A Tale Of Two Guitars
Longterm solutions for tone woods and endangered tree species after a 40 year hiatus
I got my guitar fixation sitting in a home garage hair salon in Texas. It was the rendezvous point for a group of scattered friends who played country and folk acoustic classics while I just listened. After a year of missing out on the strumming, I bought my first guitar in 1977 from the local music store in downtown Wichita Falls, catty-corner from the Sears building.
It was a Ventura V-12 model: designed in the USA, made in Japan and bedazzled with abalone inlay. It costs me $250.
Today at 62, I still play that Texas Ventura. It’s taken me on many a journey over 43 years. The original spruce soundboard is now a golden honey hue and it holds scratch marks made from heavy-handed picking and a noticeable incisor indentation near the top end (Yes, I bit the guitar, probably after trying to play barre chords.)
However, in 2020, nothing remains the same. The Ventura is now at the guitar clinic. It got stressed out after lowering the saddle nearly flat for better action and the soundboard top started to separate from the side body. When the luthier tried to fix it, we discovered that the soundboard is not a solid piece of wood, it’s plywood laminated. Small sections broke off and splintered. That means the guitar top is toast and not reusable.
My Ventura is now a relic of the recent past. That saddens me as much as losing the idiosyncratic John Prine to Covid-19 complications earlier this year. But a guitar can have a reincarnation.
A mishandled solid spruce soundboard with minor blemishes was cast off as an unusable piece of wood. Too disfigured for a pretty new guitar. So now, my four decades old guitar is getting a facelift with a solid top to make Ventura 2.0. Plus, I get to hold on to the original laminated top as a keepsake to maintain the memories.
As Prine sang in one of his classic songs: “Well it took me years, to get those souvenirs.” That is a recycling win-win.
From 1977 to 2018, I never bought another guitar. I was either travelling too much or telling myself that I didn’t play well enough to buy anything better. This is a classic attitude mistake of many an average guitar player. The truth is the exact opposite. A new guitar gives reenergized life to your playing, especially when the sound is sweeter and fingerboard action becomes easier.
Electric guitars have always seemed like a different species, a different animal to me. They intrigue my rock ‘n’ roll soul, but it feels like speaking a foreign language when I try to play one. Nothing is comfortable and the output is lacking true communication. I’m a banger at heart, so the light touch of an electric just goes against my natural grain. So I gave up my desire to thump a Telecaster and set my sights on a new acoustic guitar.
Living in Malaysia limits your guitar choices. During my twenty plus years here, the Japanese brands, such as Ibanez and Yamaha, dominated music store selections. There were other off-brands like Cort and Seagull, but they never tempted my interest. Popular traditional brands in America, such as Gibson and Martin, were not to be found, as well as the newer Taylor guitars, of which I’d never seen, heard or picked.
Over the decades, on the ecological front, there were lots of changes in the guitar-making world. Traditional tropical hardwoods used for guitar bodies, necks, headstocks, fingerboards and bridges were a diminishing resource. Many species - ebony, rosewoods, mahogany - are threatened and endangered due to over-extraction or dwindling natural habitats. It’s harder for guitar companies to source material and illegal for them to import certain species. And that’s not to mention the higher prices due to limited supplies.
As a natural resource auditor, I checked logging areas in tropical rainforests against criteria for sustainable practices. This, of course, includes restricting cutting regimes, harvesting certain size classes and protecting threatened plant species and habitats. This put a new spin on buying a guitar, a “sustainable” one.
I was very keen and committed to find an eco-friendly guitar choice.
By now Taylor guitars seemed to be the quality guitar of choice in Malaysia. I made the music store rounds again and finally got my hands on one. For my old ears, the Taylor sounded great but it was too perky and bright. It was just too happy. I needed a deeper sound that came from the gut and resonated with my darker side. The Taylor seemed ready made for a pop artist performer; I wanted bluesy and swampy country.
However, Taylor blew me away on one criteria: their environmental initiatives. They took sustainability serious. Sourcing legal wood material is one thing. Working with local communities in foreign countries to secure longterm wood products and benefits is dedication to the cause. It is not easy to deal with governments, forest and woodland management and supply chain dynamics under the rigorous criteria, and watchful public eyes, of sustainability.
Despite the bright guitar tone, I was ready to purchase a new guitar based on Taylor’s impressive environmental efforts. But I had one more store to visit before the final decision.
There was only one store in town that sold Martin guitars, which were fairly recent arrivals to the country. Martin guitars were always the high standard that seemed unattainable to me. I’ve known the Martin brand ever since I could play. As opposed to Taylor, which had no history with me.
I walked into the guitar shop thinking this is the last chance Texaco before spending some serious cash. How could a Martin ever beat out the Taylor based on eco-friendly criteria?
The store owner sized me up pretty well. He first pulled out a special Martin John Lennon 75th Birthday Anniversary Edition. It was beautiful both as a Martin and as a tribute to the late Beatle, adorned with peace symbols and iconic imagery from his songs. It was a show-off piece that the owner knew an “American” would appreciate. He was right.
Then he pulled out an X-Series Martin guitar, a series meant to entice first time Martin buyers at affordable prices. The store owner was a classical trained player; he did not bang chords or pick hard. It didn’t matter. After a full strum of a G-chord, the sustain of the Martin sound filled my musical soul. There was a deep, warm glow of notes hanging in the air. That distinctive tone and resonance sunk into my pores.
I was sold. It was tone over ecology.
In December 2018 I made a deal with my family. I traded the cost of a ticket and week-long trip to New Zealand for the cash. I bought a Martin DX1RAE, an amp and a solid body case instead. Forget the sheep and mountain memories, I finally owned a real Martin guitar! (Made in Mexico, not Nazareth, Pennsylvania, but the headstock script still reads Martin & Co. Est. 1833).
Martin approaches sustainability from another perspective. They use resources more efficiently by developing composite materials. Technology allows factory scrap wood to be laminated, bonded and laser cut into new guitar necks and bodies. New composite products like Richlite, made from paper and resin, replace fretboards and bridges previously made from ebony. High Pressure Laminate (HPL) infuses layers of thin wood and resin covered with a decorative - rosewood, mahogany - outer layer.
For many guitar players, these new materials are not proven yet. The old woods have been around for centuries and look and sound really good. How can a composite compare? Other woods, such as Koa from Hawaii and Sapele from tropical Africa, are among the newer species to enter the market.
All of these initiatives stem from the loss of original guitar woods. Wood resources are not infinite. Trees are renewable, but it takes a generation to grow to maturity. And the beauty of old growth timber can never be replicated with plantation grown stock.
Sustainability is not an easy path. One of the more egregious consequences of tropical logging is wood waste. Selective tree cutting causes residual damage to the forest stand. The economics do not favor removing any of these usable waste products. So, any effort to reuse wood pieces as laminate material in a guitar factory is a positive environmental step.
Solid wood alternatives are making an impact in the market. The “wood purists” are holding on to tradition. But tradition now comes at a higher cost. Acoustic guitar makers are moving on because they know the realities of both ecological and economic concerns.
I purchased my second guitar 41 years after the first one. Without realizing it, I started with a laminated version and now I have an HPL version. The future of acoustic guitars is wide open for experimentation. Guitar players need to embrace the new direction and appreciate the environmental efforts behind these decisions.
Sustainability is not only about protection for the planet, it also encompasses sacrifice. Old traditions are invaluable and pay homage to history. New traditions are in the works and pay fidelity to the old ways with an eye towards looking out for the future.
My appreciation to you for taking the time to read these selections and essays. I hope you find some enjoyment and insights about the world we live in. Thanks for supporting and sharing Continental Drift.
— Rick Scobi (@rickscobi)