First things first - I do not sell
guitars. I make them for myself and my friends. The purpose of
this web page is to allow me to have a place where I can share
the things I've learned while making guitars. And before
anyone has a cow, my "Depner" logo is both a parody of, and an
homage to, Fender ®, so it's covered by fair use. Other things
that I will cover on this page include some stuff about bands
I've played in, gear I'm using, some of the software I've
written, and anything else that I can think of that might be
of interest. This web page uses HTML, CSS, and Javascript
because I'm not interested in any fancy garbage and also
because it's soooooooo much easier to build this way (using
the SeaMonkey WYSIWYG editor and GNU Emacs) than using
WordPress ®. Yes, I tried WordPress and hated it. I've got
over 45 years experience as a professional programmer writing
mostly graphical scientific data editing and mapping software
(FORTRAN, C, C++, Pascal, Java, DISSPLA, Motif, Qt, etc.) so
HTML isn't very hard for me. So, this probably won't work too
well on your phone but I really didn't build it for that
anyway. I hope that someone, somewhere finds some of this to
be of use.
I began building my own guitars
in 1989. You can read about that little adventure in Early
guitars section of the Guitars page.
Since I retired my main hobby has been gigging with my band
(see Bands) but in 2018 I received an email
from StewMac advertising a Strat kit for a ridiculously low
price. Since 2018 I’ve made about 24 guitars, most for
me but some for my friends. Of those 24 I’ve given away four
or five and made eight for friends (including one bass).
For the last five years or so I’ve been having back problems
so I started making crazy light weight guitars. I’ve also got
arthritis in my left (fretting) hand so I’ve had to go to a
24.07″ scale (like a Fender Mustang or Jaguar). I tend to
build guitars with a theme (e.g. Mardi Gras, Halloween,
Southwest, Casino).
In addition to my guitar making endeavors I have also been
running sound for my band using a Behringer XR18. I have put
together a 3U rack case that contains the XR18, a TP-Link
travel router, a Raspberry Pi 4, and a bluetooth receiver. I
can record all 16 XR18 tracks to the Raspberry Pi during live
performances, then load them into my DAW when I get home. I’ll
be describing that, as well as some other, hopefully,
interesting things, in the near future.
If you have any questions or comments on any of this you can contact me at
