Design
“It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
- Wendell Berry
Since most of our instruments have been custom designs, we’ve built just about everything at least once…both modern and traditional nylon string guitars, chambered and solid body electrics, 12-strings, 10-string baritones, modern fingerstyle cutaway SJs, traditional dreadnoughts, 12-fret parlor guitars, and of course, some fairly radical custom commissions that are difficult to describe without photos.
The steel string acoustic guitar in particular presents a myriad of challenges, because you have so much stress acting on such thin structures. In fact, the lighter you build those structures, the more resonant the instrument. So if you want to make a truly responsive acoustic guitar, you’re constantly walking a tightrope.
Early on, we experimented with offset soundholes, tailpieces, elevated fretboards, double tops with space-age nomex cores, double sides, laminated braces, lattice bracing, rim struts, adjustable neck angles, sound ports, passthrough bridges and carbon fibre reinforcement.
We still incorporate some of these innovations.
Just as important, we learned to let a lot of them go and focus on what really works.
That’s why, for example, most of our acoustic guitars are built with an elevated fretboard. This structurally unifies the entire neck, so the guitar never develops that all-too-common hump at the body joint.
Reverse kerfing stiffens the rim, allowing more of the energy to activate the soundboard and back.
Instead of a heavily-braced upper bout, carbon fibre struts span from the head block to the waist, locking the neck angle to the stiffest part of the rim. This allows us to free the soundboard from the burden of supporting the fretboard, radically increasing the size of the active soundboard. This makes a huge difference on smaller designs, contributing significantly more warmth and resonance.
We use carbon fibre rods on either side of a bullet-proof, single-action truss rod. This helps weight-balance the instrument and yields a very stable, stiff neck, keeping the energy in the string for great sustain. Belleville spring washers secure the neck-to-body joint while allowing us to dial in the neck angle with absolute precision.
We offer the passthrough bridge and tailpiece as a custom option, because they allow the soundboard to relax and relieve the stress acting on the rim. This is especially suitable for fingerstyle players who don’t do a whole lot of heavy strumming, because the soundboard is responsive to the lightest touch.
In order to protect your guitar without sacrificing tone, we use an extremely thin, hand-polished satin lacquer finish that ages gracefully and allows the natural resonance and beauty of the wood to shine through.
All of these innovations help us move toward our ultimate goal: to deliver an instrument that is light and responsive, but solid enough to pass on to future generations.