Custom Guitars UK

Koa is my favourite wood

Koa is beautiful. It is full of rich colours, and the figure that can be found in it is as good as I’ve seen in any wood.

I built this bass in 2005. The koa top has a subtle flame and a rich, brown colour.

Koa (acacia koa) is a hardwood native to Hawai’i, and was used by ancient Hawai’ians to build dugout canoes. It is used frequently in making ukuleles, but is rare, due to logging. Most old growth wood now comes from stumps.

Old growth wood is more desireable then new growth and farmed wood, because of its figure. The reason why it looks so wild is because it has had a hard life. Growing from the side of a volcano in a rainforest with no protection from wind for 3,000 miles, it grows in strange ways; this causes a lot of the figure from within. If the tree is farmed and looked after, its grain will be more straight and true, and unlikely to be so beautiful.

I built this courting dulcimer in 2006. The back of this instrument shows how much variation can occur in one piece of wood. At one end, the flame is tight and even. After the waist, the flame suddenly gets much larger, and more irregular. This piece is typical of the most sought after pieces of koa, with its strong orange colouration and distinctive dark streaks.

The conservation of koa is a big concern. I am always careful to ensure that I only use FSC-accredited woods; when I build with koa, I use fallen or recycled wood, or stumpwood.

For me, the other tragedy of koa is that I’ve never heard a good-sounding koa acoustic. A customer of mine once told me about a Taylor built with koa that he rated, but most people feel that this wood is too bright. Brightness is something that you look for in a nylon stringed instrument, such as the ukulele. However, the challenge when building a steel stringed guitar is to try and build in some bass. This is because the nature of the instrument is that it will tend towards high end response.

This is my solution: koa binding! It works well against these cocobolo sides. I have also used it with rosewood, which provides another good contrast.

Apparently, mango wood has a very similar tone to koa, so I have braced the mango guitar I am building to draw out the bass response and counter the trebly predisposition of the back and sides. If this is successful – and my testing so far suggests that it will be – then maybe I’ll give koa another chance, and build an acoustic from it. A guitar with koa back and sides plus a great bass response is, to me, the ideal guitar.