I busted my butt trying to get this guitar done on time for the Guitar Foundation of America (GFA) 2024 competition where I will be a vendor for the first time. I wished to have both a spruce (#21) and a cedar guitar (#22) to show off for potential customers at this very elite show. I finished this guitar 1 week before the show, and then a customer visited my home to chat about a potential guitar and claimed this one for his own. So now I’m capturing pictures of this beauty before I take it to GFA and then send it on to its new home.
This is some of the great stripey sinker cedar that I purchased from my mentor Peter Oberg when he retired. This is simply the wood of the angels. It is both light weight and super stiff, requiring minimal bracing for support of string tension. This results in a fast attack and oodles of overtones. This top has a very light weight Hauser 7-fan with closure bars. Coupled with this awesome wood, the sound is perfection.
This guitar has the following characteristics:
- Western Red Cedar stripey top. Perfectly quartersawn with amazingly stiff properties. Some people may be put off by the color stripes, but there is no better wood than this sonically.
- East Indian Rosewood back and sides. Nice even straight grain makes this a beauty, and will help it have a long happy life. The sides are laminated with Port Orford Cedar as the inner lamination layer. This helps stiffen the sides for both supporting the top with a strong rim for sound clarity, and also reduces the likeliness for cracks appearing from impacts to the sides.
- Curly maple bindings .
- Amazon Rosewood headplate
- Gabon Ebony fingerboard
- Brazilian Rosewood bridge
- Spanish Cedar neck
- Indian Ebony arm rest. Low profile provides a softer pressure on your right forearm. The arm rest is only glued to the bindings, so it floats over the top to prevent any impact on the sound of the guitar.
- Rosette is my own ram horn mosaic center pattern, surrounded by a beaded necklace created with colored veneers. The main white portion of the “chain” of the beaded necklace is a thick veneer of Holly.
- 650 mm scale length
- 52 mm nut width, 42mm string center to center string spacing at nut.
- Partial 20th fret for upper 2 strings
- Gotoh premium tuners with the extra roller bearings.
- Hauser inspired Symmetrical 7-fan bracing pattern with closure bars.
This instrument has been SOLD
