As a longtime guitar player, I always pick up guitars when visiting friends and family, at garage sales or pawnshops, to find that the poor thing is entirely out of tune (let alone the rusty strings). By that I mean out of standard tuning, not a dropped D-tuning or Keith Richard’s beloved open G. Every […]
The ukulele is not an ancient instrument yet after its initial ups and down as the guitar’s little sister, we are now experiencing an incredible recent ukulele revival. As a hybrid descendant of the historic guitar line, it started its ascent in popularity with sugar cane field workers from the Atlantic Portuguese island of Madeira […]
This 6th and final installment on tone woods and their sustainability within an ever growing consumer demand is about rosewood, one of the most expensive tonewood varieties. Rosewood has a lot to live up to with its smooth, warm tone and complex harmonic overtones. Visually, Rosewood is typically dark, chocolate brown in color, with a […]
In this fifth installment on sustainable tone woods for string instruments we’re talking about Maple. Though far less common as a tonewood, Maple nonetheless prominently features on some of the most popular acoustic guitars ever made. One of the hardest and most dense tonewood varieties, maple is famed for its bright tone, great projection and […]
Mahogany is the most popular choice of tonewoods for guitar backs and sides, though it’s also occasionally used as a top material. Mahogany is a dense wood, with a dark finish, and close grain. Tonally, it has far warmer, darker tone than both Cedar and Spruce. As a material for back and sides, mahogany’s density […]
In this third installment on sustainable tone woods, we’ll be talking about Ebony as a Tonewood. Previously we talked about KOA and Spruce. Woods commonly used for instrument building, known in the industry as ‘tonewoods’, more often than not are tropical hardwoods growing in countries with rampant illegal logging, lax law enforcement, and disappearing rainforests. […]
“Hawaiian KOA Tonewood is Sustainable” is the second installment in our six story series about producing sustainable tonewoods, which is currently defining the global availability of the woods suitable for the manufacturing of string instruments. Building an acoustic guitar means considering the tonal balance of the wood as much as any structural properties. Guitars are […]
The sustainable supply of Tonewoods is at a critical junction, following years of clear cutting forests that besides construction timber, produce the woods needed for acoustic instrument building. Among the thousands of timber and lumber species and varieties globally grown, there are only a small number that carry the distinction of being a tonewood. Tonewoods […]
You made the decision and bought a guitar, or a banjo, a mandolin, or ukulele, because you wanted to learn to play it and enjoy live music. If you’re a newbie and have to go through the entire learning process before you can impress yourself and others with your talents, you may want to consider […]
Takamine guitars are made in Japan since 1962 and distributed in the US by ESP Guitars in Hollywood, California since 2015. The brandname was taken from Mount Takamine, a prominent feature in the skyline panorama of the small city of Nakatsugawa in central Japan and is correctly pronounced as “ta-ka-mee-nay”. After a decade of experimenting […]