Jennings Guitar started with Chad Jennings building his first electric guitar at the age of 14 for an eighth grade science fair project. His father pulled out their old, rusty and dust-covered Shop-Smith, and with this Chad crafted his first body and neck. He was immediately hooked and Chad became infatuated with everything that involved building and playing guitars.
After the refining and honing of Chad’s skills, Jennings Guitars was officially established in Camarillo, California in December of 2014. Today, Jennings Guitar is dedicated to helping musicians build an instrument that will further inspire musicians in creative ways.
We stopped by their booth at the NAMM show and got a close-up look at both the Catalina and the Voyager guitars. The Catalina is built as a semi-hollow instrument, drawing on the shape of larger hollow-body guitars but scaled down into a smaller, more comfortable body, with offset horns and a curved heel that make the upper frets easier to reach. The Voyager is the solidbody counterpart in the Jennings lineup, built around the same hand-selected tonewoods and light, playable setup that define the brand. Both carry Chad’s stepped headstock design, and every finish is sprayed and buffed in-house.
The instruments are built in Camarillo in relatively small numbers, with body shaping, finishing, and setup handled in-house rather than farmed out to a larger supplier. That kind of hands-on process was easy to see up close at the booth, from the grain of the wood to the fit of the neck joint.
NAMM draws builders working at every scale, from major manufacturers with sprawling booths to smaller shops like Jennings, whose setup was easy to miss in the noise of the show floor but rewarded a closer look. Spending a few minutes with Chad at the booth made clear how much of the Catalina and Voyager’s identity comes from decisions made by hand rather than off a spec sheet.
A few booths away, we also caught iVee Guitars handmade aluminum resonators from the same show.
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