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.

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.