2020 Richard Robson Spruce/Lacewood Parlor Guitar

I wish I'd had time to take a video with this guitar. My friend Dick up in Hancock, VT built this one last year. He's built a number of others, but this is his first x-braced 6-string, I believe -- and what a guitar it is! He used a Bohmann-style double-x pattern under the hood and that, combined with the short-scale neck and lightweight build, have yielded an instrument with all the good things -- sustain, clarity, warmth, woodiness, and fast response.

The top is actually made from 6 pieces of 150+ year-old red (Adi) spruce that he put together from an old beam I'd given him to use for bracing stock. This stuff is super-tight-grain and rings like a bell. I remember being totally taken aback when he brought the top blank in and told me what he'd done. Gibson from the '30s would be proud of him!

The back and sides are lacewood which, as Dick pointed-out, sound a bit like oak. Oak tends to have long sustain and a plunky, rock-dropped-in-water bass response to my ears when it's been used in older guitars. And, yes, that lacewood is gorgeous.

What's fun about his guitars is that I often get to see them go through their evolutions. This one started-out with a big old neck and now has a more-relaxed, medium-depth, C/D-shaped profile. He also changed the neck angle a little bit and the bolt-on neck mounts some, too.

His bird inlay is, as usual, really nice. He's kept a similar aesthetic through all of the instruments he's built and it's nice to see it continued and refined on this one.