This $25,000 Guitar Took 400 Hours To Make (Full Build)

this is an incredibly special guitar and its story has a little bit of everything mystery because this build uses tone Woods that I have zero experience with heartbreak because there were several setbacks in the making of this instrument mother Redemption because with a little Ingenuity everything worked out totally fine didn't see that coming and all of this culminates in what I honestly think is one of the best sounding and best looking guitars that I've ever made okay to get things started we need to take our rough cut pieces of Sinker Cypress and resaw them down

to boards that are just over 1/4 in thick pretty much all guitars require two pieces of wood to make the front and the back and that's because the vast majority of lumber that's out there just isn't wide enough to make it out of a single piece this process is called book matching and it also makes for a much more consistent soundboard and back both in its appearance and structural properties once we have the boards ripped down on the band saw it's time to glue them together with what we call a plate joining jig this tool

helps us to apply pressure in all directions and ensures that the pieces are properly aligned and joined up really really well we'll then let that dry overnight and then pull it out of the jig run it through the sander and as you can see here the top looks absolutely great and we're now ready to head over to the CNC machine for the next step we used to do these next steps by hand but we have a CNC machine now so we like to use it because it offers a level of consistency and accuracy that we

just can't achieve otherwise with the rosette Channel cut out we can now install the rosette and this is made out of a black walnut so we'll get it laid in place here and then put some super glue on it let that dry for a little bit and then send it through the drum sander once again to get everything nice and level okay now we get to move on to the part where we brace the top of this guitar and uh this can open up a whole can of worms for folks because people get really attach

to different bracing techniques on guitars but what I like to say is find a bracing pattern that works for you and just stick with it because then you get to know what works and what doesn't work for that particular bracing style and for me I like to use a classic X style bracing and that's what you guys are seeing here something you can do to improve the quality of the guitar is using a really high quality piece of wood and as you can see here this wood is perfectly quarter on the other thing that we

like to do is what's called tucking the braces and as you can see here we have our tone bars tucking up underneath the xrace as well as the bridge plate is tucked up underneath the brace and this helps to transfer the energy from each brace into the other corresponding braces that are close by and thus transferring more of that energy into the soundboard of the guitar and I personally find that it really improves the tone of the guitar taking the time here to remove any glue squeeze out because as you guys know I may or

may not have a problem with people who leave glue squeeze out inside their instrument now that all the braces are on the top of the guitar and before we voice it we just need to rinse and repeat those same steps for the back of the guitar so we're going to take our blackhearted sassr here do our plate joining method and we're going to actually put a strip of wood down the center of the back and it's called a backstrap that just kind of helps reinforce it and make sure that we don't have any cracks that

go down the middle and then we're going to start gluing on our braces using the same technique that we did for the top I know we're only about 2 or 3 minutes into the video here but something to remember is that we're actually about 30 or 40 hours into the guitar build at this point I just wanted to add a little bit of context to what you guys are seeing because remember the entire process of building this guitar even though this is a 30 minute long video it took us 6 months to build this entire

guitar so just keep that in mind all right now we have all the braces glued onto this guitar top the next thing that we need to do is what's called voicing it that is a multi-step process where I'm going to take chisels and different hand planes and we're going to go over every single brace on this top and shave them down until we get to that really sweet spot where the wood still maintains the optimal amount of strength but becomes more musical in nature but it really is the part of the Guitar Building where we

start to give this instrument its voice and see how musical we can get all of this wood to start working so we'll start doing that now get it in the clamp so I mentioned that there'd be mystery in this build at the top of the video and we're now entering that phase of the build the reason for this is that I've never actually worked with this wood before and while that might not seem like a big deal let me explain what it actually is like I said this step is where the instrument gets most of

its voice voice and once the top gets glued to the sides there's not a whole lot of opportunity to change the voice of the guitar in any easy way so it's crucial that we get it done correctly the first time most of the guitars that are made in factories aren't given this individual level of attention for its voicing and that can leave most of them sounding less responsive or full as they would if they were individually voiced to their optimal dimensions that's not to say there aren't incredible sounding factory made guitars out there but in

my opinion those guitars just got lucky and are the results of the right wood being paired with the right braces all right so I've got my kind of just initial voicing done as you guys just watched me do which just involved me shaving everything down to kind of I'd say 80% of what I think that its final shape is going to be taking care to do it and not go too far is the main thing um but what I wanted to do now is pull it off the vacuum clamp and give you guys a chance

at home to hear what it sounds like I just have this little lapel mic here so I don't know how it's going to work but let me see here if we can get it to [Music] um what I'm really listening for there is a certain amount of Decay um and a certain amount of brightness that I'm always looking for uh I don't use any soral oscilloscopes or anything like that but um what I'll do is I'll kind of continue to shape this give us some more finesse and you guys can listen to it on the

next step at this point it's really important that I start paying attention to what I'm doing as there's a fine line between a properly voice guitar and one that isn't strong enough to handle the 160 lbs of tension that the strings are going to put on the soundboard I take a lot of notes when I build my guitar so that I can learn what works and what doesn't I record things like the height of my braces how many grains per inch each piece of wood has how much of a scallop that I put on the

braces and how much the wood deflects under a known load what I'm listening for at this point is for the top to begin opening up I want to hear the wood become more resonant and for the tap tone to ring out a lot longer than it did when I was just roughing in the braces if it's done correctly there should be a lot more overtones in the sound that weren't there in the last tap test I think you can really hear the difference a lot more um bottom end resonance out of it now it just

it feels so much more um kind of just alive at this point [Music] now I think it's voiced okay so I'm going to take over here for a second from Chris and uh Bend and laminate the sides cuz he's a very busy man and his time is very important and honestly this is not a difficult part of the build so the tools for doing this have evolved but the main method of bending wood hasn't really changed for thousands of years the key ingredient is steam right off the bat though I'm going to leave the spray

bottle in front of the camera which is just a rookie move you guys should try and do better if you're making videos like this at home but yeah once our sassa fras is all moistened up it can go in for a nice warm nap in the side Bender I'll use a tape measure to figure out where the waist of the guitar is and we're good to go after that it's into the Bender where we'll get it up to around 260 to 5° and then let it uh just kind of get to hang out in there

but uh just like the cookies that we get out of the oven we have to let it cool down room temperature before we're ready to laminate them uh laminating again not super difficult we've got a mold we've got our side Woods got some epoxy want to making sure we get some good coverage on those pieces of wood and then yeah it goes into the vacuum bag to sit for a little while uh we'll wait to see if it meets Chris's seal of approval how look all right and then the last step is to scrape all

of the epoxy out of the inside and it's ready to go on to the next step in the overall build we just rinse and repeat for the other guitar side at this point it's time to start assembling all these parts into something that actually looks like a guitar we start by gluing the sides to the tail block and the neck block these mahogany blocks give the sides a place to join to as well as form major strength points for the entire body now that we have a fully assembled Rim we can glue in the curing

this small strip of wood serves the purpose of giving the soundboard in the back a larger surface area to be glued to when being attached to the sides once those are installed we need to radius the rim to match the Dome shape that's in the top and the back because believe it or not a flat top guitar isn't actually flat my guitars for example have a 30ft radius for the top and a 15t radius on the back before we can close up the body we'll need to fit the top and the back to the rim

so that the braces are fully tucked into the curing I do this by cutting and notching the sides to perfectly align with the bracing on the soundboard this is going to add a considerable amount of strength to the joint and this allows me to voice my guitars with just a little bit less wood on them and thus making a more sensitive instrument now let's head back over to the gobar deck to glue the soundboard to the sides just a little bit of glue goes a long way here because we don't want a whole bunch of

glue squeeze out that we're going to have to clean up afterward as you can see here it came out beautiful all right now that we got the top glued down I want yall to hear what this tap tone sounds like because it definitely changes once you glue it to the rim uh and you can get a better sense of it before we glue the back on so give yourself a listen to this [Music] and it's that sustained once again that we're shooting for it kind of represents the uh level of um sensitivity to touch that

we're going to get with this guitar and super excited about it so far now we just need to repeat those same steps for the back and we'll have the whole body closed up all right let's pull it out of the mold and we have a fully closed up body at this point and this is a really big step because it represents a transition from the initial construction phase into the detailed construction phase of a guitar build before we move on to the next step I need to remove the excess wood from the soundboard in the

back so that I can begin the process of leveling the sides of the body and preparation for The Binding channels that I need to cut after that I'll suction it to my homemade vacuum clamp and begin the sanding and scraping of the sides until all of the lumps are removed The Binding cutting jig uses the sides as a reference point and if the sides aren perfectly smooth The Binding channels will end up being uneven and that ain't fun for anybody this process can often take an entire day but the end results are totally worth it

so let's talk about binding what is it and why do we need it put simply it's a strip of wood or plastic that wraps around the entire body of the instrument A lot of people think that it's just decorative but it actually performs a super important task in sealing off the end grain of the top and the back as well as creating a protective border around the entire guitar which can help prevent damage from occurring on any of those joints I've actually never had the opportunity to work with this species before but it's been on

my bucket list for a super long time now I think it's pretty obvious where the name snakewood comes from as its figure reminds me of a certain legless reptile but the thing about this species of wood is that it's incredibly difficult to work with it's actually one of the densest Woods in the entire world with a jonka rating of 3,800 now I have no idea what that means but my tools sure don't like it now we can head over to the binding cutting jig and take our guitar body and put it on the guide and

just spin it around and it'll cut our binding channels for us absolutely perfect the first time you can see that there's a couple of Ledges here and one of those is for the binding and the other one is for the Walnut perling that we're going to be installing the process of gluing in The Binding is actually pretty straightforward what we're going to do is take our pre-bent binding put it in the Channel with a little bit of glue and then use binding tape and rubber bands to wrap around it so that we can get all

four pieces of binding installed as good as possible now once again we prepped this guitar really really well and we got our binding channels cut super super clean so that means that the binding should go in really easy and not have any gaps whatsoever and we'll just repeat that process on all four sides of the guitar and you can see the end result is just absolutely gorgeous getting real excited about how this is looking now the only thing that's left to make for the body is the engraft this is a decorative strip of wood that's

used to cover up the seams where the two sides come together at the bottom of the instrument I'm going to make mine out of snakewood to match the binding I use a Dremel tool and chisels to cut out a pocket into the body and then I'll glue in the end graph with 15minute epoxy all of my guitars feature a signature look of having the end graph wrap around to the back of the guitar so I'll do the same thing to the back piece as well once it's totally dry I can then sand everything down and

stand back and admire all of my work up to this point the body is completely finished now and we get to move on to the neck all right folks I promised you heartbreak and we are entering that phase of the guitar build so let me give you guys a little bit of backstory about how the Heartbreak came to be so typically on my acoustic guitars I make the necks either out of Spanish cedar or mahogany and sometimes Maple and I was thinking about using one of those woods for this guitar and then it occurred to

me that I could make the neck out of something something that matched the blackhearted sassr back and sides a little bit better than those species do so I started looking for some black limo to make the neck out of and the only thing that I could find was a two-piece neck blank and so what that meant was the neck was glued up on a center seam amongst itself so it was a two-piece neck with a seam that runs right down the middle um I didn't really think anything of it and started making the neck as

you see here in front of you I got pretty far in the process and then it occurred to me that hm I should probably put some sort of reinforcement on the back of this because I don't want my truss rod to be sitting in the same spot as that seam because there's a really tiny little Bridge of wood um that's left over after we cut the trust draw channel so I proceeded at that point to make a strip of snake wood that would fit in the middle of the neck and you'll see here how this

all turned out all right it's the next morning and we' pulled the neck out of the clamps and super super happy with how this came out um I went ahead and took a scraper and peeled off all of the um epoxy that was on here it looks super good feels super smooth so I feel good about moving on to the next step at this point and I think it's just going to look absolutely killer once we start actually carving the neck cuz it's going to reveal this in really different ways and I think it's just

going to look absolutely awesome and it'll complement the end of the end graph that comes around the bottom of the neck really really well so so far so good uh I don't foresee any more issues uh arising from the seam down the middle of the neck you see there that's on me I shouldn't have said that I was so confident that I would just put it back on the CNC machine cut out the top profile on it and then I'd be on to the next step but that's when I noticed something wasn't quite right you

have got to be kidding me no jeez well didn't see that coming um my CNC machine I think lost its XY right before I pushed start and uh I kind of felt like it might have and my dumb ass just went ahead and just pushed start and uh I don't know if you can see it on camera but it was slightly off on the center line of the neck so what we've got here is an off-center uh Center seam and I'm going to have to make make a new neck so it was off to the

internet again to find another piece of wood and this time I was able to find a single piece of black Limba that I can make the entire neck out of that was perfectly cord on so all I had to do was scab on a new piece so that it' be tall enough for the heel section put it back in the CNC machine do all those steps all over again except for we're not going to need to put a strap on the back of this neck and then we'll be all caught back up then it's it's

time to install our carbon fiber reinforcements into the neck in addition to a trust Rod every drify guitar comes with a double carbon fiber reinforced neck and this just makes it so that that neck is that much more stable we find that on all of our necks trust Rod adjustments are very very rarely needed and it's just nice to have a little bit of an insurance policy plus it's one more thing that helps reinforce that neck to headstock transition area and speaking of headstock transitions you can see that I've actually included a space when we

made this on the CNC machine for what is called backstrap on the back side of this headstock this isn't something that is often done in factory made guitars but it's something that a lot of hand Builders do like myself and what we're doing here is grafting on a piece of wood from the back and sides onto the back of the headstock over the headstock transition area using 15-minute epoxy and what that does is greatly strengthen that neck joint further reinforcing that area so that we can be sure that this area is really nice and strong

and never breaks in the future all right now we're going to head back over to the CNC machine and make our headstock overlay and this is just like our back strap that we put on the headstock except for this one's going to be on the front of the headstock obviously and once we have that cut out it's finally time to install our Driftwood logo into the headstock and I just have a drawer filled with these things that I make once or twice a year so that they're ready when I need them okay what we're doing

here is the same exact thing that we did on the body we're installing our Walnut purling and our snakewood binding it's a little bit different here in the sense that I'm not cutting Channel for it what I'm doing is I make my initial headstock overlay smaller than it needs to be so that after I add on the purling and The Binding it's at its final Dimension so I just have to make those pieces by hand using a chisel and some super glue and some patience and takes about I don't know a couple hours and then

we're all done with it now that it's made we can go ahead and get it glued onto the headstock at this point uh what I like to use is some tight Bond here and hold it into place with some masking tape just so it doesn't slide around at all once I clamp it down and then we're going to put a/2 in acrylic call on it and give her the old clamp aoo and uh let it sit once that dries we can head back over to the body and start the process of what's called fitting the

neck we're going to take this jig that you see here made by Elevate Luther um and we're going to cut a Tenon in the neck and then we're going to cut a mortise in the body and at that point we can mate the neck to the body but what we have to take great care of is that it's actually sitting at the exact right angle so that once the fretboard is on it and the Frets are on that and then we add our strings and we add our Bridge all of the geometry is correct so

what you do is you put sandpaper between the neck and the body and you slowly start to change that geometry until everything sits exactly where you need it to and that's what you're seeing me do here we check and make sure that we have the correct Gap at the bridge location and that the neck is perfectly aligned with the center of the body once everything's all dialed in we can then turn our attention to installing the hardware so that we can actually make this a bolt-on neck uh this process kind of speaks for itself but

we're going to find our center location and drill some holes so that we can put our threaded barrel nuts into it and uh you know Bob's your uncle look at that tight joint that's exactly what we're looking for okay at this point we are almost done with all the major construction on the guitar but we have one last big thing to do and that is the fretboard so if you guys know anything about guitars you know that the fretboard is kind of the big feature piece and can really make or break the look of a

guitar so I was doing a lot of thinking about what I wanted the fretboard to look like and then I was thinking back to how much I love The snakewood Binding that we put on the body and then I thought man it would be really cool if we could put some snakewood on the fingerboard somehow like a lot of it and then I thought well how about we do snakewood block inlays going down the entire fretboard so that's what we did we found our best piece of Brazilian rosewood to make the actual fretboard out of

we cut some female Pockets into it and then we made rectangular blocks to fit inside those pockets and then epoxy those in and then we wrap the entire fingerboard in Walnut purling and then wrap that in snakewood binding and I am so stoked with how this thing came out it looks super super good and we kind of have the best of both worlds right we've got the beautiful pop of the snake wood but the acoustic resonance and the lightweighted of the Brazilian rosewood for the fretboard and it just looks super awesome okay so now we

need to glue it to the neck of the guitar and we're going to do this just using some tight Bond making sure not to forget to install the trust Rod first and then we'll put some tape on it just to keep it from sliding around and then clamp it down and we're going to let that sit for a good long time and remove it later in the day at this point we get to do something real exciting and that is put the neck onto the guitar and stand back and look at it and admire our

work because this is the first time we're getting a chance to really get a sense of what the finished product is going to look like really excited at this point um I do want to point out that the snakewood is more orange than it's going to be after it has some time to oxidize you can see it here how the fretboard is really Orange where the binding is a lot darker that's because the binding was sanded few weeks ago okay one more piece of snakewood is going to be put on this guitar and that is

on the heel cap and that's just a decorative piece of wood that goes on the back of the heel of the neck and to hide any marks that we made when we were fitting the neck and then the very last thing that needs to be installed before we can carve the neck is our fret markers that go on the side of the fretboard all right what you see me doing here is drilling the holes to accept the tuning machines that we're going to put on here and this is going to be a slotted style heads

stock guitar this is something that I like to do on pretty much all the guitars that I make first of all it increases the breake angle of the string across the nut and that's really good for the acoustic properties of the guitar and second of all it just looks really good so we're going to use this jig right here to cut the slots themselves and then I'm going to use this rotary file to create some slots so that we have enough clearance for the string to go down to the headstock and then some sand paave

to clean it all up and then we begin the process of carving the neck look there's obviously a lot that could be said about carving a neck but I'm going to keep this super brief because at this point I'm sure you guys are super tired of hearing me talk you take some files you take some rasps you take some sandpaper and you move your hands back and forth until you have something that looks like a guitar neck and it's as simple as that folks and here's the end result and we've got ourselves a beautiful neck

here my very first time ever carving this black Limba I think the end result looks absolutely beautiful there's a little bit of figuring in the neck that I think is going to look really great underneath some finish uh and I'm looking forward to using this on some guitars in the future it just looks really really great all right the very last thing that we need to do is install the Frets on this guitar and on this particular instrument we're actually installing stainless steel Frets now this is something that you don't often see on acoustic guitars

but we have been installing them on our electric guitars for a couple years now and we love them so much that we've decided that we're actually going to be putting them on all of our Acoustics because they last forever and they're kind of the gold standard so why not put them on our Acoustics right so we're we're just going to head over to the drill press and install these Frets one by one using a clamping call that matches the fretboard radius and then we're going to smash each fret in one by one until we get

them all installed the next entire month of this guitar's lifespan looks about the same as every other guitars it includes pore filling a mind-numbing amount of sanding spraying the lacquer letting the guitar hang up to gas off for 2 weeks and then wet sanding and buffing the Finish inevitably finding spots you miss and buffing again putting Hardware on the guitar drilling out holes for the bridge pins and probably several other steps that I missed all of which is incredibly tedious it takes so long to do and just when you think this hunk of wood and

metal that you've now spent hundreds of hours pouring Your Blood Sweat and Tears into will never get finished one day it is and it's incredible [Music] okay after 6 months we finally made it to the point where we get to see what this guitar sounds like but before I play any chords on it I do want to run through the signal chain real quick we're using a zoom H6 recorder we've got it about a foot away from The Sound Hole we're using the XY microphones we're not doing any post-processing whatsoever so what you guys are

hearing on your end is exactly hopefully what we're hearing on our end we do recommend that you wear a nice set of headphones or play it through a good set of speakers but with that let's make some noise on this thing [Music] I think it sounds absolutely incredible and it's kind of like got this really unique sound to it to me it's subtle and I don't know if it's coming across in the video but every guitar I built up to this point has either had a cedar top or it's had a spruce top on it

and this is my first Cypress top and the thing about it is I feel like the color palette of this guitar is somehow fitting right between Cedar and Spruce and if anything it's so hard to put words into these sort of things but I feel like the notes almost kind of have like this like this fuzziness this hairiness to [Music] it it's like a softness in a way that doesn't lose the brightness of the steel strings I don't know if that's carrying across at all to you guys but it's definitely like a feel thing and

it's very very unique compared to any other guitar that I've played and I I'm absolutely in love with it and a big shout out to Aaron Lucas of Dark Forest Cypress who sent us this piece of uh Cypress gosh over a year ago at this point and uh definitely going to be getting more from him we'll play a little bit of the usual on here so you guys can get a sense of what it sounds like as well [Music] and it's just got a really wonderful sustain on it it reminds me a little bit I

think now that I'm playing a little bit more it's reminding me more of Cedar than it is of spruce but once again it definitely leans more towards the spruce in the sense that it's brighter let me play something up the neck a little bit so you guys can get a sense of How Sweet It Is as we play up and down the neck um because sweet is the word that I would use to describe the sound on this guitar it is a smaller body size than I have built in the past on most of my

guitars um being a session model instead of a grand session but it still maintains this giant Cathedral sound which I I attribute a lot of that I think to the ancient Cypress that's on the top of this guitar so [Music] all right a little information about this guitar it's actually going to be heading up to Eddie's Guitars in St Louis and it's going to be our first guitar it's going to be sold in a retail store in mat super excited about that so if you guys are looking for more information about this guitar or any

other guitars at Eddy's we're going to have a link to that down below and with that I think we've reached the Finish Line um 6 months to get us to this point and it's totally been worth it we've laughed we've cried uh and now we're happy because it just came out so good so if you guys have enjoyed this make sure you guys comment down below like And subscribe and we'll see you in the next one