Renowned sculptor takes on new challenge - guitar-making

Scott Lennard is a man of many talents. From taxidermy to bronze-working, he seems to be able to do quite a bit with a little bit of time and muscle. 

Lennard has now added custom, high-end guitar-making to his repertoire. Montrose Guitars, Lennard’s company, is a year old and already has made a splash on the country music scene.

Last week, Lennard and his wife Patti took a few Montrose guitars to Nashville for the Country Music Awards. At a roped-off event to raise money for colon cancer (for country singer Wade Hayes), Lennard got a few musicians to play his guitars.

Trent Willmon, a country singer who has landed six singles on the U.S. Hot Country charts, was blown away by Lennard’s guitar.

“I’ve played a lot of guitars in my life, and this is one of the best sounding guitars I’ve ever played,” Willmon said. “It plays like butter.”

The guitars might sound so buttery because of Lennard’s pain-staking process to build his guitar bodies, which takes a month, and then the long steps of adding finishing touches may takes months for a guitar to be totally finished. 

“It takes about 12 weeks until the finished product, working long hours,” Lennard said. “Self-employed people work way longer hours.”

In the year since he has started building guitars, Lennard has made seven and sold three guitars, and with the most basic model selling for $4,500 and some of the upper-echelon models marketing for $8,500, this is proving to be a profitable hobby. Lennard said that if a client were to opt for the most expensive model, something with gold inlays, Brazilian rosewood and other expensive accoutrements, the price could rocket up to $20,000.

Lennard decided to dabble in guitar-making after Patti, a talented musician, had been teaching him for several years. This, and the fact that Lennard met a premier guitar builder in Portland, Ore., who began to show him the ropes.

“I told him that I was using Brazilian rosewood, and he was shocked,” Lennard said. “He really thought I was getting ahead of myself.”

Lennard already has designed his own model, named the Montrose Signature Model, a narrow-wasted acoustic with a Florentine cutaway (for neck players) that the affable guitar builder (or luthier) is proud of.

After all, he has three more orders waiting.