Six Strings Attached: Fry Guitars Makes Custom Guitars Players Dream Of
The next time you find yourself looking for a high-end electric guitar—as we all do sometimes, right?—resist the urge to run to Reverb.com or gallop over to Guitar Center. You might just find what you’re looking for right here in central Arkansas.
Hot Springs native Dave Fry has been hand-building guitars in Arkansas under the name Fry Guitars since 2010 and has created axes for a number of notable players, including Brian Venable of Lucero; Will Johnson of Jason Isbell’s band the 400 Unit; and Chris Turpin of the duo Ida Mae.
“My guitars are just different,” Fry said. “You get to work directly with me when you design a guitar, which is fun. You pick all the colors and parts.”
Upon entering his workshop in Alexander, it’s immediately apparent that Fry means business when it comes to building guitars or dreaming up new models. The workshop is clean and comfortable, and feels more like an artist’s studio than a woodworking shop. Woodworking machines, shelves filled with various tonewoods, and stacks of guitar parts line the walls, sharing the space with a large couch on which Fry can play his creations. A framed Stereolab poster hangs above a vintage skateboard that leans against the wall, which Fry rides around his workshop on when he needs to think.
“I love the craft side of it,” Fry said. “I love the design side of it, the rock and roll side of it. But I also love the math side of it. You can’t really move some things around, so there’s a base plate that you kind of build from.”
Fry’s bread and butter are funky, retro-style electric guitars that are reminiscent of the budget instruments you might find in the pages of an old Sears catalog, but decked out with modern hardware and built with an attention to detail that comes from decades of experience as a luthier.
“Vintage guitars inspire me. Old Danelectros. Old Silvertone guitars. Department store guitars, I guess,” Fry said.
“I’m a little more accountable to my customers because I know them,” Fry said. “When you know someone and you’re talking to them, your instruments have to be perfect.”
After graduating from the Roberto-Venn School of Guitar Making in Phoenix in 2000, Fry apprenticed for a few years with Terry McInturff, a North Carolina luthier whose instruments have found buyers with Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. Fry then worked for Modulus Graphite, a company best known for building guitars and basses for Bob Weir and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, and for the short-lived RKS Guitars, co-founded by Dave Mason of Traffic, in Southern California.
“You learn a lot in a factory or any other guitar company, but it’s on their instruments,” Fry said. “Their instruments are fantastic. I probably own one from every guitar company I’ve ever worked at. I love instruments, but I still wanted to do my own thing.”
Fry returned home to Hot Springs after working as a corporate employee and opened the first Fry’s Guitar Store there.
“I love Arkansas. It’s a great little secret place,” Fry said.
Fry ran the Hot Springs store for a few years before moving to Little Rock, where he had a guitar showroom and hosted concerts.
“A lot of people came to the store to play a little office concert,” Fry said. “It was great and we did it for years. I’m currently looking for a place to have that kind of concert again.”

Today, Fry works out of his home workshop and ships guitars directly to customers and stores, such as Cottonwood Music Emporium in Costa Mesa, California.
“A lot of my customers are musicians from all over the country. We work over the phone and I ship guitars all over the place,” Fry said. “Some of my customers are local. Some are in Arkansas, some are in northern Arkansas.”
Fry said durability is important to him as a guitar builder, and he often uses alternative building materials like Formica, a high-pressure laminate material most often used for countertops, which some luthiers and guitar builders have taken a liking to.
He avoids tonewood species like Brazilian rosewood, which are threatened by overharvesting. “I don’t use Brazilian rosewood unless it’s vintage, from an old piano or something,” Fry says.
“I use a lot of local wood. I use alder and maple,” Fry says. “Everything I use is absolutely environmentally friendly.”
In 2021, Fry built a guitar from reclaimed Douglas fir wood from the demolition of a building in the Argenta neighborhood of North Little Rock.
“It was a good guitar, with a very good resonance,” Fry said. “The wood is fantastic.”
Fry uses standard woodworking tools to build his guitars and said a typical order can take him around six months to complete.
“If you can make a piece of furniture with that, I’ve got it,” Fry said. “The main tool I use is called a spindle mill and it’s the same tool Gibson and Fender used to make guitars in the ’50s.”
“I make all my pieces in bulk on that base and everything after that… is hand-refined,” Fry said.
Contact Fry Guitars at dave@fryguitarsusa.com, on Instagram @fryguitars or on his website, fryguitars.com.
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