Adam Zawalich doesn’t play guitar, but he sure likes making them. The 40-year-old luthier and Shelburne Falls resident has been making guitars for more than a decade, starting his journey in 2015 when he learned the craft while living in Canada.
Although he has tried to learn to play, Zawalich said his brain isn’t sure how it all “connects” — how to maneuver on the fretboard, strum the guitar and keep the rhythm all at once. However, armed with woodworking knowledge and a strong intuition, Zawalich finds that his handmade guitars come together beautifully.
“Making it, I feel like, it’s a lot more from as long as you have a couple of measurements that are like exact,” Zawalich explained. “The rest of it’s always kind of feel.”
Education and business
Zawalich owns his own business, Zawalich Woodwork + Design, where he creates furniture, decor items, wooden game boxes, guitars and other handmade pieces available for both direct sale and custom commission.
At home, Zawalich utilizes an attached workspace that he shares with his wife, newborn baby and the family dog. In his shop, Zawalich uses a smattering of hand tools and electrical equipment to assemble his creations, pulling from a deep collection of wood he has amassed over the years.
His woodworking journey began when he was young, starting in his high school woodshop class. He and his father would also work together in a corner of the family basement that had been turned into a woodshop, where he would feed off his father’s knowledge.
“I was going back there to work on stuff, making people Christmas presents and things like that,” Zawalich said of the basement shop.
In college, Zawalich earned his Bachelor of Arts in historic preservation from Salve Regina in Rhode Island, followed by a Master’s in Architecture from the University of Michigan, where he met his wife. He eventually returned to New England, working for a furniture maker in Rhode Island. This is where Zawalich cut his teeth learning to create items using reclaimed materials.
“That was a pretty good kind of crash course in like, ‘Here’s a giant, 200-year-old beam that’s crazy crooked, how do I cut it straight?’ kind of thing,” Zawalich explained.
From there, Zawalich headed up to Ontario to be closer to his then-girlfriend while she attended graduate school in Toronto. There, he began taking a class in hand-tool woodworking, which introduced him to a more “old school” style of craftsmanship.
Once that class wrapped up, Zawalich still had a few months left on his visa before heading back to the United States. That is when he discovered the Canadian School of Lutherie in downtown Toronto.
“I just reached out to him, like, ‘Hey, I have two months in Canada, can I like make a guitar?'” Zawalich said. “And he was like, ‘Yeah, come on down.'”
Zawalich initially intended to just make one guitar. After two weeks, he finished his first electric guitar and was even offered a job at the school. Though he declined the position, the experience gave him a major appreciation for the school’s confidence in his abilities. It planted a seed in his head: “I wonder if I can actually sell these?”
Letting the wood sing
Once the newly engaged couple finished their time in Canada, they moved to San Francisco, then back to the East Coast before landing in Shelburne Falls. It wasn’t until 2020 that Zawalich’s guitar-making niche began to take off. He started selling pieces to musician friends and securing custom client commissions via social media.
One such piece he made was for a client in Hawaii, where he use koa, which is a native Hawaiian wood from the Acacia koa tree, and mahogany to create a “T-style” guitar — a model styled after the iconic Fender Telecaster shape.
On top of making electric guitars, Zawalich has crafted electric bass guitars, a banjo for his wife for Christmas and ukuleles. He also makes his own wooden guitar picks and wooden guitar stands stamped with his “ZWD” logo.
Zawalich said that he hasn’t made a guitar for any widely-known musicians yet, but his builds are beloved by his friends who play. He has also gained broader business exposure as a vendor at the Green River Festival in Greenfield, debuting in June 2024 and returning this past year. He noted that musicians playing the festival would stop by to check out his work, showing a massive interest in a custom cement electric guitar he displays.
The process of making a guitar is entirely based on what a client is looking for or what Zawalich envisions, allowing for plenty of creative liberty with wood choices. In fact, Zawalich emphasized his interest in making sure the wood in both his furniture and guitars stands out.
To start the body of a guitar, Zawalich uses forms that he laser-cuts out of wood. These forms are based on standard Fender electric guitar shapes that he alters to create his own unique profiles. He places the form on the selected wood pieces and cuts out the shapes needed for the design.
If he’s blending two types of wood together — like his koa and mahogany guitar — it requires a careful process of gluing and sanding to attach the pieces seamlessly, creating a unique design that highlights the natural wood grain.
One of the guitars he is currently working on features an ash body, with parts of the wood naturally hollowed out. He has used resin to fill in portions of the wood while retaining the organic shape of the body. This emphasis on retaining the natural grain in guitar making comes directly from his background in furniture making.
“A good chunk of the furniture education was just finding the art in the wood grain, and like letting that speak for itself more than anything else,” he said.
This philosophy of letting the wood speak for itself extends to the neck of the guitar, the fretboard and the headstock. Zawalich explained that in the case of a guitar with a flamed maple neck, he opted not to inset traditional circle markers into the fretboard, leaving it clean with just the fret wire.
One of his favorite guitars was actually born out of a furniture build, utilizing a leftover end piece from an elm liquor cabinet. It’s an elm-and-maple Stratocaster-style electric guitar featuring an elm body, a maple neck and custom resin control knobs cast with leftover elm and maple sawdust to adjust the volume and tone.
By the end of a build, Zawalich said he finds that guitars offer a more definitive end point than furniture, taking anywhere between one and two months to complete.
With a table or other piece of furniture, a woodworker can always find an excuse to do some extra sanding. But with a guitar, after clearing what Zawalich calls his “absurd amount” of checklists and finishing a final visual sweep, there is nothing left to do but let someone else make some music.
“I feel like that’s kind of the fun part of woodworking,” Zawalich said, “just like figuring out ways to [know] what to do with this weird piece of wood.”
To view Zawalich’s designs and commission information, visit his adamzawalich.com/.
