Jeffrey Yong

Jeffrey Yong (born 29 November 1958) is a Malaysian luthier. He is considered to be one of the top luthiers in the world and is noted for using local Malaysian wood in his instruments. Yong has gained international recognition and has exhibited at conventions in the United States, Canada Japan, Russia and China.

History
Yong was born in 1958 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He started his career as a guitar instructor and examiner in 1976. He built his first guitar in 1985 from a DIY kit, and traveled abroad to improve his guitar-making skills.

After a luthier asked why he was sourcing material from overseas when Malaysia exported good quality wood, Yong looked into the possibility of using local, non-traditional timber, such as monkeypod, rengas, mango, rambutan, and Malaysian blackwood, for building musical instruments. He continued to innovate and gained extensive knowledge of different kinds of timber, especially those from tropical regions.

Yong founded the Guitar Institute Malaysia (GIM) in 1993, specializing in teaching different genres of guitar playing and guitar construction. He also taught at the Luthier School International in California. His skills in luthiery were mostly self-taught. He has published articles on guitar-making in several newspapers over an eight-year period, and has appeared at guitar maker conventions in the United States, Canada Japan, Russia, China and Malaysia.

Yong's guitars have been exhibited at Healdsburg Guitar Festival, Shanghai Music Festival, and Montreal Guitar Show. At the Montreal show in 2011 he introduced his "JJ Blackie" and his innovative "Seismic", a JJ-shaped 10-string acoustic guitar with Monkeywood body and Blackwood fingerboard (see pictures, right) which featured in Premier Guitar Magazine. The guitar's D and G strings had octave pairs and the B and high E had unison strings.

Yong introduced Malaysian Blackwood to other guitar makers during the 1998 GAL convention in Tacoma, Washington, USA. He also pioneered Monkeypod as a tonewood and saw it adopted by other luthiers. Using Monkeypod wood (Samanea sama or Rain Tree), formerly known as Albizia saman to build guitars was not new, but it had not been regarded as a premium tonewood and had previously only been used for aesthetic purposes.

Yong built almost an entire guitar of Monkeypod, and in 2006 it won the Blind Listening Test at the Guild of American Luthier's convention. It was judged to be the best-sounding instrument in terms of tonality, timbre and sustain. Yong was competing against notable luthiers such as Erwin Somogyi, and two of his guitars were ranked in the top three

Instruments built in Yong's workshop were made by hand with 99 percent local woods, mostly Monkeywood, the remaining one percent being the maple veneer used in the bindings. His bracing design and layout were influenced by Martin's X-scalloped patterns, Torres fan bracing and Smallman lattice bracing.

Artists who use Yong's guitars have included Don Alder, Farid Ali, Kent Nishimura, Hiroshi Masuda, Shun Ng, Wayan Balawan, Dan LaVoie and Okapi.

Articles published
 Steel String Guitars 
 * JJ (Jeffrey Jumbo) Guitar
 * The body shape is a cross between a Jumbo and a Classical Guitar.
 * OM Guitar
 * Seismic Guitarat
 * 10-String Acoustic Guitar.
 * Presented it in Montreal Guitar Show in 2011.
 * Influenced by the tragic March 2011 earthquake in Japan.
 * Body - Monkeypod
 * Fretboard and bridge - Blackwood
 * Headstock - half-slotted, half-pegged design
 * Sound hole, back, and bottom strap buttons are appointed unevenly representative of a seismic shift.
 * To get a chime sound, its D and G strings have octave pairs, and the B and high E have unison strings.

 Classical Guitars 
 * Tioman I (Nylon String)
 * Torres bracing and body design
 * Tioman design (Nylon String)
 * Torres body shape with modified lattice bracing
 * Tioman III (Nylon String)
 * Khono design body shape (larger body) with modified lattice bracing

JJ (Jeffrey Jumbo)
The JJ is a hybrid of a classical guitar and a jumbo. It uses scalloped "X" bracing, and has a unique bridge with more mass than the conventional bridge.

Other interesting features are:


 * Cutaway bevel offers more excess to higher frets without sacrificing air mass in the body.
 * Sound port to bring the in-body sound closer to the player.
 * Thumb Scallop helps the player utilize the over-the-thumb technique with ease.