“If that's not done properly, then the guitar won’t be playable”: The hardest part of building a Gibson guitar from scratch, according to CEO Cesar Gueikian

Gibson CEO Cesar Gueikian has looked back on his experiences of building electric guitars, and has named the parts of the process that are the most challenging when it comes to assembling Gibson guitars.

It’s now been around three years since Gueikian first started building guitars under the ‘CEO Series’ project. What started out as general curiosity to find out more about the guitar-building process soon spawned into something else entirely.

Nowadays, his CEO builds are making their way into the hands of some big artists. Jason Momoa owns a White Explorer styled after James Hetfield’s original Metallica model. Kirk Hammett played a Ghost Burst SG at Back to the Beginning. More, we have been assured, are in the works.

Naturally, he’s learned a thing or two about the guitar-building process along the way, and in a soon-to-be-published interview with Guitar World, Gueikian reflects on the challenges he’s come across during his short-but-successful experience with building guitars.

“There are so many very difficult things that happen in all the steps of making a Gibson,” he notes. “The first real challenge for me was learning how to do binding the proper way, so that the binding would be perfect and there would be no air pockets. I had to learn that very specific method of wrapping binding so that it's a cohesive unit.”

However, Gueikian admits that a cosmetic flaw isn’t the end of the world. That can be redone, and the guitar itself will still be playable. There are other parts of the build, though, that absolutely cannot go wrong. If those get screwed up, it’s game over.

“Neck fitting was really challenging,” Gueikian adds. “That's one of the processes where – because the binding can maybe have a couple of defects and they're going to be cosmetic – once we moved into neck fitting, if that's not done properly, then the guitar won’t be playable. The neck fitting was really critical.”

The set neck seems to be a particularly problematic area for a budding luthier. Not only does it have to be fitted correctly, it needs to be profiled correctly. And if you go too far, there’s no going back.

“With the sanding of the neck, I made mistakes,” Gueikian admits. “I went a little too far, and that's not something that can be repaired once you start eating into the wood to a certain degree. And gluing – it sounds simple, but if not done properly you can end up with air pockets in many different places. They're going to render the guitar unusable.”

The full interview with Gibson CEO Cesar Gueikian – in which he recalls the making of the SG that Kirk Hammett played at Back to the Beginning – will be published on Guitar World in the coming days.

Hammett's Back to the Beginning SG is set to go under the hammer next week to raise funds for the firm's non-profit, Gibson Gives as part of Julien's latest Played, Worn & Torn auction.