Modern Guitar This instrument was built in 1998. It is constructed of East Indian Rosewood and European spruce. Guitarists who have played this instrument say it is one of the loudest guitars they have ever heard. I don't notice it perhaps because I have less experience playing and listening to many modern guitars. Those instruments which I have heard I find uniformly boring and muffled in sound. This instrument is neither boring nor muffled. It sounds clean, clear, and has a large blooming behavior. It carries very easily in a large hall. But I would not say that the instrument is loud, perhaps only because both the Grobert and Stradivari guitars I built later are significantly louder by far than this instrument. Technically speaking this is a modern guitar in concept. Practically speaking, it is a more like a late 19th century guitar. The body is slightly smaller than the typical modern Spanish style guitars because I found that part of the reason for the muffled tone of many of those instruments is due to their having too much extraneous wood in the instrument. I merely removed all the extra wood that would suck away the acoustical energy and the result is an immediately more energetic sound. I have since made another version of this design which is so loud that it balances easily with a modern grand piano playing mezzoforte. However, that instrument looks back in concept even further than the 19th century even though it is fan braced like most other modern guitars. It is varnished in my own violin varnish and is acoustically adjusted in a highly complex system which requires that the top not be covered in varnish or any other type of finish. This particular instrument, pictured, is shellaked to a high polish, which lives up the the usual expectations of guitarists for what guitars are supposed to look like.