Meet the makers

---

Joel was raised in Lookout Mountain, GA, just a stone's throw from the current location of the Slow Train Guitars studio. After studying English at the University of Georgia, he came home and began a long career of working with his hands. Painter, house carpenter, composite aircraft fabricator, log home builder, custom furniture maker, and light-night tinkerer with old, broken-down motorcycles. He prefers working in solitude and in silence with antique hand tools, although he can be enticed into working alongside Scott with screaming routers and some early Green Day blaring in the background. A lifelong acoustic guitarist and once member of a nineties alternative rock band called Substructure, he was talked into gathering his cumulative years of woodworking skills and directing them towards electric guitars. Joel works with great attention to detail and with an artist's eye. He's been known to ponder the shape of a headstock for months at a time (much to the consternation of his fellow cohort), but he believes the end result is worth the wait. Folks who have played a Slow Train guitar agree. 

Scott is from Jackson, Mississippi. He started playing guitar at age thirteen, when an older friend named Hudson loaned him a black plastic dreadnought. He made the transition to the electric guitar in high school, when he was the lead singer of a folk-rock band called Cripple Creek. He studied English at the University of Mississippi, where he continued to mess around with guitars and sound. But when he moved to Florida for a three-year Master’s degree, music took a back seat. Finally, he earned a Ph.D. in Hebrew and ancient Near Eastern languages and literatures from Princeton Theological Seminary. By then, all the guitars and amps he had collected in college were gone, and a teaching career was first priority. Scott is professor of Biblical Studies at Covenant College, in Lookout Mountain, GA, where he has taught since 2006, but over the years he has returned to guitars and amps with a vengeance. He enjoys the process of design and building and the give-and-take of working with various pieces of wood. His black Labrador Retrievers are never too far away as he shapes a guitar body or puts the finishing touches on a guitar setup or wiring a tube amp.