Hi Folks,
I thought some of you might enjoy a new guitar I will be picking up at the HGF in a couple of weeks. This post is rather lengthy, so skip to the pics below if you don't want to read all of it.
Last fall I contacted John Greven in Portland, OR to begin the process. I knew I wanted a OOO/OM size, because I prefer grand concert-size guitars for both playing comfort and versatility.
John and I conversed via email quite a bit about the sound I was looking for, my playing style, etc. It turns out that both John and I like a lot of versatility in a guitar, so a OOO was the ideal way to go. He encouraged me to consider a build like his personal OOO, a guitar that is well-known, at least in the Pacific northwest, as a stellar guitar that Wayne Henderson liked so much he played it at a concert there a while back.
I visited John in Portland this past April. He was most gracious and spent several hours with me touring his shop, letting me play his guitars (his personal OOO is quite special) and selecting woods and other details. John believes that light (in both color and weight) Brazilian RW makes very special guitars when paired with Lutz spruce. So we decided on Brazilian rosewood back and sides and a Lutz spruce top.
John gets his CITES certified Brazilian RW from Madeira (
http://www.madeirainc.com/), a company in Brazil that saws premium, salvaged, and vintage Brazilian RW timber into guitar sets. John had contacted them requesting light (in weight and color) and quartersawn wood. He had about 6 sets from which I could choose. Here is a pic of the back and side wood in raw form:
As an admirer of wood, I like to let the wood in a guitar speak for itself without a lot of inlay, so I requested a blank fretboard and a wood rosette. I let John use his artistic talents for the rosette. Here's what he came up with - buckeye burl - unfinished in this pic:
The neck is spanish cedar (which isn't really cedar, it's just called that) with a two-piece bird's beak headstock joint and a slim carve. Nut is 1 13/16" wide with a 2 5/16" string spacing at the saddle. I designed the shape of the headstock, a shape John had not used before on his guitars, but was willing to use on mine. I think he liked it after it was completed. He found a cool piece of bookmatched Brazilian that he used for the headstock overlay. The tuners are Gotoh 1:21 in an antique gold finish. John had to order them from Japan.
Here are a couple of pics of the guitar when John was just beginning to apply the proprietary finish he now uses:
Here's the finished guitar:
Needless to say I'm quite excited to pick up this beauty in a couple of weeks at HGF.
Thanks for looking, and thanks to John for this masterpiece
Bill