It’s become a cliché that guitarists don’t ‘do’ progress. Certainly, there’s no denying that battered Tweed amps and old Les Pauls are magical things – and there’s a reason they’re still benchmarks for a certain kind of tone and a certain kind of player. But, as we emerge slowly from the pandemic, there are signs that a genuine renaissance in guitar design is happening – and that it’s being driven by player demand.
The pandemic has played a role in that. Prior to the world locking down for a year, webcasting and using social media as the main outlet for your music was just a rising trend. Now it feels central. Other norms are crumbling, too. It used to be that only flawlessly black ebony passed muster on a fingerboard, but now players are hip to figured ebony. That’s partly because it’s a less wasteful choice in a world that’s running out of natural resources – non-black ebony used to be left to rot in forests if a tree was felled and found to contain ‘inferior’ figured wood inside – but it also looks great.
Mexican-built Fenders now come shipped with pau ferro fingerboards, not rosewood – and to be fair not everyone likes the look of that – but the sky hasn’t fallen in yet and it does the job well. Taylor is making guitars out of trees harvested from city streets that would otherwise have been made into garden mulch. The times
