Furniture Guitar

Tiny Tuesday: Eagle Carving

Once upon a time, not so long ago, the fashion amongst guitarists was to have beautifully crafted instruments. Such guitars tend to have beautiful flamed or quilted maple tops and often featured rare woods and exotic inlays.  Often such guitars were made by boutique manufacturers.  Paul Reed Smith's Private Stock guitars were a prime example, and this is part of the headstock of Private Stock #168 which was made in August 2000.

The guitar is a PRS McCarty model with a tiger eye maple quilt top and a solid Brazilian rosewood neck.  It features the company's standard bird inlays, but in this case they are made from (Pre CITEX) mammoth ivory and hand carved.   It sounds wonderful and plays like a dream.  The extra shows the body of the guitar, so that you can see what I am burbling on about.

The trouble with instruments of this type (which their critics call "furniture guitars") is that beautiful as they are, they need much more taking care of, if the deprivations of wear and tear are to be avoided.  You can't really take them to the jam night in your local pub.  As a result the beautiful thing lives in a case for most of the year, coming out to be polished and played on heydays and occasional holidays.  Most of the time I play battered Fender telecasters and strats which are largely bulletproof.  There's just no pleasing some people!

Thank you once again to  Newcastle Downunder  for hosting Tiny Tuesday over the last weeks.