Make Your Own Kind of Music

The Many Creations of Brian Calhoun

On a quiet street in downtown Charlottesville, there’s an old brick cottage that subtly blends in with the rest of the neighborhood. The main floor’s living space is typical of a comfortable home, but drifting up from the basement, the soft whine of power sanders and the gentle scraping of chisels indicate that something very different is going on here. Filled with carefully shaped pieces of wood, workbenches, tools, and sawdust, the basement is a 1,200-
square-foot warren of workshops where some of the most admired acoustic guitars in modern music are being made.

This is home base for Rockbridge Guitar Company and co-founder Brian Calhoun, who fell in love with music as a kid, followed that passion into the workshop, and ended up building guitars for a star-studded roster of artists like Dave Matthews, James Taylor, Brandi Carlile, and Lainey Wilson, among many others.
“I started playing guitar in sixth grade,” Calhoun says. “My dad played James Taylor and Jim Croce, that kind of stuff.” He also had an unforgettable guitar teacher, Steve Hoke, who helped set the young Calhoun on his musical journey. He describes Hoke as a free-spirited guitar wizard living among the white picket fences of small-town Lexington, Virginia. Hoke also built instruments for fun, filling his home with handmade mandolins, dulcimers, a hurdy-gurdy, and four-necked guitars.

“I adored him, and I still do,” says Calhoun. “I remember looking at a mandolin and I could not believe he made it out of thin air.” In high school, that sense of wonder led to a senior-year independent study project where Calhoun tried to build his own mandolin. He didn’t finish it, but discovered that building an instrument could be as captivating as the music coming out of it.

Calhoun went to Berklee College of Music in Boston for one semester, disliked it, and came to Charlottesville to play in a bluegrass band and figure out what would come next. That’s when a series of Rockbridge County instrument makers pulled him deeper into the craft.

Mandolin builder John Schofield offered to help him finish that first mandolin from the independent-study project in exchange for help around the shop. It became a classic, old-world apprenticeship. “I’d go out there and help him with his mandolins and learn little woodworking things,” Calhoun says. “At the end of the day, we’d do something on my mandolin.”

Schofield, recalls Calhoun, relied more on his experience and craftsman’s instincts rather than obsessing over minutiae. Around the same time, he met violin maker Sam Compton, who represented the opposite extreme. “He was the kind of person where if something was 5.3 millimeters instead of 5.4, you had to start over,” Calhoun says.

Between those two mentors, he learned both artistry and precision. He added a stint at Stelling Banjo Works outside Charlottesville, doing intricate custom inlay on high-end banjos. By his early 20s, he was carving, inlaying, and finishing all sorts of instruments.

Ironically, he didn’t really play mandolin, banjo, or violin. “I could pluck a few notes, but I didn’t know what I was doing,” he says. “Guitar was what I played all the time.” If he was going to build an instrument he truly understood from a musician’s perspective, it needed to be a guitar.

With all of the creative talent coming from Calhoun’s childhood home of Rockbridge County, one starts to wonder if there might have been something in the water. “I think a lot of it comes from growing up in Lexington at a time when childhood was really loose and unstructured,” says his brother Ben Calhoun, a UVA engineering professor known for his pioneering work on ultra-low-power circuits that run on power harvested directly from their environments. “We just wandered around inventing our own adventures. On top of that you had two universities, a big music and arts scene, and parents like ours who valued ideas and somehow let us climb 150-foot trees, build zip lines, have fireworks wars—all the stuff I can’t believe they allowed now that I’m a parent. When you grow up that way, without phones or the internet, having to make your own fun and take risks, I think creativity and inventiveness are almost the natural outcomes.”

The final piece of the guitar-making puzzle was yet another friend from Rockbridge County—Randall Ray, a house painter, bluegrass picker, guitar builder, and music historian. Calhoun had known Ray since he was a teenager, when Steve Hoke would take him on field trips to Ray’s house to play bluegrass.
As the pair built their first instruments together, they discovered which shapes, woods, and bracing patterns spoke to them. In 2002, they officially named the partnership Rockbridge Guitar Company, after the county where their musical lives began.

“The joke I always say is that Brian was too young and naive to know that you can’t do this for a living,” says Ray. “But he’s like, we can really do this. And the next thing I knew, he’d gotten us about a year’s worth of orders. So we just started building guitars.”

In those early years, Calhoun loaded up his car with guitars and drove to small concert venues and bluegrass festivals. “I was basically a kid saying, ‘Hey, look at this guitar my friend and I made.’ Sometimes people wouldn’t give me the time of day. Sometimes they’d be courteous and strum it and go, ‘Wow, this sounds good. Let me take it where I can hear it.’”

Turns out that he was the right person for the job. “I think musicians have connected with Brian because he’s completely himself, with no pretense or awe, even around people others tiptoe around,” explains Brian’s brother Ben. “He treats everyone like a regular friend, and that kind of genuine ease is rare enough that people gravitate toward it.”

Slowly but surely, a base of bluegrass and Americana players started to form. Pinpointing what people were reacting to is difficult without drifting into luthier jargon, but Calhoun offers an explanation. “It’s a lot of tiny decisions,” he says. “Scale length, the shapes, the aesthetic, the bracing [wooden strips glued to the inside of a guitar’s top that support the tension of the strings and shape tone and volume], the way the neck joins, but also the way we build them. In a big factory, if the chart says red spruce should be four millimeters, every piece goes to four millimeters. In a small shop, you might say, this piece is a little stiffer, let’s take it to 3.8. You make micro-adjustments along the way and that’s happening on every part.”

Those subtle choices, plus a bracing pattern they developed to give their guitars a particular balance of warmth, clarity, and volume, add up to what players refer to as the “Rockbridge sound.” The company builds roughly a dozen body shapes, then customizes each one with different bracing patterns and woods like mahogany, cedar, and rosewood.

Over time, that expert craftsmanship—and a lot of hustle—brought Rockbridge guitars to bigger stages. Bluegrass legend Larry Keel was an early champion. Then Dave Stewart from Eurythmics. The real tipping point in terms of name recognition came when Dave Matthews, already a local icon and global star, tried a Rockbridge and loved it.

A YouTube video featuring Richie Sambora, lead guitarist for Bon Jovi, provides a measure of the reverence top musicians have for Rockbridge. “I have the finest double-neck acoustic guitar ever made in the world,” Sambora says, cradling his Rockbridge guitar as he prepares to play. “And if anybody would know, it would be me, because I went through a lot of them, and this is the most exquisite ever.”

Today, Rockbridge Guitar Company is a four-person operation. Calhoun and Ray are joined by longtime friends, master finisher and woodworker Adam McNeil and builder Jake Hopping, both of whom Calhoun has known since they were teenagers together. Work is specialized and there is overlap, so no single person builds a guitar start to finish. When you pick up a Rockbridge guitar, you are holding a true team project.

By the time a guitar reaches the end of the line, it has been in process for about five months, even before curing and final adjustments. With four people splitting their time between building, finishing, and running the business, that translates to around 65 instruments a year and a grand total of about 1,300 guitars since the company was founded. Rockbridge’s base model price currently starts around $6,300, with the average cost landing closer to $10,000, and then goes higher when specialized woods and intricate inlays enter the picture.
“There’s something about completely factory-built guitars that you can tell the second you look at them, even if they’re expensive,” Calhoun says. “It’s a little too perfect. Things that are handmade have a different kind of beauty. You can’t quite describe what it is, but you feel it.”

Away from Rockbridge, another side of Brian Calhoun’s creative mind plays a slightly different tune. His side projects have included dreaming up a farmyard board game and inventing a one-string guitar that allows kids to quickly and easily play music.

Calhoun’s game, Chickapig, began to take shape after joking one day that he could invent a game better than the boring, but million-copy-selling, one­ he was playing. He experimented with chess-like mechanics using scraps of paper that evolved into chicken-pig pieces, a pooping cow, and a prototype he played with friends, all while treating the whole thing as a fun hobby rather than developing a product to sell.

Friends wanted the game, so he built 10 sets by hand, complete with wooden boxes and clay pieces. He then built oversized boards and launched the popular Chickapig nights at Kardinal Hall. A successful Kickstarter led to Amazon sales, independent shop orders, and a licensing deal with Buffalo Games. In 2017, Chickapig was flying off the shelves across the country at Walmart and Target, while hitting the No. 1 spot on Amazon’s games list.
After a successful two-year run, Chickapig was no longer on the mass-retail shelves. “The nature of games and toys is you sell 90 percent of your product over Christmas,” Calhoun says. “Big retailers have a short attention span. If you are not some breakaway hit, they want the next thing. It is so exciting and then all of a sudden it is just gone.”

While the boom did not last, the impact did. Before Chickapig became a national sensation, Calhoun had taught the game to students with autism at the VIA Centers for Neurodevelopment. A month later, VIA director Ethan Long shared that his students were choosing to play together during their free time, something he had not seen happen before. Recently, Calhoun met a man at a Mt. Joy concert in Asheville whose nephew had been a student at VIA. The man teared up as he told him that they still play Chickapig together.
After riding the Chickapig wave, Calhoun embarked on a project that tied his inventiveness back to his first love, guitars. A friend suggested building animal-shaped instruments for kids, so Calhoun built a purple dinosaur ukulele and watched it get mobbed at a kids’ party. “Everybody wanted to play it because it looked like a dinosaur,” he says. “But nobody could.”

Calhoun knew young children could learn piano and violin because those instruments start in a simple, linear way, one note at a time. That insight sparked an idea: a one-string guitar he’d name TinkerTar.
Calhoun built a prototype shaped like an elephant and handed it to the same kids. They immediately pressed down the single string, changed pitch, and found melodies. “I can give a TinkerTar to a five-year-old who is struggling with ukulele and they can sight-read and play in minutes,” he says. “Anything you can play on 15 piano notes, from Twinkle, Twinkle to Smoke on the Water, you can rock out on one string.”
Once again, TinkerTar was an idea that grew from a personal experiment into a product that enjoyed a wildly successful run in mass retail when it was launched in 2023, then the familiar drop when retailers moved on. Similar to his experiences with Chickapig, Calhoun emerged with a deeper appreciation for the moments that truly matter—building meaningful connections through a board game or seeing a child experience the joy of making music for the first time.

There are common threads that run through Calhoun’s creative life. Orbiting around the steady center of Rockbridge Guitars are games, children’s instruments, and most recently, novel-writing. It’s all tied together by curiosity, a knack for invention, and a determination to work through both external and internal doubts.
“With everything I have done, I always have massive insecurities that come with it,” he says. “When I was building guitars, people would ask what college I went to. I didn’t go to college. I was trying to start a guitar company. We did not have famous clients. It was brutal.”

Later, when the big names started playing Rockbridge guitars on arena stages, the same work suddenly looked legitimate to the outside world. He has never forgotten how arbitrary that shift felt. “It is not fair that people are judged by their success,” Calhoun says. “I think that stops a lot of people from going after their dreams. There are a lot of people out there making things who have not had that recognition. What they are doing is valuable.”
His advice to other makers and creatives is shaped by that experience. First, do not let other people’s reactions decide whether you keep going. “You cannot worry about what other people think,” he says. “If we had, we would have quit Rockbridge in the first year or two. People wanted us to make replicas of old Martins. We didn’t want to. We wanted to do what we do. You have to believe in what you are doing.”

Second, let the work come from a genuine interest or passion. “Everything I have done has started as a hobby,” he says. “I have never thought, ‘I am going to start this business that will make money.’ It has always been a thing where I thought, ‘I like this,’ and I got into it.”

For anyone wondering what to pursue next, he suggests a simple test. “Ask yourself what you spend your free time on,” he says. “What would you be doing if you were not getting paid for it? That is probably the thing you should chase because you have to be able to do it when the odds are stacked against you, and when people are not into it yet.”

In other words, start with the thing you can’t stop thinking about. The handmade mandolin that was finally finished. The board game that grew out of a boring game night. The one-string guitar that made a five-year-old’s eyes light up. In Brian Calhoun’s world, the rest follows from that.