Martin Guitar Soundhole Rosette

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?

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.