The people behind every Luke's.
Luke builds them. Alessia finishes them. Every guitar that leaves our workshop carries their decisions, from the raw wood to the last coat of nitro.
It started with the old guitars.
Long before Luke's Guitars had a name, there was a simple obsession: the electric guitars of the golden era. The way an old Strat or Tele feels in your hands. The way the notes bloom instead of just sounding. The way a worn neck seems to know where your fingers want to go before you do.
We didn't want to just own that feeling. We wanted to understand it. Why do some of those instruments sound alive and others don't? How much comes from the wood, how much from the way the guitar is put together, how much from a finish thin enough to let the body breathe? And could that feeling be built again, on purpose, instead of hunted down by luck?
Those questions became a workshop, and the workshop became Luke's Guitars.
Luke started where every luthier starts: at the bench, with wood, tools and a lot of patience. Every guitar taught him something new about how small decisions change the way an instrument sounds and plays. Alessia brought the other half of the answer, the finish: thin nitrocellulose, applied and aged by hand, which is a big part of why a vintage guitar looks, feels and resonates the way it does.
Today Luke's Guitars is still a small, independent workshop in Forlì, in the heart of Romagna. No production line and no shortcuts on the parts that matter. It is a slower way to work, and it means only a few guitars leave the bench each year. We are completely fine with that.
Luke
A lifelong vintage guitar enthusiast who turned that passion into the craft of lutherie. Luke still thinks like a player first: every decision on the bench is made with one question in mind, how will this guitar feel and sound in the hands of the person who plays it every day.
Every Luke's is built under his eye, from the first cut to the last string.
- Wood selection, chosen by ear as much as by eye
- Neck shaping and fretwork
- The handwound pickups inside every guitar
- Assembly and final setup
Alessia
Specialist in nitro finishes and aging, and a recognised master builder with her own brand, NitroAle. The finish is the first thing you see and the last thing that touches the wood, and Alessia treats it as part of the sound, not as decoration.
From a clean, glossy new look to a heavy relic that seems to have lived fifty years on stage, every finish is applied and aged by hand.
- Body preparation and sanding
- Thin nitrocellulose coats, applied by hand
- Controlled aging, from light wear to heavy relic
- The final feel of the guitar in your hands
Why we wind our own pickups.
We are a guitar workshop first, not a pickup brand. For a long time we fitted pickups from the market, and we kept running into the same problem: they didn't do justice to the work that went into the wood, the build and the finish.
So we learned to wind them ourselves. Not from a manual, but at the bench, winding by hand and testing every recipe on our own guitars until the sound was the one we were after. Those are the pickups inside every Luke's today.
And since the guitars are only a few each year, we decided to make the same pickups available for your guitar too.
Four rules we never break.
Want a Luke's of your own?
Our guitars are built from a waitlist, a few each year. Our handwound pickups are available now.