David Myka has many books, but if he invites you into his library, you will not see one. That's because he is a luthier, or guitar maker, and what he calls his library is actually an organized collection of stacks of nearly 50 types of wood, including claro walnut, indigenous to the Pacific Northwest, black limba from Western Africa, and his prized planks of 82 year-old Brazilian kingwood.

Myka, 39, a West Seattle resident, works nearly 70 hours a week in his loft studio near the Morgan Junction. He makes about 16 to 20 guitars a year in the $3,000 to $10,000 price range. Most are electric guitars, but he is currently building an unusual instrument. He is keeping busy, and has customers as far afield as Australia.

"I am working on a custom 12-string baritone electric mandolin, kind of an odd-ball," he said as he lifted up a slice of shaped wood that will evolve into a "David Myka original".

"I've always worked with my hands," said Myka. "There weren't a lot of books on (building) them when I started as a kid. I like it because I don't have a set idea about how a guitar should be built. Each one is a little different. It's kind of cool to approach the guitar with the kind of idea that anything is possible."

Sorting through his library he said, "Some wood you pick up, and it's just dead. When you strum a guitar with really nice woods it comes alive. This is the stuff you're really looking for."

From his collection he pulled out a piece of wood that to the uninitiated may look to be a random selection. The tactile artist poked it with his finger and it dinged and then echoed slightly like a soothing xylophone key struck by a mallet. He "played" another chunk of wood which also reverberated as he tapped it, to his delight.

"Some pieces really ring out, and some pieces don't," he said.

"We luthiers are really picky," he said with a wry smile. "I'll go into a shop and see a rack of wood and the wood suppliers are like, 'Oh no, a guitar maker!' and I'll pick out the one piece that's good after pulling everything out and making a mess. It's got to look good, sound good, and be good structurally or it won't work."

It all started near Buffalo, New York where he was raised.

"When a buddy and I were teenagers we wanted guitars but were too poor to buy them, so we decided to make them," he recalled. "We'd take old radios apart and unwind the transformers for pickup wire."

The guitar pickups are mounted under the strings to capture mechanical vibrations.

"I could never play as well as I thought I should be able to play and realized if I was going to get involved in music for a living I should probably lend my talents to building my instruments rather than playing them," he said. "People would be much happier that way."

His taste in music has always been eclectic, but mostly electric.

"There was always the 80's hair bands," he said. "I was into Frank Zappa and Led Zeppelin. I was into heavy metal and the Grateful Dead at the same time. I go to local clubs. Now I love fusion, electric jazz.

"Really the value is the personal interaction with the client," he said. "My work is fairly high end, but I like to say I work in a sustainable way. I'm not cranking out a thousand guitars a month with helpers. I've just developed a one on one business model.

"People usually choose (a design) because they like the way something looks," he said. "Then they want to see if I can make it sound the way they want. I make recommendations because some want a type of guitar that will never give them the sound they want. They want the look of this cool, funky, hollow body thing but they want to play high-gain rock, really loud. You need something solid for that."

You can visit David Myka's website's "Sounds" page here and actually listen to a selection of his guitars being played.