Sustainable TONE
breathiness of mahogany, but,” Taylor
laughs, “it’s got some balls! A little bit of
grit underneath so it can handle a little
more snap.” It combines nicely with both
cedar and spruce, making it a great choice
for fingerstyle or flatpicking guitars.
Colesanti says creating a strong market
for alternatives is often a simple matter of
listening to the tone: “I think we had talked
ourselves into thinking only certain kinds
of wood sounds good acoustically for the
flat top steel-string guitar. But once we got
over that hump and started building with
those materials, we found the sound was
really good, and then the difficulty became
actually convincing folks out in the world
that it’s okay to have a guitar made out
of that material. A lot of that wood grows
right in Pennsylvania, so it’s not like you’re
going to South America or Africa or Europe
or Australia to find these woods. You can
Cocobolo on Taylor LTD-6S
BOB LONG
A Tree’s Third Chance
Here’s a little perspective: Taylor says they use
150 spruce logs a year, which is probably very
comparable to Martin’s use. A typical sawmill
will process 150 logs in a single shift on a single day. At the other end of the scale, Santa
Cruz makes in a year about the number of
guitars Martin or Taylor will make in a couple
days, and Bob Long makes in a year the number Santa Cruz will make in a week.
There are advantages to being a micro-builder.
Long doesn’t have to worry about whether he
can get enough of any kind of wood to satisfy
a mass market. He gets much of his top wood
from local piano technicians who pull it from
pianos that need to be rebuilt.
The first step in processing is to take the bracing off: “The braces usually come off pretty
easily,” says Long. “Then I sand them down
to get the grime and the shellac off so they’re
clear, and then stow them away and identify
which piano each one came from. I do it so
that all the wood in each guitar comes from
the same piano. They go into the guitar exactly the way they came out of the piano. All
the joints were made by the craftsmen at the
Steinway Company or Mason & Hamlin.”
buy maple and cherry and birch and even
walnut right here.”
The Future Sounds Brilliant but
Warm, with Plenty of Sustain
It’s an exciting time to be an acoustic guitar
player. There are more options available
than ever before, and it’s possible to know
with a great deal of confidence where your
wood came from and how it was harvested.
With ninety percent of your tone coming
from the top of the guitar, it’s possible to
use the back and side wood sort of like an
EQ. If you learn about different tone woods
and what properties they bring to a guitar,
you can get incredibly close to your ideal
tone before your guitar is even made. That
makes me feel like, well, a guitar player in a
luthier’s workshop.
The idea came to him because his own family piano was no longer tunable and was
going to be disposed of: “It needed too
much work to afford to keep it, so rather
than send it to the landfill, I took it apart
and I used virtually every piece of that piano
for something. I made coat racks and shelving—our house is full of old piano things,
including two guitars.”
Long loves it that he can offer his customers a dimension beyond the ordinary story,
“something with a family association or just
the added bit of romance that exists when
the wood is something more than simply
visually pleasing. When somebody says, ‘Tell
me about your guitar,’ and the story is ‘Well,
it’s Indian rosewood and I gave the guy a
check,’ it’s not a very romantic story. Over
100 years ago, someone had the foresight
to realize a particular spruce tree, when processed into piano soundboards, had a value
greater than newsprint or so many two-by-fours. That lumber then had the opportunity
for a second life... a higher calling. The tree
lived on as pianos, in homes, schools, church-es, and theaters for the next 100-plus years. I
like to think that I’m extending that life even
further... giving the tree a third life. Where
would we be without foresight?”
longguitars.com
