Blog, Custom Guitars UK

How To Grow Your Own Guitars

I was at a trade show a couple of years ago, and there was a stand there run by Madinter.  Madinter is a Spanish Luthier supplies company.  Unsurprisingly, it specialises in Spanish guitars, but when it comes to wood, it’s much the same.  A piece of ebony for a fingerboard is just the same, regardless of the guitar.  They have some electric wood, too.  I like the fact that it is a little cheaper, and I don’t mind that the wood comes fairly unprepared.  I can’t mill logs, but I can turn a rough plank into a slotted and radiused fingerboard, so I don’t need to pay someone else to do that for me.

At this trade show, Madinter were giving away packets of seeds.  These seeds were for Cypress, a wood commonly used in the construction of Flamenco Guitars.  The packet had the following statement on it:

With just one cypress tree we can make a hundred guitars.  With a hundred guitars we can plant one hundred trees.

I really liked the sentiment so, once I had settled into my new house, I planted the seeds and waited for them to germinate.  They are growing fast now, and I re-potted them at the weekend.  Four saplings are shooting up.

I think it will be an amazing experience to grow a tree from seed, and build guitars from it. And I figure I’ve got a couple of decades to learn how to make a Spanish heel before my guitars are ready to harvest…

Image credit: Bill Ward’s Brickpile.