Carbon Dating
This month we’re off to Donegal, Ireland, to visit a company specialising in carbon-fibre acoustic guitars. We were very impressed with the Emerald X10 we looked at last issue and were eager to discover more about the background to these fabulous instrume
Emerald Guitars have been making acoustics using carbon fibre since 1999. We take a trip to their workshop in Donegal to see how it’s done
Emerald Guitars was initially set up in 1999, when founder Alistair Hay had the idea of turning his enthusiasm about the instrument into a career building them. With a background in engineering and experience using carbon fibre in Formula 1 racing boats, he settled down for a period of research and development, not only learning about luthiery in general, but how his knowledge of carbon fibre could be turned towards the manufacture of acoustic instruments. In fact, an early development involved making a guitar for a certain Mr Vai…
“I went to a Steve Vai concert,” Alistair remembers. “It was The Ultra Zone tour and he came out on stage dressed like the alien from the album cover, but with a regular Ibanez JEM. I thought, ‘We’ll have to do something about that…’ So, the very next day, I went home and started building the Ultra guitar.”
Working from the album’s artwork Alistair made The Ultra Guitar (pictured overleaf on page 130) and presented it to Steve at his home. “Steve hung it on his wall and never really did that much with it,” Alistair says, “But then about 10 years later he decided he wanted to take it on tour. He took it and toured right around the world and played 300 or 400 shows with it.”
Up to this point, Alistair had made around 30 acoustic guitars, but it was The Ultra that acted as something of a catalyst where using synthetic materials was concerned. “It was carbon fibre and fibreglass, made in a very similar way to how I make the guitars now. Basically, the centre of it was carved out of foam and the carbon was covered around the outside, but, yes, it was all composite material. Essentially, it was Emerald Guitar number one because it was the first guitar that ever left my possession. I had made quite a number of other guitars before that, but, really, they were all just prototypes. This was the first one that actually left my hands.”
What made you look towards carbon fibre rather than wood for building instruments in the first place? “I can remember the exact moment that I decided to try and build a guitar from carbon. I had borrowed a friend’s Ovation that had a fibreglass back. I looked at that and it fascinated me, the fact that it was made from a synthetic material. I can remember just having this idea that I’d love to try and build a guitar from carbon, but it was just an idea. Then, about four years later, I decided to have a go at it, see what I could do with it, but it was a fascination for guitars, really, how things worked. I never had any idea that it was going to become a business. It was just a hobby, something to tinker at.”
What sort of obstacles did you have to overcome during the formative building process? “Initially, the first guitar I made, I just looked at the shape; I looked at how it was made and copied that, but copied it in carbon fibre. I discovered afterwards that just to make a wooden guitar out of a different material, copying that design, and the shape, and how that’s made and then doing it out of a different material isn’t a very smart way to do it. What I decided to do was step further back and look at the end point I was trying to achieve – that is what it sounds like and how it plays. Then everything else can fit around that.
“It allowed me to explore it in a different way; how we put the materials together, the shapes that we use, where we put the soundhole. You find that there’s a lot of freedom in that. A lot of things are done by tradition, and it took a while to realise that if you approach it differently, you can get a better product from the materials that you’re building them with.”
“I never had any idea it was going to become a business. It was a hobby, something to tinker at”
Are there distinct advantages to using carbon fibre over wood? “Well, I’ll never say carbon sounds better than wood, because I have a great appreciation for wood. I love how it looks, I love how a wooden guitar that’s finely made can sound, but what carbon does is it can create a beautiful sound in its own right and it creates great consistency. So whenever you find out how to create a really beautiful sound, you can repeat that from one guitar to the next quite easily. It offers great structural integrity. That strength allows great stability of tuning; you can get more accuracy in your setups. It doesn’t change with temperature and humidity, so what it is on a humid day is what it’s going to be on a dry day, on a cold day, on a warm day, so that it keeps it really even. That can be a really big benefit for someone who’s travelling.
“The other advantage is the ergonomics: it allows you to build a guitar in a different shape, it allows you to build in more curves to it, so you can build a guitar that’s more comfortable, like our big jumbo, the X30. I think if you measured it, it’s probably the biggest jumbo on the market, but I would challenge any other jumbo to say it’s more comfortable. I think it feels like the smallest jumbo on the market and it’s just because of the shape, and the curves and how it tucks into your body.”
The Emerald range of instruments is particularly huge. How did you go about developing your catalogue? “A lot of that has come from trying to find instruments where the material has really excelled. The six-string market is a huge market, but it’s very hard to get seen in that giant pond. I initially started to look at little niches where we could really excel and be seen. We do really well with our sevenstring guitars, we do really well with our 12-string guitars. To me, it’s the best way in the world to build a 12-string guitar, it just gives you much more stability of tuning and sounds really fantastic.
“As for our harp guitars, again, a complex shape with a lot of tension. The best way in the world to build that is with carbon fibre.”
You often use wooden laminates on the top of your guitars… “Carbon is a great material, but its uniformity also means that it all looks the same. In its own right, it’s beautiful, it has got a really nice three-dimensional look to it, but I got a little bit bored with just the carbon by itself. What we developed is a technique where we can fuse a piece of real wood veneer, a piece of natural wood, into the carbon-fibre laminate. Under vacuum, the resin impregnates the carbon fibre and also the wood veneer, so the whole thing becomes one integral piece. You get all the strength of the carbon fibre and then the aesthetic beauty of a piece of real natural wood. What it allows us to do is use woods that you would never normally see in the top of the guitar, because it’s really being used as an aesthetic purpose, rather than a structural purpose.”
“Whenever you find out how to create a beautiful sound, you can repeat that from one guitar to the next”
Another feature is you’ve integrated a MIDI facility on the X10 model… “I wanted to do something a bit different. Being passionate about musicians like Steve Vai I always thought I would like to build electric guitars, but the acoustic world just seems to be more of a fit for what we do. I always wanted to build something that fitted into that world, so we decided to try and build an acoustic guitar that fits into the electric world, so it’s more of a crossover.
“First and foremost, it’s an acoustic guitar. I started off with a great-sounding acoustic guitar, worked on the ergonomics to make it a little bit smaller, very comfortable to play, gave it a neck that has got a slimmer profile and more of an electric feel with more of a radius’d fretboard.
“We’re using Graph Tech Ghost piezo pickups, so you’ve got six individual signals and that gives great string balance, but also great definition from one string to the next. Then we’ve added to that a custom-made Krivo pickup that’s only 6mm thick, so we don’t actually have to cut into the top of the guitar. You can blend between those two pickups to give a much thicker acoustic sound, but also you can separate that out and use it as an electric pickup. Then, because you’ve got those six individual pickups, you can operate MIDI from it. We’ve designed it so you’ve got those three separate sources. You can split them all if you want and have them all going to separate sources as well: you can have your piezo going to an acoustic amp, your humbucker going to an electric amp, and your MIDI going to a third source.”
Guitarists tend to circle MIDI with great suspicion, the mindset seemingly that it’s a utility for keyboard players. How have you found it’s been received? “If we hadn’t given it a great acoustic sound as well, then it would be perceived as another artificial guitar or an artificial guitar sound, but I think the people that have taken it, embraced it, love it because of the fact that they can just add extra to the great acoustic sound that they have. They’re not depending on it, but they’re using it as a creative tool to add extra to what they already have. It’s not like being a crutch to create some other kind of sound.
“So, yes, people maybe misunderstand MIDI a little bit, but if you look at it as a creative tool used in the right hands, just like any other guitar or any other element, then it allows you to do some really amazing things.”
With all the current concerns over sustainability of natural materials, do you see carbon fibre as the viable alternative to wooden instruments? “I don’t think I’d ever like to see carbon fibre taking over from wood. I would love to see it become a very level playing-field and just another alternative, because I love the art of wood in guitar building.
“I think there needs to be a different attitude towards the materials that are used, maybe some of the mystique of certain woods that are used and why they’re used. I think that could change a little bit and let people realise that what makes a great-sounding guitar is how it vibrates. So, really, it’s the initial process that’s really different and then everything after that becomes quite traditional.” www.emeraldguitars.com
“I don’t think I’d like to see carbon fibre taking over from wood. I love the art of wood in guitar building”