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Guitar luthiery: Wood?

[vimeo width=”629″ height=”354″]http://vimeo.com/27320078[/vimeo]

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If you get to know me, I’ll tell you about my guitars. I don’t talk about them freely, because they’re almost like girlfriends to me. (When I was a teenager and practiced guitar a lot, I would fall asleep with axe still in arms.) With guitars, I’m a serial monogamist. I’ve never owned more than one at a time, mainly because I haven’t had to. I’ve also never owned expensive guitars, because I think of guitars in the way I think of cars: they’re meant to be used. You shouldn’t be afraid to ding them up. So my life has seen a string of cheap guitars that I’ve loved intensely for different reasons. Note that I said guitars are almost like girlfriends to me. Girlfriends aren’t cheap. (Also, you shouldn’t ding them up.)

In recent years, even though my cheap guitars usually come from Asia (probably through slave labor), I’ve become interested in custom guitars. (See my list of the Top 10 Most Metal Guitars Ever Made.) The interest is academic, as I can’t afford one. But bespoke anything is cool, and the more we get away from mass-produced homogeneity, the more interesting art tends to be. That’s what luthiery is, an art. It’s sculpting wood and metal into a functional object with lasting value and emotional appeal.

The above video captures the latter aspect well. It portrays Sacha Dunable, vocalist/guitarist of Intronaut, working at his guitar repair/building operation, Silverlake Fretworks. The video is more of a mood piece than anything informative, but, boy, is the camera work great. Dunable is building a Flying V guitar for former Intronaut bandmate Leon del Muerte (Murder Construct, Exhumed, D.I.S., ex-Impaled), so we see nice images of that. (For more photos, see Silverlake Fretworks’ site.) Maybe someday when I have the dosh, I’ll have Dunable build me a custom guitar. It’ll be an SG copy with the word “Heat” on the headstock and little habanero chilis for the inlays. That’ll probably doom me to a lifetime of Sammy Hagar covers.

I’ve always felt a little guilty that my guitars came from (probably) slave labor and chopped-down trees. But I’m old-school. I nerd out on woods for guitars (even though mine only come from the “cheap tree”), and I’m not about to go the Travis Bean route and play aluminum guitars. “Aluminum guitars” just sounds wrong. (Watch, in 50 years we’ll have deforested the entire planet, if not killed ourselves off completely, and wooden guitars will be a relic of the past.) So my liberal guilt solution is a Laguna guitar. For every guitar Laguna makes, it plants a tree. (That’s not really the reason I got my Laguna, an LE200BKS. I got it because it was cheap. It plays like a dream, though.) I don’t think I could be one of those rock stars with 60 guitars. That’s too much dead wood to have in my life. I’m just fine with my Laggie. Her neck is so smooth.

— Cosmo Lee

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For more discussion about the environmental impact of guitar woods, see this post at Phyte Club.

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