concentric harmony

Concrete and ash guitar, made in collaboration with Taran Guitars for the Scottish Furniture Makers Associations Ash Rise exhibition.

The exhibition brings attention to the plight of ash trees amoungst the ash dieback epidemic. Original showed at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh the exhibition tours around Scotland.

It was a real pleasure and honour to work with the guys at Taran Guitars, a specialist guitar manufacturer in Fife. The concrete element was a really interesting process. The design was formalised with Taran, and then the concrete element was computer modeled and a wooden model fabricated using laser cutting technology. A mould was then taken and poured with high strength concrete. The real technical element was the chambering on the rear. This was intended to keep weight down and help the instrument to reverberate. The final product weights no more than an average electric guitar and sounds beautiful.

The pattern on the front was produced using our polycromatic concrete technique alongside using natural pigments extracted from the ash bark. Steel inserts were set in to be able to move the pickup forward or backewards, effecting the tone of the instrument.