Randy Wood Cuban Mahogany Custom

[tpbiii]

Randy Wood is a very well know luthier who now lives and works outside Savannah GA. George Gruhn, Tut Taylor and Randy Wood were the original partners in GTR, the first major vintage guitar operation in Nashville in the early 1970s. Randy has made and maintained instruments for a huge number of major musicians (Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton, etc...). He is best known for his mandolins, but he does it all.

Randy has been our luthier of choice for maintaining our vintage instruments for the past decade, and we have become friends. Last spring, he handed me a guitar he had just finished -- one of a set of three that he had made from old growth Cuban mahogany and red spruce. The guitar was specifically designed as a finger style guitar. The body footprint was the same as a 1939 J-35 and it had a custom pickguard aimed at fingerpickers.

Modern acoustic guitars by big and small builders alike are often designed to be copies of vintage guitars. We have played many guitars of this sort, and they almost always come up short to our ears. This is not because the are not fine guitar -- many are very well constructed, but they pretty much universally fail to deliver that old "aged" vintage sound simply because they are not yet aged. We prefer, and generally buy, the actual vintage guitars.

Well, Randy's guitar just blew me away, not because it sounded vintage, but because it had an amazing, and wonderful, tone of it own that was unlike anything else I had played. Cuban mahogany is much harder than "regular" mahogany, giving it a tone that is a bit more like RW. This creates a tone quality which seems perfect to me -- a harder and more sustained midrange than the 30's and wartime Gibsons we usually use for my fingerstyle music, but not as full as the midrange of the old Martin dreads, which to my ear muddies up the music.

So we now have a new guitar (2009) -- something I expected never to have again.

Here are some pictures:

[JohnM]

Cool guitar! Pickguard would take some getting used to visually for me, but I dig everything else.

[kirkham13]

neat, now we have to hear it! really classy-

[ChuckS]

Very nice guitar; familiar shape but different enough to make a bold statement.

I also think cuban mahogany is a great tonewood. It takes the characteristics of dense honduran mahogany a bit further. I agree it moves towards some characteristics of rosewood. It seems very articulate, with well defined and developed bass, with more resonance than a 'typical' mahogany. It seems to have a bit of reverb, but not as much as rosewood, and it doesn't seem to have the rosewood darkness. Seems to have an added focus, with the effect of a little less warmth/openness (maybe also less 'round' sound as some call it). Yet, it has the clarity and high end I hear with other mahogany.

There's a thread where a number of guitars made from this tonewood were shown and described.

http://www.acousticguitarforum.com/f...ighlight=cuban

[random works]

I live about an hour from Randy's shop and have yet to make it by there. One reason is the fear of playing something I want to take home but can't.

That's a sweet looking guitar!

[tpbiii]

Well, I finally got around to making a recording.

The day I got this guitar -- only three weeks ago -- I still had my stitches in from carpal tunnel and elbow surgery, which was very painful -- painful if I tried to play and painful waiting when I could not.

Well, I am still not right -- I can't reach for notes yet, so flatpicking will have to wait. But closed hand fingerstyle works pretty well, and since this is not a flatpicking guitar anyway, I decided to move ahead.

For comparison, I played three guitars: our 1935 D-28; our 1943 J-45; and the Randy Wood guitar. I just sat down and did it -- I'm not up to much more than that right now. The videos should be played in order for the full effect -- it originally was a single piece, but I cut it up for people who did not have seven minutes. Also this is HD video and audio, so you need a good computer, internet, and audio (good headphones or a good audio system) to hear ok.

1935 D-28
1943 J-45
Randy Wood guitar

Best,

-Tom

[kendallhadden]

I consider Randy Wood to be a great friend. He definitely is my luthier of choice and is a great guy. If you are ever down in Bloomingdale, GA I urge you to stop by and see him. To me, he is the setup man!!!