Redwood Stories

      I've always been fascinated with the "bones" of sound-producing creations;  how the material something is made from effects the quality or character of the music it makes, and how that in turn moves the player and listeners.

      When Suzy and I moved from Vermont to California in 1989, I'd been working with wood for about 20 years, making musical instruments for about 17 years, and guitars specifically for 14 years.  In all that time I had had almost no experience with the wood of the redwood (sequoia) tree, perhaps the most impressive and magical of California's forest dwellers.  In fact, the total sum of my personal knowledge of redwood trees at that point consisted of these three things:

      1) Outside the small town of Hardwick, Vermont, in the early 1980s, was a motel called "The Redwood Motel" (if already this starts to sound implausible, well, it was, rather).  The proprietors had imported a couple of young Redwood trees, planting them prominently in front of the motel building, where they soon died (the trees;  not, as far as I know, the proprietors).  Apparently there's a reason redwoods don't grow in Vermont!  I remember driving past that motel with the dead redwoods out front many times, and wondering what they'd been thinking.  But then, how would you know, without trying it?  I don't know how long The Redwood Motel lasted, only that it did outlast those trees.  Presumably it eventually went through a name change.

      2) My friend (and sometime guitar teacher) Daniel Hecht, a wonderful guitarist who bought a couple of my early guitars, had a guitar built by the great California luthier, Ervin Somogyi.  As I recall, this guitar had a redwood top, and would have been the first of such that I'd encountered.  I made some adjustments to it for Daniel, and was impressed by its sound.

      3) I had occasion once to run into my guitar-building mentor, Charles Fox, at an event where he was exhibiting instruments (this was some years after I had studied at his school in South Strafford, Vermont).  He told me that perhaps the best-sounding classical guitar he had heard was one that had been built by a past student of his, George Morris, who was now teaching at his school.  This guitar had the rather unusual combination of a redwood top and maple back and sides.

      Also, at some point I read an article (in the old Luthier's Mercantile International catalog) about a guitar builder in Southern California, Jose Oribe, who built classical guitars with redwood tops.

      So, when Suzy and I arrived in Santa Cruz, the dust settled around us and it became apparent that we would be here for a while, I really started to notice the redwood trees.  Especially, I noticed that in the canyon behind Suzy's family's house, there were a lot of young redwoods, mostly in circles around huge old stumps, as well as a number of logs lying on the ground.  Suzy's Dad told us that the area had been logged over for redwood lumber twice that he knew of; once in 1906 when San Francisco (an hour or so to the north) was being rebuilt after their famous fire of that time, and again in, or around, 1920.  The redwoods that had grown up since then were "pretty big" (huge, by Vermont standards!), but nothing like the "old growth" trees, which could be as much as a couple thousand years old.  I learned that the old-growth wood was what one wanted for a guitar top, and I soon realized that some of those old stumps in the canyon might contain musical riches. 

      Luckily, from my years of cutting firewood in Vermont, I did know how to use a chainsaw, and Suzy's Dad had one with a long bar suitable for cutting into those big stumps.  I spent some magical summer days wandering that canyon-side, mining stumps for possible top-wood.  I also found some promising logs left by the old loggers, as well as a big snag that had been left hanging in the air.  Redwood is good at resisting rot, but after 60-80 years, the logs on the ground were not in very good shape.  I did get some lovely tops from that snag, and I tried a lot of stumps.  Most of the stumps had one of two problems: patches of dry rot, or "butt flair" (this latter is something many of us experience when we get older!).  The lowest section of the trunk of these huge trees (the "butt"), is subject to an enormous amount of pressure from that weight bearing down on it for hundreds of years.  The very bottom of the trunk, which comprises the stump once the tree has been removed, reflects that stress by often having some curve to the grain, from compression, as well as a tendency to move around a bit while drying/seasoning.  So while there seemed like the potential for a lot of guitar wood on that hillside, much of it was unusable, and I found I had to be careful in choosing pieces to make into guitar tops, even among the wood that looked good.

      And the wood really varies!  No two stumps alike, some really hard or dense, wild color and grain variations.  Despite all the possible problems, I found a lot of redwood that I thought had potential for instrument tops.   We purchased a re-sawing bandsaw and I set about ruining large amounts of beautiful wood while learning to cut out those thin, wide plates that would become guitar tops.

      In the end, I got a surprisingly small amount of wood for my efforts.  I never got terribly good at re-sawing, but I did get enough wood to make a number of fine-sounding instruments, and I did learn quite a bit about the pros and cons of using this wonderful wood for instrument sound-boards.

      Redwood is not a terribly strong material.  When building our house and workshop, our contractor-friend told us that the building codes did not allow redwood to be used in certain structural applications, as it wasn't considered strong enough (Douglas fir is the standard for wood in house-framing).  When using redwood for a guitar top, one has to leave the top thicker than one would ordinarily do, with, for instance, one of the spruces.  It is also important to choose the stiffest, most perfectly vertical-grained pieces, and the so-called "old growth" redwood is greatly superior to the wood of younger trees.

      At one point I experimented with using redwood for top bracing; or at least I did some testing in that regard.  I discovered through these tests that redwood has what I call a "poor memory".  I can take a piece of quarter-sawn Sitka spruce brace-stock, say 1/2 inch tall by 1/4 inch thick (by some length), bend it a bit along its length with my hands, and when I release it it springs immediately back to its original shape.  When I do that with a comparable stick of redwood, I can watch as the bent piece slowly, sleepily, returns to its relaxed position.  This fact alone should discourage us from using redwood for instrument tops or braces; however it turns out that one can make a reasonable, or even a wonderful guitar using redwood for the top, but it takes some cautious consideration.  And I don't recommend its use for structural bracing!

      A number of fine builders have used redwood for guitar tops successfully, both steel-string and classical.  I know at least one fine classical builder who simply claims to not like the sound of a redwood guitar, period.  And I know of at least a couple of builders who have been seduced by some incredibly beautiful piece of curly-figured redwood, and sadly discovered that the curly figure causes the wood to be considerably weaker and not able to withstand the tension of the strings over time.

      But for me, it was initially just a thrill to be able to "mine" my own guitar wood,  from my own back yard.  Having that kind of direct connection to the material makes the experience of creating, as well as the result, a source of even deeper satisfaction. 

      This California home Suzy and I moved to in 1989 (and have now inhabited for over 30 years!), is on an old one-lane road that winds up through pastured hills above the Pacific coast.  The road itself was originally paved with "asphalt rock" that was quarried from the hillside, and spread on the road by one of it's early residents, Tony Landino, who raised his family in a small house half a mile down the road from where Suzy and I are now.  When we moved here, the road also had the most beautiful, old, redwood fence-posts lining each side of it, strung with barbed wire to keep the cattle off the road (which didn't always work). One day, some years ago, Suzy and I found ourselves riding with old Tony in his truck, on a mission to fill some of the potholes that develop in the road each rainy season.   As we drove down the road, Tony pointed at the fence-line and said, "I put in those fence-posts in 1936...we're gonna have to replace some soon, redwood doesn't last forever"!  The last of Tony's family have now moved elsewhere;  the Landino place was sold, and the folks who bought it needed to upgrade the fence for their horses, and pulled out all those old redwood posts.  One day a year or so ago, the new owner, Jeremy and I went through that pile of old redwood fence-posts, looking for ones that might have good enough wood to re-saw for a guitar top.  We found a couple of likely choices, one of which turned out to have some beautiful, straight grain.  Being a fence-post, the pieces are narrow, so it will take four of them to make up the full width of a guitar top, rather than the usual two.  But talk about well aged!

      And one more redwood story:

Some years ago, I had the opportunity of hosting a guitar-building student from Quebec for several months.  In trying to think of ways to help deepen his understanding of the interconnections of Earth, trees, guitars, music and life in general, I took him down into the canyon behind Suzy's mom's house, to show him both the standing redwood trees, and also the stumps from which I'd gotten the wood that he was using now to build a guitar.  I hadn't been back to this particular stump for quite a number of years, and found something very surprising and unexpected. Many of these stumps are surrounded by a circle of redwood-children that have sprung up from the roots of the original tree.  Despite what now seems obvious; a tree stump simply meant to me that the tree was dead, gone.  I hadn't thought about how, of course with all those children sprung from the parent roots, the tree actually never died, just the one big stem that got cut down.  The surprise came when we looked at this stump, and where I had cut my piece out of it the living bark was slowly growing up over the edge of the cut.  I suddenly realized that this stump, and the trees that now encircled it, were all part of the same system, the same one tree.  Nothing here was dead, all was interconnected, and I was moved to see how, in a way, all life is like that.

      If somehow the music that comes out of that wood can express just a bit of that truth for ears to hear, then I'd say the tree, the luthier and the musician have all done their jobs well!

      I went through a period of using redwood a lot; I've come to realize that while I love the wood, and it has its place in my creative practice, there are other woods that are more appropriate for many of my projects.  I use it more selectively now;  perhaps that makes it even more special.  Below are a selection of instruments I have made using some of that backyard redwood for the soundboard: