Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeff M
Very pretty guitar.
Seems like there are lots of great builders out there today building many gorgeous guitars.
You mention Kline.
I had the chance to play a couple of Kleins at his shop in Sonoma several years back.
Nicely built.
I don't recall being bowled over by them at the time.
I believe one of them was built with the Kasha bracing system.
Actually, that was where I first had the opportunity to play a Petros guitar.
There was an Olson in shop at that time too.
Now I DO remember those guitars.  |
The Klein I played was priced over $20k and sounded magnificent, looking like
this used jumbo Klein, $24k, previously owned by Andy Summers of the Police. Listen for yourself to a sweet little purist recording of that exact guitar for sale (link at dealer's website above). Ryan Thorell explained some Kleins were Asian sourced and he has played some mediocre sounding Kleins, apparently like the one you played.
I saw Thorell's first production guitar last week; unstringed/sound unknown...looked OK but suffice to say its cosmetics were far short of his current work.
Also last week while visiting Ryan I played his personal '77 Martin D28. Not bad, average range of performance for a D28. Without knowing its identity, Ryan then handed me another much smaller guitar, which upon first strum was alive in harmonic richness and even played louder and w/ far greater power in the bass range. The D28 sounded anemic by comparison.
I quickly blurted to Ryan, oh yeah, that's what I'm talking about. This was the rare pleasure of playing one of Frank Vignola's actual guitars, a Thorell Corina (Martin OM or 000 size) Adirondack/mahogany, sunburst back. Frank has been playing it w/ David Grisman.
Frank told Ryan this Thorell Corina, fresh out of the box, blew away his '37 Martin D18. It's decades since I played a pre-war D18, but there are good reasons to agree w/ Frank's opinion, besides the simple fact that it's Frank Vignola. A Thorell mahogany Dreadnaught first stringed 30 minutes before I played it sounded sweet enough to make me sign a check on the spot for the axe described in this thread.
The really strange, unbelievable thing about dealing w/ Ryan is he is thirty years old and has no business at that age having his ability, talent, skill set and artistic taste.
Yesterday I commissioned two more guitars, another "The Grand" (Port Orford Cedar, African blackwood) and an electric bass that may well set a new benchmark (hybrid solid/hollow body, redwood burl top, walnut back, birdseye maple neck, proprietary on-the-fly adjustment feature) for that genre.