About.

Gelvin Guitars is a one-person site about playing guitar better and building electric guitars from scratch. Everything on it is free to use.

Why it exists

Most guitar sites are one of two things: a shop pretending to be a resource, or a wall of video links. Neither is much use when you are sat with the instrument in your hands at eleven at night trying to work out why your B string sounds wrong in one chord and fine in another.

So the tools here are built to be opened, used, and closed. No sign-up wall, no email gate, no ten-paragraph preamble before the tuner appears. And the written guides try to answer the actual question rather than pad out a word count.

How it's paid for

Advertising, and nothing else. There are ad slots on most pages, positioned between sections rather than inside the tools, and none of them are the kind that follow you down the page or cover the content on a phone. If an ad ever gets in the way of using something, that is a bug — tell me and I will move it.

There is no paid tier, nothing is gated, and no tool will ever be crippled to sell you an upgrade.

Your privacy, briefly

The tuner uses your microphone entirely inside your browser. No audio is recorded, uploaded or sent anywhere. The same goes for everything else here — the tools run on your device, not on a server. The privacy policy has the full detail, including what the ad network does, which is the only part not under my control.

Corrections

Guitar writing is full of confidently repeated nonsense, and some of it will have made it in here. If you find something wrong — a fingering that does not work, a measurement that is off, a bit of tonewood mythology I have accidentally repeated — send it over. Corrections get made and credited.

What's coming

• A forum with accounts, build threads and a members' marketplace
• An open chat room for talking about music in real time
• A practice tracker that remembers your tempos and what you worked on
• Ear training drills for intervals and chord types
• More build logs, including the ones that went badly