Walnut

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Walnut is another one of my favorite tone woods, Bass Guitarists have long known about Walnut's tonal qualities,  Just to be clear, I probably think Korina is one of the best tone woods for the back of a guitar and isn't necessarily overwhelming as a top.  Walnut makes a great tone wood for the top or front of the guitar. It's dense like Maple but it's usually more stable and Walnut grows slower so the grain will be tighter and the sound richer than Maple.  Solid Walnut works extremely well on a Bass Guitar.

 

 Very few guitar players have ever experienced the tone of Walnut.

 
 1,    There are probably 150 Guitars sold for every Bass sold. Walnut is simply not plentiful enough for guitar manufacturers to seriously consider using it. Boutique Bass manufacturers like Alembic, Surine, Carl Thompson, & Myself use it because the amount of instruments built is small enough to warrant the locating and purchasing of it. Recently I have bought several Crusader  6 string Guitars made from Walnut and I was extremely impressed with the tone.  Based on this I decided to try and locate some Walnut to build guitars with.  This brings me to the 2nd reason for it's rarity.  The root of the problem if you will.

2,  In my attempts to locate solid Walnut for building guitars I found that many of the premium rifle manufacturers like Weatherby by for example have driven the cost of Walnut way up. The really great Walnut,  Claro Walnut is one of the most stable woods available.  In zeroing a rifle, stability of the wood is of extreme importance. In many competition rifles the manufacturers are using Delrin and /or other composite graphite materials.  A gun buyer that prefers wood will pay a huge premium (as much as $10,000.00) for a Walnut gun stock. I don't know of any guitar players who will pay that kind of a premium for a guitar body.

Fact
Some of these custom guns sell for $20,000.00 up to $100,000.00 (And we thought Gibson & PRS's  were expensive)  These same guns that cost so much actually cost less than a medium priced guitar to manufacture. However the gun market is a very strong market and prices will always be very high. In any case the Walnut mills are not going to want to waste time talking to guitar manufacturers when they can sell the wood to gun companies for so much higher. 
 Custom Made Viking Body Shape

 

As I stated above one of my customers happens to be a Walnut grower and he cut some gorgeous Claro Walnut and stashed it for guitar usage. I was able to talk him into selling me some of it.  This wood was air dried for 6 years and after some very careful cutting I was able to get enough for 7 guitars. The wood is extremely marbleized and figured.

I am planning to build at least 3 Quicksilver Guitars and maybe several PRS bodies from this wood. I will probably marry it to some similar shaded Black Limba AKA Korina. I fully expect these guitars to have incredible resonant qualities.

 

 

 Below are some pictures of Walnut Guitars


 


Walnut Magic Twanger

Here is the Walnut I recently bought, each board is worth $1,200.00
The high figuring only occurs at the top of the board


Here is what the top of 3 of the boards look like. If I am lucky I'll be able to get 2 spectacular tops from each board.

the rest of the board is average figure.

 

Walnut Matched Set

  

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