Welcome to our page. We are a husband and wife team who have been making /repairing Flamenco and Classic guitars for about thirty years in Portland, Oregon USA. Enjoy the pictures below and please e-mail us at sheltonw@peak.org if you have any questions about pricing or repairs.
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Susan Farretta sits on a huge pile of Engelmann Spruce
billets. Engelmann Spruce is a creamy white variety of Spruce that more closely resembles
the true German Spruce than the more common Sitka. This wood is highly sought after by
guitar makers as well as violin, viola and cello makers. Although the tree is fairly
widespread in the northwest (east of the Cascades), it has a habit of growing in a twist.
Probably 95% of the trees are what we call "twisters" and are unsuitable for
tonewood. Of the 5% or so that grow straight we need to find one that is damaged in some
way (leaning, uprooted, lightning strikes, etc) before the forestry people will allow us
to cut it. The search for the perfect tree can take days and days. We were lucky enough on
this trip to find two trees. The tree is cut into rounds then backpacked several hundred
yards to the truck. Only a small
amount can be gathered per day because it's about 25 miles of logging road back to the
campsite. Once at the campsite we split the rounds into billets and wax the ends over the
campfire. That pile of wood represents several days of hard labor. The rounds in the
foreground are firewood. In order to produce guitar tops a tree must be at least 24 inches
in diameter.
This is
an example of the shameful waste of a wonderful resource. This little valley was
clear cut by Burlington Northern. The logging road on the perimeter of the valley
has this immense quantity of wood bulldozed into piles along it's entire edge. The
wood was left to rot because it apparently is not desirable as construction material.
All this wood is old growth Engelmann Spruce. Possibly the finest instrument
topwood in the world. We measured 40 inch butts on many of these trees and there
were innumerable numbers of these trees that were absolutely straight. We had to
walk around a closed gate and past "no trespassing" and "no wood
cutting" signs to get this picture. Apparently Burlington Northern would rather
let this wood rot than to allow instrument makers to pick through their waste. To
get an idea of the scale of this valley there's a person standing on the pile of trees in
the right center of the picture. The piles of wood extended for miles. It
would be hard to calculate the value of that much Engelmann Spruce; but it would be in the
many millions of dollars. The real loss though is to the environment. What
kind of impact does it have on this high mountain wilderness to strip all the trees and
leave this beautiful little valley exposed to erosion. Will the trees ever grow
back? I saw no signs of tree planting besides I can't wait for 500 years for
the Engelmann Spruce trees to grow back.
Rehearsing for a show. Pepe Luque sings a Buleria accompanied by John
Shelton.
Susan holds two new guitars. The one on the left is a double bodied
Flamenca Negra with Brazilian Rosewood back and sides. On the right is a Classic double
body with East Indian Rosewood. The first double body guitar we saw was a Juaquin Garcia
owned by the noted classic guitarist Manuel Lopez-Ramos. The guitar was so impressive that
we decided to create a test to see what effect the extra set of back and sides actually
had. A shell was created that would slip over the back of one of our guitars. It was held
in place with softwood wedges so that it could be easily removed and replaced. The
improvement in the sound quality with the shell in place was dramatic. Since the design of
the Garcia guitar was rather fragile we invented a much stronger method of attaching the
extra set of sides and back. This design change has been very successful both cosmetically
and structurally. Although the double body guitar is extremely difficult to build it
represents a surprising improvement in sustain, projection and volume.
Left to Right: Flamenca Blanca, Cypress back and sides,
European Spruce
top, ebony pegs. Flamenca Blanca, Cypress back and sides, Engelmann Spruce
top, ebony pegs. Double body Flamenco, Cypress back and sides (interior
Brazilian Rosewood), Red Cedar top, ebony pegs.
Here are some details of recent guitars.
A review from Acoustic Guitar Magazine, November 1998.
We're in the process of developing a new location for our home and shop near a small town called Alsea. It's a lovely six acre lot bordering the Alsea River. We'll be adding pictures as the work progresses. Click here for the first installment.
We'll be adding some more text and some links as time permits. If you're interested in Flamenco try Roberto Lorenz's Homepage.