More Tatoo Work for Bro's Guitar

It's coming together. This is actually the third set of sketches I've done for the inlay work on my Brother's guitar. Excuse the image quality, the big silver disks on the headstock represent the base of the tuning peg. It's not photo-realistic, it was just to give me a notion of the space I have to work with. Likewise, the gradients in Illustrator are just to give a vaguely 'shell' impression. Kenny is a master luthier who does flat-out amazing things with shell. Visit the page about the archtop he built for me and you'll see what I mean. So these leaves, they'll look amazing when they're set in shell.

If you are on High Speed, curious & patient, there's a PDF of it you can zoom in on and see more detail. IT IS HUGE. Almost 100 MB, so I'm not kidding about that high speed. The rosette and pick guard are crude representations, really just place holders like the tuning peg indicators. The geometry of the guitar body isn't perfect either, but close enough for government work.

It's not an archtop like mine, a cutaway flat-top. Brian scoured the earth and came up with some master grade red cedar for the top (this is almost impossible to get anymore). The back and sides are going to be Brazilian rosewood, Kenny's had a stockpile of that from before the importation ban.

You hear about the burning of the rainforest in Brazil, but what they don't tell you is that no one would burn down those forests if they could legally export the rosewood and other exotic woods to the United States. Yes, logging would mean some of the rainforest gets cut. But when you make it commercially valueless, it leads to idiotic things like burning it down to try and graze cattle. It's so vast, you could probably do selective logging that's sustainable. It's not as if someone's going to pulp mahogany and rosewood for paper. They farm pine trees for that in Arkansas.

And of all the tone woods out there, Brazillian rosewood is the undisputed champ for resonance. It also made a very sexy fingerboard for my guitar (the archtop).