While these are not technical terms (and there are always exceptions), guitar making can be broken down into four broad categories:
1. Single Artisan: Makers like Dominique Field, Edmund Blochinger, Richard Reynoso, etc. who really work entirely by themselves. At this level, they buy raw wood, or sometimes even chop trees down themselves, or at least visit mills and hand-select their wood. With the exception of tuning machines and strings, they build or create all the parts, including necks, headstocks, veneers, stains, rosettes, etc. These makers usually apply the finish to the guitar themselves, once the build is done. The overwhelming majority of luthiers at this level prefer the use of shellac, applied with the French polish method, although some makers also work with synthetic varnishes which are typically sprayed.
2. Artisan Workshop: This is where there are multiple builders working together. This could range from the Fleta workshop (a guitar made in 1970 for example, would have been the combined effort of Ignacio, Francisco and Gabriel Fleta). No single guitar at that time can be proven to be built 100% by Ignacio (or either of his sons for that matter). They were likely all built with joint effort, but all the parts are built from scratch in the workshop by those three makers. The labels at that time also read “Ignacio Fleta e hijos”. The Romanillos workshop is another famous example (Jose and son Liam), Teodoro Perez (Teodoro and son Sergio, daughter Beatriz and son-in-law Marco Tejeda), etc. These workshops are usually family-run and very small.
3. Production Workshop: This would include Sakurai-Kohno, Hill Guitar Company, Jose Ramirez concert guitars, etc. It is a larger-scale enterprise where there are highly-skilled craftsman who have typically been trained in guilds (at least in Spain), but the individuals don’t build guitars with labels bearing their own names. In this environment, the workers are specialized at specific tasks (like varnishing or assembling the box, etc.). Sometimes at this level (but not always), “parts” (rosettes, purfling, etc.) are bought from outside sources but all construction is done in-house. Depending on the number of workers, workshops such as this often produce in the range of 20 guitars (or more) per month. Wolfgang Jellinghaus guitars fall in this category as another example.
4. Factory: This is certainly the broadest category, and is where you most often find the “assembly line” style of manufacturing. There are some factories like this in Spain and of course everyone knows that these are currently springing up in grand style in China. There is a higher degree of automation and greater reliance on machinery which ensures consistency of the final product, which is more “mass produced”. Workers here are not necessarily skilled craftsmen – usually they are trained in how to assemble pre-fabricated parts together, like legos, on an assembly line.
Again, there are always exceptions and category-blending, whether it’s an individual maker who builds in batches, buys his rosettes or even has a professional varnisher do his polishing, to “factories” with as few as a dozen employees.