Who wants a guitar made with this back? Should we use wood with wormholes? Obviously it is ecologically more advisable to use it than to discard it or burn it. My teacher used 3 and 4-piece backs and wood with wormholes to make some fantastic guitars. No one seemed to mind. I don’t buy endangered rosewoods since the ban on D. nigra and since I heard about the situation in Madagascar. The other question is: Should the holes be filled and “hidden” or should we proudly show that we are creating beauty using flawed materials? Filling the holes is probably better for structural integrity and acoustics but it can be done in such a way that draws attention to the holes or not. There is a danger too that filling a hole will create a super-hard foreign object which can cause a crack when the wood shrinks around it. One of the old guys here used to take the wood and cut vertically where the holes or defects were and then glue it together again. I saw some of the results of this on his spruce tops and it was invisible. Maybe the question should be: Do you prefer something like this or alternative non-tropical woods?

It is worth noting that any holes you see in rosewood were likely made while the tree was living so if you buy wood or a guitar with wormholes you are probably not importing bugs or eggs into your shop.

I enjoy showing off my rosette work but without a doubt the best ones are the historic copies or a few one-offs I have made. I have an idea how to improve my signature rosette but I don’t know when I will get around to that. Here is an example of a change that I tried and now I have to decide if I like it better or to go back to the old version. In the version above I doubled up the centre line to make the black a bit stronger. Below is the rosette that I have used for my concert guitar on close to 200 iterations. By the way, the guitar in the video is for sale.

I had a great mentor as well as some financial help when I started to get serious about making guitars. I was encouraged to buy wood for the future and so as often as I could I travelled to Valencia for tops, backs, sides, necks and everything else that goes into a guitar. As time passed I was able to buy more wood on each trip and in 2002 and 2003 a made some very large purchases. I know that some of you are struggling to get the wood you need for the next guitar but if at all possible do buy as much as you can manage at least to the point where you can someday work with 10-year old wood. Having the wood season in your shop is the very best thing you can do for the sound and the stability of your guitars. The photo shows what might be the very last set of Indian rosewood that is marked with the year 2002.

I make most of my guitars with european spruce for the top mostly because my clients seem to like it. I have used sitka spruce a few times with good results and of course lots of canadian cedar for classicals. I like cedar tops a lot but I don’t tend to use them on flamenco guitars that I make even though the two that I did make turned out great. I wonder if I should try another and break my prejudice about cedar. Maybe part of what I don’t like is cedar with cypress – because I tend to prefer cypress for flamenco guitars.

Here are some reasons to use cedar: The availability is good given that trees are large and grow quite straight. It can be very stiff and light. You don’t need to worry about colouring the finish (if you worry about that sort of thing). I do, I like a bit of colour on a top. Again because of the size of the trees it is quite easy to find a top with uniform grain. I don’ think that is very important but more and more often buyers are looking at aesthetic qualities of the top wood because they wrongly believe that this affects the sound. The world would be a happier place if people trusted us to do the best we can and then trusted their ears and fingers when searching for a guitar.