readers’ Letters

So, our beloved rosewood trees are to be placed on the CITES endangered list. 47 years ago John Mayall sang Nature’s Disappearing – well, now a lot of it has actually disappeared and a certain amount is residing in my living room and small studio. It is the wide-scale destruction of habitat that is causing the greatest depreciation of species because tropical forest has evolved over time as a community, where different species and life forms live in symbiosis. No Sumatran jungle, no Sumatran tigers… PRS is likely going down the right track with its Reclaimed Series, but I’m not sure about paying the best part of £2k for an instrument with nail holes in the soundboard!

The trouble is, to make a bookmatched front or back for a guitar you need a tree of at least that diameter. Okay, so you can make a few from one tree, but hey, we in the UK are blessed with a number of large parks and gardens, public and private, where there is a ready supply of large, solid timber that is felled by man or nature on a regular basis. Ash, alder, beech, maple, even oak can be used to good effect. We guitarists need to open our ears – and minds – to new resonances that can be enjoyed without destroying the planet. Premanand Giri, via email Thanks, Premanand, there’s no doubt that all of us will have to open our minds – and ears – to alternative tonewoods. We’ll be examining the recent controls on rosewood products next issue. But in the meantime, there’s plenty of evidence that big makers are preparing for a future in which traditional tonewoods take a back seat. Taylor, for example, is growing plantations of maple with a predisposition for attractive figured grain to use in its 600 Series acoustics and probably many more future designs. The idea being maple is under far less logging pressure than tropical hardwoods and is likely to remain so. It meant taking a fresh look at its designs in the process, so they could coax tonal qualities from maple that most guitarists don’t traditionally associate with it. If that process yields beautiful new voices from the guitars of the future, so much the better. Necessity is the mother of invention in this case.