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INTRODUCTION
Imagine walking into your local music store and personally talking to the luthier who is going to be hand crafting your guitar. Imagine being guided through every step of the process, selection of tone woods, neck size, frets, pick-ups, color, even case interior and exterior. Thanks to the Ronson Guitars web site this is now possible. I can guide you through every phase of building your own personal guitar, even providing you with pictures each step of the way to completion.
Ronson Guitars is a one man operation, making one
guitar at a time. The same man answering the phone, selecting the wood,
shaping the neck and applying the finish.
BIO
Mark Teed is a 4th generation Ruthenian-American. His maternal great-grandfather emigrated from then, Austro-Hungary to the United States in 1894. Today this area is near the Polish border in north-eastern Slovakia & lies within the Carpathian Mountain range which is a heavily wooded area. About fifty percent of the land on which the Rusyns lived was covered by forests. The Ruthenians or Rusyns were known to be wood cutters & carvers of many things wooden.
It should therefore come as no great surprise that many of Mark’s uncles and cousins are master craftsmen and work in the areas of fine cabinetry, boat building & trophy plague manufacture.
Mark first took an interest in playing the guitar in the early 1970’s. He began collecting guitars in search of finding his personal “Holy Grail”. Soon he began to repair and modify instruments in his own guitar collection. He developed his first prototype around 1993.
During the past 10 years he has been working on the stages of development that now find their end result in the models available commercially here at Ronson Guitars.
Side Note:
John Dopyera the originator of the Dobro aluminum resonator guitar was also from the present day county of Slovakia. The word Dobro, deduced from “DOpyera BROthers”, not only means 'good' in Slovak, but is also the name of the instrument itself.
The guitar is considered to be an original American folk instrument and only a few people today know that its inventor and original constructor was Slovak. John Dopyera, originally called Ján Dopjera, emigrated from the Trnava region to California in 1908.
The 11th annual festival is dedicated to the memory of John Dopyera, who invented the distinctive resonating guitar. The word Dobro, deduced from “DOpyera BROthers”, not only means 'good' in Slovak, but is also the name of the instrument itself.
Ruthenian
1 of or relating to Ruthenia, its people, or
their dialect of Ukrainian
2 a dialect
of Ukrainian
3 a native or inhabitant of Ruthenia
Ruthenians are an ethnic group generally associated with a region known as Transcarpathian Ruthenia. This area is just east of Slovakia, and was part of Czechoslovakia between the wars. It was taken over by the U.S.S.R. after the second world war, and became known as Carpatho-Ukraine. Transcarpathian Ruthenia was of vital strategic importance to the U.S.S.R., as it provided a border with Hungary, which proved very 'useful' in 1956. This area had a large Jewish population, and Munkacz (Mukachevo) is a very well known city in Jewish history. Stanislawow is perhaps 75 miles north of Transcarpathian Ruthenia. While Transcarpathian Ruthenia is the prime settlement area of Ruthenians, the ethnic group lives in other adjacent areas of Slovakia, southern Poland and Ukraine.
http://www.carpatho-rusyn.org/hutsul/carving.htm
CARVING
A large part of SubCarpathian Rus' is wooded.
Western
Slovakia
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