I have spent the past 25 years totally immersed in making only classical guitars. I have tried many varieties of current classical guitar design and have settled on a traditional, fan-braced guitar with some of my own variations, as all builders do. I do not use any synthetic materials, like Nomex or graphite in my guitars. I am fortunate to live in a city with an outstanding classical guitar performance series. Each year, the St. Louis Classical Guitar Society brings in 6 or so performers to play in a terrific hall at the Ethical Society of St. Louis. I have heard scores of performances in this same hall and have a good reference with which to judge guitar sound. All I can say is that the most moving performances I have heard in this or any hall have used traditional guitars. I have heard all the $20K+ high-tech guitars that use aerospace materials and they have all left me cold. To my ears, there is an emotional distance to the sound. Tone colors are almost absent and these guitars possess but one voice, that goes from loud to soft. It is almost a spiritual quest of mine to demonstrate the musical superiority of traditional guitars made with the greatest material of all: wood.

One of the saddest aspects of this trend is the number of young players who automatically jump on the aerospace bandwagon without ever having played an exceptional, traditional guitar made of wood. Wood instruments somehow connect us to the world, perhaps a stirring in our DNA that reflects the eons in humankind's relationship to wood-- a bit of poetic prose, no doubt. But there is an emotional response I get from a wood instrument that doesn't come in any other form. If a guitar doesn't have a soul then all you have left is noise.

This whole synthetic question is one reason I have started making steel-string guitars again. The synthetic craze has not caught on in this arena and there is a consensus as to what makes a good steel string guitar sound. I find it odd that in the classical world, we have builders making 19th Century copies, NASA approved, synthetic-reinforced guitars, and everything in between. Stranger still is that there is no consensus among players as to what makes up a great classical guitar sound. There are probably some hard-core classical players who will raise an eyebrow to the fact that I am making steels and classicals. To them I would answer: Isn't the world big enough for all types of music?

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Brazilian rosewood	Honduras rosewood	Indian rosewood