The smell of freshly cut lumber fills your nostrils. Woodworking machinery, work tables, waiting raw materials, and projects in progress make the room a labyrinth beneath the slabs and forms that hang from the walls and pack the shelves that line the space. And there’s sawdust everywhere. Sawdust on the tabletops. Sawdust on the papers, catalogs, and other publications stacked upon them. Sawdust on the computer keyboard on the corner desk. Neatniks might be aghast, but for guitar geeks this is heaven: the Woodstock workshop of renowned luthier Joe Veillette.
“Actually, I’ve never really liked the term luthier,” he says. “To me, it sounds pretentious. I just like ‘guitar maker’ or ‘guitar builder.’ I mean, no one would call [inventor and solid-body electric guitar creator] Leo Fender a luthier.”
For over 30 years under the Veillette Guitars banner, Veillette has been creating some of the best sounding, wonderfully playable, and visually striking custom-built guitars available. Clients of his company include such names as Eddie Van Halen, Dave Matthews, Steve Miller, James Taylor, Slash, Brian May, Todd Rundgren, Ani DiFranco, Aerosmith’s Joe Perry and Brad Whitford, Keith Urban, Kaki King, Earl Slick, Men at Work’s Colin Hay, Al Di Meola, Lee Ritenour, Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready, and hundreds more. Building, you might say, is in Veillette’s blood. And his exacting personality is clearly one of the key elements of the approach that’s won his operation its devoted, continuously growing customer base. In a way, it makes perfect sense that before he got into building guitars, Veillette had planned to get into building, well, buildings.
Structurally Sound
Raised in the Brooklyn, Veillette didn’t come from an especially musical family. “Doo wop was big then and I loved listening to it on the radio and singing along, but people told me I couldn’t carry a tune,” he says, with a laugh. It wasn’t until he was in his early 20s and studying architecture at City College of New York that he even picked up a guitar. “I had a friend there who played, and meeting him was the first time that I’d ever actually seen anyone actually playing a guitar,” he recalls. “I was transfixed. We’d hang out 24/7 and listen to records and he’d show me stuff.” Soon Veillette acquired his first guitar, a Gibson J-45 acoustic. Unfortunately, the instrument’s headstock broke not long after he’d started learning to play it. The repair shops he took it to proposed simply gluing it back together, which his engineering background told him would not be sufficient. But, as it turned out, the fissure would prove unintentionally fruitful.
“I read an article about guitar makers in New York magazine,” he says. “It made me figure that if I just learned to do what they did, I could probably fix my guitar myself.” In 1971, he signed up for a course at the Manhattan YMCA taught by Michael Gurian, the Greenwich Village master whom Veillette credits as his mentor. (Gurian’s guitars have been the choice instruments of Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, John Renbourn, and others; the luthier would later officiate at Veillette ’s second wedding.) At the time, with a lucrative position as a designer at a Park Avenue firm and a seemingly bright future in the architectural field ahead of him, Veillette had what looked like the ideal job to match his five-year degree. But that line of work, with all its big-city schmoozing and artifice, had begun to make him feel somewhat hollow inside.
Finding His Voice
Veillette left both the architectural world and the big city in 1972 to begin his own guitar-building business, relocating to the tiny Sullivan County hamlet of Grahamsville with his first wife. The couple wasn’t long for the country, however. “It was pretty remote,” he explains. “We had our daughter Jasmine and we decided we wanted to raise her somewhere that had more going on culturally, so after two years we moved back to Brooklyn.” Soon, though, Veillette reconnected with another aspiring young guitar-smith, his former architectural studies classmate Harvey Citron. In 1976 the pair cofounded Veillette-Citron Guitars, whose instruments put their operation on the musical map by finding their way into the hands of high-profile players like Jorma Kaukonen, Tina Weymouth, and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter of the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan. When another customer, Veillette’s eventual neighbor John Sebastian, came to him in 1978 seeking a custom-made electric baritone guitar, he created the Shark, a signature model whose wavy body shape hints at the Guild Thunderbird played by Sebastian’s Lovin’ Spoonful bandmate Zal Yanovsky.
Although the two remain friends, his business partnership with Citron dissolved in 1983 and Veillette pivoted to performing for the next eight years—largely without a guitar. Returning to the vocal group harmony sounds he’d loved as a boy, he formed and fronted a cappella group the Phantoms, proving the detractors who’d dogged him in his youth about his vocal abilities wrong, With the group, Veillette brought his undeniably sweet voice to doo-wop chestnuts and even landed the outfit a recurring slot on a radio show hosted by comedian Soupy Sales. (In the early 2000s he’d join Prana, the meditative harmonic vocal ensemble led by local composer Baird Hersey.) “Generally speaking, I’m not impressed by most instrumental music,” Veillette admits. “To me the best instrument is the human voice. In a way, I make guitars to support the human voice.” And a move back to the Hudson Valley would see him refocusing on making them.
Keeping It Clean
Setting up in Woodstock in 1991, Veillette partnered with bass maker Stuart Spector before finally stepping out with his own company in 1995. Since then, he hasn’t looked back, drawing on his industrial design background to create a strong visual as well as sonic identity for the Veillette Guitars brand with his clean, sleek, minimalist acoustic and electric guitars and basses; he traces innovations like the single-bolt neck system used on all of his guitars (many conventional bolt-on necks use four bolts) to his architectural schooling. “I don’t put a lot of schmutz on the instruments I make, like inlays or any of that kind of decorative stuff,” says Veillette. “To me that’s just gilding the lily. I make tools for musicians. I wouldn’t buy a chisel just because it had inlays on it.”
Another defining aspect of Veillette Guitars is the company’s concentration on what its founder himself terms “weird stuff,” in lieu of only regular six-string instruments. In addition to his long-made baritone variations, there are offerings like the Flyer Duet six- and 12-string double-neck acoustic guitar, the Archtop semi-hollow electric bass, and one of Veillette’s most successful items, the Gryphon, a short-scale acoustic model that’s tuned to high D and is available in six- and 12-string variants. A recent repeat buyer is Dave Matthews, who owns 18 Veillette guitars. (Steve Miller has 12.) “It’s such a crazy-beautiful instrument,” says Matthews about the Gryphon in a video he sent to Veillette. “If you play the guitar, or any instrument, really, I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to have one.”
Prices range from $2,850 for a Shark electric baritone six-string guitar to $3,925 for a maple Gryphon 12-string to $5,200 for an acoustic fretted five-string bass and beyond. Custom models start at $4,000. The company also carries the designs it has licensed to Korean manufacturer Avante (Avante versions of the Gryphon 12-string go for $1,449).
Playing for Keeps
In January 2014, Veillette started getting uncharacteristically irritable and sometimes confused as well as having persistent headaches. “I got a headache at NAMM [the annual National Association of Music Merchants trade show] and it pretty much went on for three months,” he says. “I went to get a CAT scan, and the hospital immediately sent me to Albany Medical Center. I had a huge hematoma, so big that I should’ve been dead by then. They drilled a three-inch hole in my skull to drain it.” Though he downplays the episode—“It wasn’t that big a deal,” he says—Veillette seems to have taken it as a sign to train younger hands in his craft.
Operating in the outbuilding on his wooded property, he and his team—venerated Woodstock guitarist Jimmy Eppard and rising young maker Rowan Dedolph—build bespoke instruments, consulting personally with individual clients throughout the process. “I’ve been a woodworker since I was 19,” says the 22-year-old Dedolph, who studied at Arizona’s esteemed Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery. “Growing up as a musician in [nearby] Palenville, I’d always heard a lot about Joe and the guitars he makes, so it’s great to actually be working with him.” The next generation of music makers is also well represented in Veillette’s world outside the workshop via Triad, the trio he plays in with his daughter Jasmine and influential jazz guitarist John Scofield. (As a child, Jasmine was tapped by producer Todd Rundgren to contribute the vocal intro to XTC’s 1986 hit “Dear God” when it was being recorded at Utopia Sound Studios in Woodstock.)
To date, his company has produced well over 2,000 hand-built guitars. With that many instruments out there in the world, and more on the way, one wonders what Veillette would want the musicians who inherit and pick up his guitars 100 or more years in the future to get from playing them. “I just hope they get some inspiration to make music with them,” he says. “It might sound kind of ‘woo-woo,’ but every guitar has its own palpable effects and subtleties. It resonates.”
This article appears in November 2026.
