The Geisha

I love building acoustic guitars, but as I mentioned in a prior post, I get bored with repetitive creation, thus the 'Geisha' is the product  of my expanded imagination several months ago.

She is a standard dreadnought size, 25.4-inch scale, 14 fret acoustic guitar.

What makes her different is that she has a shallow body. Some builders refer to this style as a thin line.

But, there are a couple other significant differences from others I've created.

The body is only three inches thick throughout.  The exotic wood inlays are a lot more dramatic than others I've built.  And, I added a soundhole cover to accentuate the design.

So let's talk details. The neck is a one-piece mahogany design with cubist artform headstock overlay with 20 individually cut and placed pieces of exotic wood.

Black Grover tuning machines with recessed retainer nuts and washers draw Martin SP 12/54 strings over a buffalo bone nut, for a more chunky response.

I chose a light-colored rosewood fretboard to blend nicely with the overall 'softness' of color.  Small diamond-shaped abalone inlays mark specific fret positions.

And, to finish off the neck design, a piece of scrap wenge wood serves as the heel cap, which blends nicely with the dark rosewood body binding.

The body back and sides are mahogany topped with a sitka spruce soundboard, a 18-piece handmade custom design exotic wood rosette with maple soundhole insert, which is also custom designed with magnets to hold it securely in place.

A custom designed rosewood bridge with buffalo bone saddle and ebony pins with abalone inlays secure the strings to the body.

The 46-piece custom cubist Geisha design anchors the base of the top, and a
45-piece, guitar pick-shaped custom design floats within the highly figured mahogany back.  And, to wrap up the design is a rosewood end cap with ebony strap button with abalone inlay.

The guitar plays very well.  Harmonics are
right on the mark.  It resonnates well.

 And, as I suspected when I was designing the body, the sound is very bright
on the treble side and not quite as robust on the bass line, because of the reduced size of the sound chamber.  But overall, I like the Geisha a lot, and I suspect she will get a lot of play.