La Murcia

This is special project for Stanley Yates. It is a nine string guitar with the extra strings added as bass courses while the top three strings remain individual.

640mm Scale Length

Shorter scales add a sweetness to the tone and the larger fret width and height optimize the experience of fretting a note.

Floral Rosette

I wanted to add a Barqoue style rosette to this guitar given Baroque guitar repertoire would be its intended use. This rosette design was nabbed from some free online clipart. I took some maple plates to a trophy shop and had a guy laser cut the design and then filled the design with black resin.

Gilbert Style Bridge

Using a traditional string spacing required some convincing on my part but in the end it worked just fine. I did resort to a traditional tie block. I can't imagine adding two holes for every string when strings are arranged in courses. You might as well write "Tear Here" on top of the tie block.

Rosette

Here is a better picture of the Rosette.

Headstock Binding

Here is a close-up of the work I did to frame this assymetrical headstock design.

Headstock

The full headstock with 5 strings on the bass side and 4 strings on the treble site. The tuning machines are Gilbert's design.

Western Red Cedar Soundboard

Here is a nice top from one of my better flitches of Bull Run watershed Cedar.

More Headstock Binding

On special projects like this I almost always have to do something nice with the back of the headstock. That is the side that the player looks at everytime he plays right?

Wenge Back and Sides

This is actually the first guitar I built with Wenge Back and Sides. This particular guitar uses a three piece back.

Wenge Back and Sides

This is actually the first guitar I built with Wenge Back and Sides. This particular guitar uses a three piece back.

Trim

The maple binding and end graft highlight the darkness and fascinating grain texture of wenge wood.