Blog, Custom Guitars UK, Martin

Custom Guitars: Rosettes

I’ve been thinking about rosettes quite a lot recently. The rosette is the decorative circle around the soundhole. They come in many guises.

This is a Martin rosette. It’s an example of what you may find on many guitars, with a few rings surrounding the soundhole.

Spanish guitar rosettes tend to be more elaborate, with beautiful marquetry patterns. You almost never see this on a steel string.

Baroque guitars were extremely elaborate, with three dimensonal “roses” going into and covering the soundhole.

This rosette is the work of Master Inlayer Larry Robinson, and appears on the 750,000th Martin. Check out the 1,000,000th Martin for more of his stunning rosette and inlay work.

Here at Jim Fleeting Guitars my simple hardwood rosette, with a couple of rings around it, is very fashionable. However I have decided that there is so much more that can be done.

I spent a week with Ervin Somogyi in Oakland, California. Ervin’s guitars all show his high level of skill, and his wonderful eye for design.

His interrupted rosette idea really struck a chord, and I decided to try a mix between the simple hardwood rosette and this interrupted design. This rosette is bolivian rosewood with a little of the sapwood showing, matching the headstock, back and sides.

This is what I came up with. It has inlaid mango, again to match the back and sides, and the Jim Fleeting Guitars’ ‘F’ logo.

This is my latest creation. The top hasn’t been cut out yet, but you can see the drawing of the shape of the guitar on the spruce. I put a fingerboard on there, to get the look of it. I am obsessed with the Art Deco designs from the twenties and thirties (probably because of their use of exotic woods) and I think this really shows that style. What do you think?