and a guitar company was born. Flaxwood
tells me that although they use this flaxwood
material, and the parts are made by injection
molding, there is old-style luthierie going on,
too. The neck is glued in, and the bodies are
finished by hand, just like a wood guitar.
guitars don’t do this. All the models are
25. 5” scale, and I assume, because of the
consistency of the materials, they all weigh
in at just over seven pounds.
How’d They Do?
All the current Flaxwood models have the
same body shape and look clean and modern.
You can get them with a variety of pickup
choices, different humbuckers, lipsticks, or
H/S/H, and with or without the whammy
bar. Our sample guitar is the Liekki (Finnish
Ring Them Bells
Previous non-wood guitars I have played
have seemed to me to go with the idea that
the guitar should be as resistant to vibration as possible, theoretically to maximize
sustain. The Liekki I found to have a pleasant,
alive vibration to it which feels quite natural
and wood-like, and yet, it has a sustain like
a piano, incredibly smooth in response. The
P- 90 sound is one I like very much; I regularly
play a Gibson ES330, so I’m in familiar territory here. The Liekki will give you a broad
palette of sounds, from a sweet Lenny Breau
type of jazz sound to a Tele-esque twang.
Click on some distortion, and you can go
from roots slide to death metal and anywhere
in between. Because it is hollow, Flaxwood
cautions that you may have some feedback
issues, but I had none (though I never got it
up to arena volume). The Schaller trem bar
did well with staying in tune, and I was able
to take the strings slack and back several
times before there was any tuning error—and
that’s without a locking nut. The nut is graphite, so this may not be your whammy if you
need to go slack a lot, but for most players
it will work very well. For my tastes, the bar
rides a bit high, but I imagine that could be
for flame), which is their P- 90 pickup model
featuring Seymour Duncan Vintage Soapbars
SP90-1 pickups, with one volume control and
two tone controls, one for each pickup. The
Liekki also features a Schaller Les Paul Tremolo
and Gotoh tuners.
The sculpted archtop body is hollow, with
one F-hole, and the back is a large ported
plate they call the resonator. The finish on
our test model reminds me a bit of a bronze
casting, and is beautifully done. The whole
guitar (body, resonator and neck) is made
of the Flaxwood material. When I picked
up the guitar, the first thing I noticed was
the straight string pull from the nut to the
tuners; this has always seemed like common sense to me, and I am surprised more
