have relevance to the community. And sometimes didn’t know that’s what we would find, so we [GTR] Are the neck and the fingerboards made
people just come to us with crazy wood! I got a were pretty thrilled when we did those beta tests. from reclaimed wood as well?
of the Theodore Levin Courthouse. The wood [GTR] Why does the old wood have a [Mark] It’s not reclaimed, but we do use maple
that was used to hold up the water tower was tighter grain. from Michigan. We want to source locally as
call from a neighbor who was working on the top
redwood. I have no idea how redwood got to the
much as possible.
top of a courthouse in downtown Detroit, but I got [Mark] Back in the day, trees were competing the wood and I made a couple of guitars out of it! for water and sunlight and that slowed down the [GTR] From the nut to the tuner, the G is the
growth. When you look at wood grain, each line longest string. Does that to help prevent it from
When we started, I knew that I couldn’t depend represents a season. Each dark line is a winter going flat?
upon finding really awesome mahogany or neat- and each light line is a summer season of growth. looking walnut, and there’s not a lot of maple that One dark plus one light equals one year. What comes out of the houses around here. So, our you’ll see in the old wood that’s in these guitars prototypes were focused on building guitars out is 30 or 40 years in a two-by-four. Whereas if you of pine and Douglas fir. There are 60,000 vacant counted the years in a two-by-four you pull off the properties in Detroit, so we knew that we would shelf at Home Depot, there might be 6 or 7 years. [Mark] They are scatter-wound by hand in the
always be able to find a source to make guitars. As a result, old wood has more fiber, density, and shop, and we try to use the best components
Our fundamental question was, “Can we make weight to it, so it performs great for instruments. and hardware that we can.
density and performance we discovered that old [GTR] The neck feels like a Les Paul, but is [GTR] Congratulations Mark, great work!
growth pine is much more like ash or some of the Fender scale, how did that come together?
[Mark] That’s exactly right.
[GTR] Tell us about the pickups you use.
great guitars out of old growth pine?” In terms of
more typical electric guitar body woods than the
[Mark] Thank you! Bottom line, we’re not just
Pine that you would pull out of a modern lumber [Mark] Our guys in the shop were really excited trying to get paid – we’re trying to do something
yard. That old wood is much denser, and even about that neck profile, so put it out on the market that changes the narrative about Detroit – and
thou gh it’s pine, it performs incredibly well. The and people really love it. also puts something special in people’s hands.
sustain and acoustic properties are great. We
WallaceDetroitGuitars.com
Sep Oct 2017
GearTechRec.com
13