‘Salacia’ - An Ocean Inspired guitar with a secret!

Salacia is one of our most visually harmonious instruments - the material choices on this guitar just work so well together. 

A Model S with an absolutely awesome set of coastal Redwood for the soundboard - it’s a beautiful example of the species. It has some lovely tight grain, it’s quarter sawn - with this unbelievable QR code style medullary figure, but what’s really special are the purple hues running through it. 

Taking a lead from that purple we’ve incorporated the colour into the tuning pegs that we’ve had custom made, the tuner keys and the purfling detail as well.

There is a Pacific northwest United States theme running through the material choices. The back and sides are made from an absolutely glorious example of Oregon figured Myrtle.  The neck is a piece of black Walnut, the bindings, the bridge, the fingerboard and the headcap are all Ziricote from Mexico. I’ve been working a lot with Ziricote lately and it’s a beautiful timber - the landscape, spider webbing that you get is just exquisite. We’ve even got a cheeky bit of Sapwood in the headstock as well to add some extra character and of course the signature Scheller open geared tuners with the custom purple buttons.

So why have we called this guitar Salacia? 

Well, Salacia was the Roman Goddess of the ocean, the personification of the calm and sunlit aspect of the sea. The ocean is really important to my client both in his personal life and his business life, so much so that he wanted to incorporate some sea urchin spines into the guitar!

I will admit I was a bit taken aback and I didn’t really know how that would work…I’d never even seen a sea urchin spine in real life… but a little package arrived from my client full of these beautiful purple spines. They even had a sound to them, it was a really interesting experience. So I decided to inlay them as side position markers on the fingerboard - we have our standard copper rings, but the sea urchin spines are inlaid in those rings. They’re really cool to look at under a microscope, they have an amazing cell structure!

Every time my client looks down on the fingerboard, he’ll be thinking of the oceans. It’s a lovely touch that I was happy to incorporate into this guitar.