The most expensive guitar I’ve ever built…

Introducing Scarlett, a Model S 12 fret guitar.

This guitar is a celebration of the finest quality materials that money can buy. We used two spectacular woods, with equally spectacular stories behind them.

First up is the very famous and the very beautiful quilted mahogany from The Tree - this is the only mahogany tree ever to have been found that exhibits this insane quilting and beautiful veining, like a tortoise shell figure. Although you see it quite a bit in maple, you don’t see it in mahogany, which makes this wood really special.

The tree or “The Tree” was felled in a rainforest in what is now Belize - it was so huge that when the original foresters cut the tree down it fell the wrong way into a ravine and they were unable to extract it, where it remained until the 1970s when a guy called Robert Novak rediscovered the tree, cut it up into sections from the forest floor and had it shipped down river to a steam powered sawmill.When he cut it open he realised that he had something quite remarkable. 

In the 90s guitars makers started to discover this timber and realised how special it was and how great it was for guitars. Notable builders such as Tom Ribbecke, Ken Parker and Michael Greenfield have used this - it really is the elite timber.

For the soundboard we have got some exquisite lucky strike redwood, which comes from a forest in Humboldt county in California - this tree was actually felled by a storm which gave the log its name and it really was a lucky strike because when husband and wife team Craig and Alicia Carter found this log and processed it, the timber revealed itself to be just exquisite - perfect guitar soundboard material. The grain is uniform, it’s arrow straight and it has this absolutely magnificent cross grain silking medullary ray that runs perpendicular to the grain of the soundboard. It is unlike any other redwood that I’ve worked with. It’s the perfect hybrid between something warm that you would traditionally associate with a redwood, but also with elements of a high end sparkle, a high end fidelity that you would associate with something like alpine spruce. 

We’ve gone for ziricote throughout for the binding, the bridge and the fingerboard - the medullary ray looks like snake skin, as though it’s been painted on by an artist’s brush. It’s absolutely fabulous, although quite difficult to work with due its very high oil and resin content, so you have to be very careful when it comes to glueing it to anything. 

Visually it is just spectacular, especially on the binding. The subtle variegation, striation and colour is something that you might not pick up from a distance, but when you get close and you’re playing this guitar you notice the details - it’s like a tortoise shell cat - it’s just lovely. 

Another special feature on this guitar is our signature Scheller tuners made for us by the wonderful people at Scheller over in Germany. This is the first time they’ve appeared on a Tom Sands Guitar and if you look closely they’ve exquisitely engineered my headstock design into the tuners. 

But what does it sound like? 

I’m hearing very nylon-esque string tones, it’s very warm, very mellow - a blend of mahogany and redwood, but there is that cutting edge sparkle that you get only from something like Lucky Strike redwood.

It just does a little bit of everything. I can’t say enough good things about Lucky Strike redwood.