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, software I've written, and anything else that I can think of that might be of interest. This web page uses HTML and CSS 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 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 ridiculous price.  Since 2018 I’ve made 24 guitars, most for me but some for my friends. Of those 24 I’ve given away four or five, 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 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 other interesting things, in the near future.