I am delighted to share some photos that John sent me after he strung up my Rhapsody today. I couldn’t be more pleased visually. More importantly, John told me:
“The guitar sounds really great..I am super happy with her as she exceeded my expectations. The ebony bridge, shorter scale, smaller soundhole all work really nice together..Really nice warm tone with killer sustain, sweet trebles and no wolf tones...”
As a reminder for those of you who have not followed along all these months John’s Rhapsody is a 16” Carpathian Spruce flat top with a carved East Indian Rosewood back. John used a 25” scale, a 1-3/4” nut width with 2-3/16” string spacing. While being a larger body size, to promote a balanced timbre, it is not very deep being 3-1/2” at the neck block tapering to 4” at the end-block.
Here it is front and back. At my request, John used one of his “Artisan” archtop headstock shape for my guitar. We tried to combine a jazz archtop aesthetic (sunburst, headstock with stylized torch inlay) with some elements traditional flat tops (like a style 40 purflings). The 20 year old carved EIR back looks beautiful and finishing mastery created an exquisite sunburst.
John used contrasting Birdseye Sugar Maple for body binding, end graft, fingerboard binding and rosette rings instead of the traditional ivoroid used often in this aesthetic.
The neck has a three-piece construction using Honduran Mahogany with Birdseye Sugar Maple. John uses custom Ebony buttons on the Gotoh 510 tuners.
One of the unique features is the Ebony pickguard. John’s Birdseye Sugar Maple bindings, Green Abalone rosette and Style 40 top purflings contrast beautifully against the sunburst top.
Lastly, here is the guitar in its Hiscox Artisan case.
John has created a unique and beautiful custom instrument that I am delighted to add to my collection. He still needs to fine tune the set up over the next week before shipping it to me.