Archive for June, 2010

Custom Baritone Guitar by Valleys Guitars

The instrument itself is ground breaking as it has a lot of very fancy features that, firstly are very difficult to put into the Guitar, and secondly do not appear on many,  if any Boutique instruments.

(View in Full Screen to see the details – use the full screen button in the player.)

Some of the features include:

The back and sides are made of Cocobolo and the top is AAA grade Englemann Spruce all the other features including the Binding are made from AAAA Grade African Ebony.

The Bevel on the top of the Lower Bout and the Mini cutaway (all ebony) are High end features and very difficult to make, not to mention that they are also very time consuming to make.

The fretboard is inner lined with Cocobolo and the frets are Gold which look terrific against the Phosphor- Bronze strings.

The fretboard has a continuous Compound Radius 10′ at the nut going to 20′ at the Saddle.

The nut, Saddle and Tuner pins are Fossilized Ivory, and the large rosette ring is Cocobolo.

The tuner buttons are fashioned from Cocobolo and the neck is Laminated in our shop, the two outer laminations are Brazilian Mahogany, then two laminations of Rock Maple and the middle timber is Wenge.

Before any of our Guitars leave our shop they are broken in using a ToneRight Vibrator, this fantastic piece of electronic wizardry actually plays the instrument in, it does, in three days, what you take three years of constant playing to achieve. This means that on delivery of your NEW Guitar you have an instrument that is played in and sounds and feels like you would expect a fully played in Guitar to be.

The scale of the Guitar is 27.5″ and is fitted, on delivery with Elixir Nano strings 16 to 70 gauge, tuned B-B.

There is a Players listening hole cut into the top of the upper bout.

The Body shape is interesting in itself. After exhaustive testing we decided to Mix and Match on the body shape whilst maintaining the overall symmetry of the instrument without any loss of sound, therefore the instrument is somewhere in between a Dreadnought and an OM. Being a Baritone we needed to keep the bottom end crisp and punchy with simmering highs and we believed that we have achieved that on this Guitar. In fact,  we  are absolutely “over the moon” with how it sounds.

The Guitar is fitted with a K&K Stereo Mix electronics which sound just Fantastic, in fact whether played through a pre-amp or straight Acoustically its all that we hoped to achieve.

This Guitar is going to Brad Bergen a very well known, 1st call, Acoustic Pro player in Sydney.

He played at our Entertainment Centre and stopped by Valleys Guitars to visit and see how the Guitar was coming.

He was blown away.

We are very excited to have Brad’s endorsement.

Watch for more on this fine instrument in the near future.