Welcome to Gary Cotten Acoustics
Gary Cotten, along with his wife Valerie and his dad Milford, have years in wood working experience.
“Working from a 1,000 square foot work shop behind the Cotten home we are able to provide a full line of Luthier services, as well as produce beautiful hand built acoustic guitars.”
Cotten Acoustic Guitars is located in the small town of Grayson, Kentucky
Our hand built acoustic guitars are built on the Gibson L 00, OM slope shoulder and Dreadnought style. We have small quantities of Honduran, Mahogany, Amazon Rose Wood, Madagascar Rose Woods, East Indian, as well as several other rose woods in stock. We also have 100+ year old Red Spruce, as well as Sitka, Redwood, and Yellow Cedars that we use for our soundboards.
All our bracings are hand made, scalloped and glued with hide glue for better sound. All our finishes are done with nitro cellulose lacquer. We provide many styles of tuners at the customers request.
Our Mahogany necks are hand built and shaped, then rubbed for a more comfortable and faster playability.
We pride ourselves on the quality of our work not the quantity. Depending on orders we build an average of eight to ten weeks from start to finish.
To date we have built fifty-five guitars, eight mandolins, two banjos and one dobro.
The love of bluegrass music runs deep throughout the Cotten family due to the heritage handed down by my parents Milford and Alberta Cotten and our many friends who have their own bluegrass music bands.
Check out the Building a DC-18 Photo Gallery for some step by step photos.
