You don’t need perfectly quartered stock for making braces nor do you need the raw billet to be cut perfectly along the grain the way this is. However, if you want maximum strength and stability per gram then you do need to split it and follow the grain and then cut each brace on the quarter. Of course this is easier and creates less waste if the billet looks like these. I always split my stock for braces as well as my stock for necks. It introduces some repeatability which is pretty hard to come by in guitar-making. These pieces made some nice stiff fan braces and the process was quite fast. However, I split a few more billets at the same time and some of those weren’t quite so perfect. In the end I spent considerably more time on the off quarter pieces especially the ones that split diagonally through the length. I used three different saw setups and three different planer setups through this whole process. One of those billets had a little surprise for me but I will talk about that in the next post.

So I now have hundreds of triangular-profiled sticks; some stiff and some not so stiff and some lightweight and some a bit heavier. I will use the stiffer ones for the centre fan braces and the lightweight ones on flamenco guitars. Because of the splitting beforehand every one of them is as strong as it can be and when I scallop the ends after they are glued to the soundboard they will carve very nicely.

Indian rosewood is a great wood to make guitars with. So far it is not scarce or controlled and it contributes to making a great-sounding guitar.  It is also very stable, in part because you can usually find it cut on the quarter. The widespread preference for Brazillian rosewood is due to a few factors that can be a bit contradictory. Buyers love Brazillian because it is scarce and expensive and because it can be very beautiful. Makers love Brazillian because it is nice to work with. A plane and a scraper leave a lovely surface, the smell is heavenly and it has a nice sonorous ring to it when you tap it.  However, beautiful to a woodworker and beautiful to a buyer is not always the same thing. We love well-quartered wood no matter what the species. The shine of the medullar rays and the even grain is the perfection we look for. I have used great pieces of Brazillian like that and had clients say, “No, that’s Indian rosewood”. These are the clients that want crazy grain patterns, various colours in the same piece and spider webbing that to them are the indications that it really is Brazillian. Crazy grain makes for a greater likelihood of cracks, different colours often indicates a flat-sawn piece while scarcity means that it is expensive and its commerce severely restricted. So why use it? Especially if many of us have found that it really doesn’t make your guitar sound any better. Furthermore, why spend the extra money on it if the best pieces are going to be confused with Indian rosewood making it hard to pass on the extra cost to the client? Just to illustrate the confusion here are 4 guitars under construction: 2 of them are being made with a south american rosewood and the other 2 are being made with Indian rosewood. Can you tell which is which? Letter A, Letter B, Letter C, Letter D.

Letter C

Letter D

Letter B

Letter A

Here is a new video by Andrea Corongiu. That Santos Hernández copy is going strong.

What a wonderful opportunity for a young spanish guitarist to study with some fantastic teachers in Alicante. The masters programme in guitar from the University of Alicante is certainly one of the most prestigious of its type. The Sabadell Bank offers a scholarship each year for this course and here we have the winning applicant with his submission. Juan José Rodríguez has been playing on one of my guitars since 2016 and has done very well in festivals and competitions and is currently attending said masters programme. I wish him the best of luck there. Click on the photo for more information on the course.

I started this journey when I began taking guitar lessons at the age of 21. I never got very far and really didn’t see in myself any great aptitude or talent for music. However, I fell in love with the guitar and its musical possibilities. I think the high point of my guitar playing was the duet above, played with a violinist whom I accompanied on guitar when he did gigs playing fiddle tunes at country fairs. It’s Paganini so the violin can be very demanding but at least on this one the guitar is really very simple and only requires that you follow the rules for chamber music. I really enjoyed playing it and it was always very satisfying thanks to the superior skills of my friend the violinist. I highly reccommend the experience of learning to play with someone. I had some fun with The Rosewood Book for flute and guitar too during that time. I look back fondly on those times when I played more often but I am mostly glad that I was able to turn my weakness in playing into a path towards building. Below is guitar number 216, one of the earlier Santos copies which is so successful now.

So somehow I turned that “failure” or disappointment into an open door into guitar-making.