Zartimus's Acoustic guitar from hell!!!!

If I haven't blabbed about it incessantly to everyone by now, I'm having a custom acoustic guitar built by Tony Karol in Toronto. It's been under construction for over a year now and should be ready by Xmas 2007. It has every cool little feature I've ever wanted in a guitar! I first saw his work at the Canadian guitar festival and found that one of his display models (called the guiding light guitar) was pretty much almost exactly what I wanted in a guitar, save for one or two things. It was a great way to see what it would look and sound like before it got built and after having talked to him on the Don Ross list the year beforehand I decided to bite the bullet after the festival and place an order. A partial laundry list of features is as follows:

Bearclaw Sitka top
Cocobolo back and sides
segmented spalted maple rosette
Florentine cutaway
5 piece mahogany neck, black lines
K&K trinity quantum blender
Sideport sound hole
Laskin armrest and ribrest in dark spanish cedar
Multiscale (fanfret) neck , 25.5 to 26.75

It's gonna be a monster! Tony sends me pics every couple of months as it is being constructed, and initially gave me lots of choices for hunks of wood, which I just picked out of the photos he sent.

All the wood I choose had these huge sap lines which look real cool when finished, so it should have a distinct look when it's all finished up.

It was quite something to have to choose every little damned thing on it, from the purfling lines to the mitered wedges etc. In some cases I didn't know what the terminology was so it was great learning "Oh THAT's what you call that! Yeah, I want one of those things!"

It's going to be a year and a half wait all told but that's ok. It gives me time to save up to pay for it!

I even got to design the guitar case (When the page loads click on the Launch Interactive case selector). The case is gonna look like this. I choose blue because I've never ever seen a blue guitar case and when I'm in a room with 20 guitars the cases are almost always black (maybe the odd yellow one). It's gonna look like this..

I can't wait to hear what it's gonna sound like outta the case 'au natural". With the K&K trinity quantum blender it's gonna sound damned fine when amplified, I've heard them on Brooke Miller and Don Ross's guitars and the reviews of them are all top notch.

The countdown is on!