Guitar Making @ London Metropolitan

cbellanga

Hey guys, I'm thinking of attending that guitar making from London Met University.. has anyone here heard anything about it?

http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/courses/short/introduction-to-guitar-making/

octatonic

I did the full degree there and know the place well.
I'm a bit pissed off with the place (essentially I reckon that I wasted £30k doing it- would have been better off having some 1:2:1 tuition and buying the tools) so take what I say with a grain of salt but my experience/opinion is far from unusual.

It is hard to recommend because of how London Met run their university- it is at the bottom of the rankings for a reason.

The staff are pretty good (with one notable exception) and the tech staff are beyond awesome.
I've been told that they have killed off the guitar making degree- they aren't taking any new students for that and I thought most of the machinery was being sold off- I saw that some of wood shop stuff was being sold it anyway.
I'd be surprised if they run the evening courses much longer but I have no actual information about how long they are running for.

Nick Blishen (one of the lecturers there) runs this: http://www.hertfordguitarstudio.co.uk/building.html
It is a bit of a trek if in London but he is an excellent teacher.

Alex Bishop is worth calling directly too- http://www.alexbishopguitars.com/map
He was teaching the evening course at LMU last I heard but that could have changed since I left 18 months ago.

As far as the sort of stuff you learn- they have an overemphasis on hand tools (because it is cheaper to teach like that) when in reality guitar builders us a lot of machines.

Danielsguitars

I went to Merton college to do guitar making, Mike Hobbs is the man to learn from there
The guy has great skills

It used to be making acoustic guitars first before anything else but I'm not sure now