I am currently making a 00 acoustic guitar out of Brazilian Rosewood.  The wood was cut a long time ago and looks quite dull; but with a finish on, its rich chocolate browns are accentuated.  I love the look of this sapwood, as I really like contrasts.  Brazilian tends to have a thin black pencil line between the heart and sap, which makes the sap stand out even more.  Beautiful.  It has a bell-like quality when tapped, and I think it’s going to sound pretty good.

Often cited as the holy grail of guitar making, Brazilian Rosewood (Dalbergia Nigra) is highly sought after.  It can be stunningly beautiful, but it is most prized because of it’s tone.

It is impossible to pin down woods and tones: no two pieces of wood are the same, and all guitar makers make their guitars differently.  You can open yourself up to criticism by stating what a piece of wood will sound like, based only on species – because you also have to take into account that everyone listens to tone differently.

It seems to me that when it comes to wood, the only subject upon which many of us are in agreement is that Brazilian Rosewood is the best possible choice for the back and sides of an acoustic guitar.  It is certainly true that my three favourite guitars have been made from Brazilian Rosewood.  (I’m not including guitars made by me here,  because I find it impossible to be objective about them.  I’ll sit there thinking, “Is this guitar too quiet?” when it is deafening.  I suppose being hypercritical is a good thing, but it doesn’t help my nerves…)

The problem with Brazilian is that it is illegal.  Let me explain.  It has a conservation status of “vulnerable” and although this is the lowest grade in the “threatened” catagory, it is still sufficiently endangered for it to be CITES listed (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora). As such it is illegal – not to mention unethical – to trade in the stuff.

Having said that, I am a great fan of recycling, and am concious of my moral responsibility as a woodworker to make sure that every material I use is ethically sound.  Such scruples can prove difficult and expensive, but it is possible to buy recycled (or “reclaimed”) timber. If the timber was cut before the wood was banned, you can make guitars from it.  It is likely that many guitars out there made from Brazilian Rosewood were once used to clad the interiors of hotels in the 20s and 30s.

Here’s the prepared frame for my Brazilian Rosewood 00.  I removed the side spreaders so that you can see it.  Once I’ve got the braces on, I’ll glue the top in, then start carving and shaping the braces.

This is one guitar I am really looking forward to hearing.  I just hope I can be more objective about it.

This is the top.  I’ve just glued the x-brace into it.  I carve the braces by hand once they’re glued in.  I can’t shape them first, as I make them tall and thin, coming to an almost-point, so I wouldn’t have a surface to clamp.

So I glue in the x-brace and carve it before any other braces are in, as they would only get in the way.  You can see in the picture the pencil lines where the other braces will go.

I carve a radius into the bottom of the braces before gluing them, which forces a slight dome into the top of the guitar.  You can see from the picture that once the x-brace is in, there is a slight curve to the top.

The rosette and soundhole are cut before the top is braced. I love the look of a simple piece of timber with a rosette and soundhole cut into it.  You know it’s a guitar, even though it’s just a big square of spruce with a hole in the middle.

This sitka spruce top is destined for a wenge dreadnought.  I don’t cut the shape of the guitar out of the top until it’s completely braced.  I make my tops about two thirds the thickness of a standard guitar top, so each one is very fragile until the braces are glued in.  With the shape cut out, the upper and lower bout areas have quite a short grain. They can easily snap if they are handled roughly, so it’s kid gloves until the braces are in.

Plenty of bear claw in that Sitka spruce top, not to mention lots of mellow bass and clear, ringing trebles.  A great piece of wood.

The top is Sitka spruce; the back is Bolivian rosewood; the ebony bridge and fingerboard are both bound with high-flame koa.  That’s koa on the headstock, too.

This two-piece rosewood back has a great bookmatch (a mirror image, straight down the centre). I love the look of sapwood.  That’s the live part of the tree – and in rosewoods it tends to have a lot of contrast with the heartwood.

The neck is a five-piece laminate construction: Honduran mahogany, purpleheart, sycamore, purpleheart and Honduran mahogany again.  Between the purpleheart and mahogany there is also a contrasting ash veneer.  Quite a complex thing to put together!  The heelcap is koa, with Grover machine heads installed.  I normally use Waverly machines, but this was a customer preference.

This is a very art deco guitar, and I wanted to reflect this with the bridge design.  It is bound with koa and inlaid with the crest of Essex, in mother-of-pearl.  Both myself and the customer hail from a fantastic part of Essex, so the inclusion of our native seaxes seemed fitting.

What do you think?

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.

Today I enjoyed another one of my favourite moments: finishing the box.  When you get the top and back glued to the sides, you can get an inkling of the guitar’s voice and tone.

With some judicious tapping, I was able to ascertain that this guitar has a good even response across its top, and that the back is vibrating well.  Then I blew compressed air over the soundhole, like blowing across the top of a milk bottle at a certain angle, so that the box began making a noise.  When this happened I felt the top vibrating, and I made douby sure that there were no inactive areas of the spruce top.

The back and sides of this guitar are made from a great piece of Mango.  When I found this piece of wood, the flame in the wood took my breath away. I also like the wide variety of colours accross this particular piece.  When it is finished, this guitar is going to be easy on the eye.

I have used a non-traditional bracing structure for this guitar, on both the top and back.  In this picture, the asterisk bracing on the back has been glued in, but not yet carved.  I have finished the inside of the guitar with shellac (French polish), to provide protection against the environment.