This guitar is based on the Henri Grobert guitar from ca. 1830 owned by Smith Sherman, one of the finest guitarists and musicians I have ever known or heard. We spent many hours in collaboration exchanging ideas and insights about the acoustics of guitars. This guitar was built to realize some of the acoustical observations made of his Grobert. For those who are unfamiliar with Grobert, he was Parisian and the maker of the guitars owned by Paganini. I took the liberty to decorate the soundboard of this instrument in Flowers and Arabesques not because there was any precedent for it but because that is what I like to do with instruments I build.
The tone of this instrument is focused, sweet, loud, vocal, nutty, and speechlike. It has incredible carrying power. Smith's original has a slightly more covered quality of sound than this instrument and is about one-third the volume. Unlike the muffled tone of most modern guitars, this instrument is unselfconscious in how it behaves acoustically.
The instrument is made of East Indian Rosewood and European spruce with a Spanish cedar neck and pegbox veneered in ebony (for the fingerboard) and rosewood (for the pegbox). tuning, as with the original, is effected by machine tuners. his instrument has no fan bracing but is braced exactly like the original, which helps explain its immediacy of response. The Rosette is of ebony and ivory (from old piano covers) inlay.
