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When you’re near Santa Cruz or the Bay Area, ping some of us and we can have a mini meetup – there’s a park up the street from the shop and plenty of places to hang and play.
A visit to the shop is a worthwhile trip. It’s good to live close enough to stop in from time to time…..they are great people and want to make their customers feel welcome.
Congrats on your OM! I’ve had my 1991 OM for a while now and it just gets better.
That sounds wonderful. We have regular jams where I am and the SCGCs always carry through.
I’d like to hear the OT and the Tree guitar sometime – they sound pretty sublime.
Yup. I kinda figured. Rick Turner might have spells to banish the hum, but beyond that, it’s just gonna make noise, I guess.
Hmm. I’d like to try that OM sometime if you’re down for it.
I have a Martin all-mahogany OM (OMC-15E, which is allegedly a prototype, which I pried out of Joe Mack’s hands) and it’d be interesting to see how the two are voiced differently.
I’ll allow that your method works mighty fine, and suspect we’ve all done that from time to time, esp when we have a long-sleeved shirt on.
…..But I’m getting a lil’ bit hung up trying to work up a way to market it. What would be the product name? What would be the slogan?
And lest you think this wouldn’t fly, remember the most common product for surfboard cleaning is called “Sex Wax,” so it’s just a matter of branding. The millennials will line up to buy it alongside their raw water….
😉
It took the right strings to fine-tune my OM. I’d used D’Addario EJ16s on everything for twenty-some years, with the general proviso that strings don’t really matter. The EJ16s were fine – or so I thought.
Swapped out to the SCGC low tension set several years ago, and bang, the midrange on the instrument came out, string-to-string clarity improved (important for jazz chords), and the voice overall is better balanced. It handles dropped tunings better as well. And I’ve had to eat my words insofar as acknowledging that string choice really can make a significant difference.
Little things matter more than we let on sometimes.
ps I may have played that F – it’s a non-cutaway, right? That is a BIG guitar.
It’s my understanding that wood from the Tree is generally denser and heavier than generic mahogany (swietenia macrophylla, Honduras, or swietenia mahoganii, which is Cuban).
That would account for a sonic difference, I think – dense woods with a high Q value (low damping of vibration) will tend to sound one way – which is similar to good rosewoods – while woods with a lower Q (higher damping) will tend to sound a little ‘airier,’ which description is usually applied to mahogany and mahogany-like woods.
A good test would be to play a mahogany OM (made of non-tree mahogany) vs the Tree.
Based on a purely anecdotal sample (playing the 00-29 made of Tree mahogany vs my own cuban mahogany 00-29), there are differences in sound, with Tree wood sounding a little more low-damping and reflective. I also think that it’s some of the most beautiful material I’ve ever seen….
It’d be fun to instrument a series of similar guitars in different woods and collect some quantitative data.
