Red spruce guitar tops

Colonial Tonewoods

Red Spruce/Adirondack spruce (picea rubens) was used in many of the golden era instruments of the 1930's and early 1940's. Guitar collectors and luthiers alike attribute the distinctive sound of these instruments to the Red spruce top. Most luthiers agree that Red spruce has strong volume, pronounced individual note clarity, and recreates the "vintage sound." Red spruce is responsive whether played softly or loudly and is well suited for fingerstyle, flatpicking, or rhythm playing. Red Spruce exhibits more grain width and color variation than either German, Sitka or Engelmann spruce. It is very common for Red spruce to have a "striped" appearance and its color can vary from creamy white to light yellow with pronounce red grain lines. Red spruce is exceptionally stiff along and against the grain and unlike other spruces can be worked thin without the loss of tone.

Red spruce trees do not grow as large as Sitka or Englemann trees. Locating trees which yield guitar tops is exceptionally difficult. We hand pick our Red spruce logs from the mountains of Maine and normally only 1 tree out of 100 meets our strict grading requirements. We air dry all of our Red spruce tops for a minimum of 2 years before we make them available to our customers. Our Red spruce is in high demand but the supply is quite limited and is reflected in the pricing. Each year we're finding it more and more difficult locate instrument grade Red spruce logs and suggest you "stock up" before Red spruce once again becomes a thing of the past.