‘Clemmie’ - Built with Apples and Oranges?
Three years in the making, but worth the wait…introducing Clemmie.
Clementine, or Clemmie for short, is our apples and oranges guitar.
A Model M14 with an Adirondack Spruce soundboard, Wengue binding, bridge and crown cut fingerboard, English Bramley Apple back and sides, and the oranges are everywhere - in the perfling, the side dots, the inside of the sound hole, we have bright orange veneer on the inside of the guitar and the rear headstock in that gorgeous orange copper as well.
This Adirondack Spruce soundboard was something I’d had in the stash for ages, but got overlooked because it has these striations and variegations in the wood. It’s maybe not something a client might choose, but for us it was a great choice for a stock guitar.
I like to think about what was happening to the tree to cause these different colour variations…maybe some arboreal anxiety about being turned into a Christmas tree instead of a guitar!
You get a really clean, articulate sound from Adirondack Spruce, which is why we paired it (pun intended) with the English Bramley Apple - something we thought would be neutral and really allow the Adirondack Spruce to sing.
We started Clemmie in the summer of 2020, when our apprentice Ted was a young whippersnapper, in fact in his first weeks on work experience…we decided to pull out the kinds of woods we wanted to work with and make a guitar that would help Ted along on his luthier journey.
Clemmie has a very full, fundamental sound, perhaps more on the traditional side of things as opposed to the more modern sounds with expansive rich overtones. Have a listen to how she sounds as played by Will McNicol and Henry Parker. I think you’ll agree this is some great work from Ted.
