Solid Cedar Top

Cedar is perhaps the second most selected tonal wood for guitar tops behind spruce. It is less dense than spruce with an attractive red hue grain. It has a dark warm tone with soft mellow characteristics. It was traditionally used for classical guitars but has gained popularity amongst steel string acoustic guitar players who play finger picking melodic strumming styles of music. It offers a depth of sound that is full of character with quality tone.

Rosewood Back and Sides

Rosewood is highly priced and used mainly on the back and sides of guitars as a compliment to other tonal woods. It is renowned for its beautiful dark and light contrasting grain. Guitar bodies made from Rosewood produce a really bright vibrant sound. Rosewood is strong, heavy and dense making it a highly prized wood for guitar fretboards and acoustic guitar bridges. It has the ability like few tonal woods possess to transfer sound efficiently through the guitar body.

Purple Heart Fretboard and Bridge

Purple Heart is a very hard, stiff and dense wood with a straight tight grain. It has become a popular choice for quality guitar fretboards and bridges due to its similar tonal properties to Rosewood but is a more sustainable choice. When freshly cut the timber is a deep purple colour and becomes a dark brown when exposed to UV light. The dense hard wearing character of Purple Heart make it a great choice for fretboards and guitar bridges as it transfers sound waves efficiently to the rest of the guitar.

Solid Wood Cedar Top

So what is solid wood? It shouldn’t be confused with a solid body which is a technique used on many electric guitars. It basically means the wood on the acoustic guitar is cut to shape from a solid block of wood and is not layered in any way. It allows the wood to retain its natural qualities, its unique tonal characteristics and vibrations just as nature intended. It produces guitars that are the best they can be in sound and tone.

Solid wood guitars are more expensive and ultimately produce a nicer sounding, more resonant guitar. Solid wood guitars produce a vibration that offers wonderful feedback when you play the guitar and the sound they produce is more vibrant.

We select each wood species for its tonal properties and we carefully blend different types of wood on the guitars top, back and sides to produce a great sounding guitar.

What is a cutaway body? The ability to reach the top frets adds versatility to the guitar allowing the player to play solos and scales high up.

Fishman Presys Active Pickup with Tuner

The Fishman Presys I is a premium quality Onboard Preamp featuring a Sonicore pickup with low profile control knobs, volume control, contour adjustment, a phase control and built in tuner. Fishman produce some of the best preamps in the world and this pickup adds superb depth to this guitar.

The one-button Contour control lets you choose between a natural sound with no EQ or a scooped sound with emphasized treble and bass and reduced midrange. The Phase control improves bass response at low volume and suppresses feedback at high volumes.

What is an Active Pickup? An active pickup is a pre amp built in to the guitar that utilises a power source, usually in the form of a 9v battery. The active pickup uses electronics to enhance or modify the signal from the guitars strings to produce a variety of tone from the guitar when plugged in to a PA system or amplifier.

Quality Vintage Open Machine Head

What is a machine head? Simply put they are the component on a guitar used to adjust the string tension whilst also preventing the string from slipping. Once tensioned it’s important that the string is held in place without slipping to maintain accurate tuning.

There are a variety of machine heads and they are an important component to consider when building quality guitars. They affect tuning accuracy and contribute to the stability of the guitars tuning.

Why we use Vintage (open) machine heads on this guitar.Vintage or open machine heads are the original machine head design used on steel string instruments. They are an evolution of the side mounted machine head design used on classical guitars. They are built from several components including a chassis, bushing, cog and threaded peg.

The vintage machine heads we used to build this guitar are precision machined to the highest standard using the best materials to produce a strong, accurate, robust machine head with a great look.

Quality Nickel Frets

What is a Fret? Frets are the metal strips that run at regular intervals along the fretboard (finger board). The number of frets on a guitar neck vary depending on the type of guitar, typically a steel string acoustic guitar has 20 frets.

Fret wire or frets are an important component that will affect the guitars playability. The type of metal they are made from will have the biggest impact over all. The three main metals used for fret wire are brass (a gold colour), nickel and stainless steel (both a silver colour).

Brass is not as hard wearing as nickel and stainless steel. This makes it a good choice for nylon string guitars but not so good for steel string acoustic guitars. Nickel is a better choice for quality steel string guitars because it is considered corrosion resistant and hard wearing. Stainless steel is a less common choice as it tends to have a more rigid structure which makes it harder to work with but is most resistant to corrosion.

Dual Action Truss Rod

What is a truss rod and do all guitars have them? Guitar necks are prone to bending from changes in temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure and tension from the guitar strings. Quality guitars have a truss rod inserted under the fretboard that runs the length of the guitar neck. A truss rod is a metal rod that can be tightened or loosened to control the bend in a guitar neck. Not all guitars have them but it’s an important component to consider when building quality guitars.

At Stretton Payne we use dual action truss rods which is a modern design that can be tightened in both directions, warping the neck in either direction. The truss rod is accessed on an acoustic guitar using an allen/hex key inside the sound hole.

A truss rod allows small adjustments to the neck position, also known as the guitars action, making the strings either closer or further away from the fretboard. Having a quality guitar with a good dual action truss rod will help set the guitar neck perfectly.