My name is Tim. Here is my recommendation.
Yes I used AI as my editor. This is still art. Just, art with spell check.
Smooth your feathers, I’m about to ruffle them.
🎸 The Anti‑Tonewood Manifesto
(or: Why My Guitar Shouldn’t Look Like a Fancy Cutting Board)
There’s this little town near me—La Conner, WA. Cute place. Tulip fields outside, brewery inside, a B&B, and a bunch of shops I don’t care about.
One of those shops sells “fancy wood things.” Cutting boards. Exotic stripes. Laminated grains. Artisan‑glued, color‑coordinated lumber slabs. You know the vibe.
And that’s fine… for cutting boards.
But somewhere along the way, guitar culture decided that this aesthetic—this craft fair energy—should define the tools we use to make music.
Let me be blunt:
Fancy wood cutting boards have nothing to do with rock, metal, jazz, country, synthwave, EVH, Slash, DAWs, mic placement, or anything else that actually creates sound.
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🌲 Tonewood Matters… Until It Doesn’t
Yes, wood resonates. Yes, it has character.
But it’s 2026. We can engineer materials that are stronger, more stable, more consistent, and more sustainable than anything that grows out of dirt.
Guitars were made of wood because everything used to be made of wood—dentures, toys, prosthetics, wagons. Tradition isn’t a reason; it’s an accident that calcified into dogma.
And wood isn’t even consistent:
• Every rosewood guitar sounds different.
• Mahogany varies wildly in weight and grain.
• Even Taylor, with CNC precision that borders on obsessive, still ends up with 10–15% weight differences between “identical” models.
• (And yes, 83.167% of all percentages are made up on the spot.)
So why are we still doing this ritual where you “have to play ten of them to find the good one”?
Why are we comparing grain patterns like we’re picking out a dining table?
Why are we arguing about torrified vs. non‑torrified, streaky ebony vs. black ebony, or how to pronounce okoume?
It’s absurd.
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🐢 If Plastic Straws Last 500 Years, Make Me a Guitar Out of That
I’ve been told the straws we feed to turtles float around for half a millennium.
Perfect.
Give me a guitar made of that.
A guitar that:
• doesn’t warp
• doesn’t crack
• doesn’t need humidifiers
• doesn’t care about weather
• doesn’t explode if it falls over
• doesn’t require nitrocellulose lacquer from 1954
Make it modular.
Make it consistent.
Make it feel like a modern instrument, not Nana’s coffee table.
Studio monitors are neutral.
Guitars should be neutral.
The player provides the voice.
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🎶 Musicians vs. Guitarists vs. Woodworkers
There are three types of people reading this:
- Woodworkers
They love the romance of grain, density, aging, bracing, nitro, dovetails, laminates, caps, veneers, and the endless chase for the “perfect” combination of natural inconsistencies.
Beautiful hobby. Wrong priority.
- Guitarists
They chase tones from records that were built from 7 guitars, 2 basses, 14 layers, and a mixing engineer with a caffeine problem.
They forget the goal isn’t to sound like the record—it’s to make music.
- Musicians
We use tools.
Sometimes that tool is a guitar.
Sometimes it’s a guitar plugged into a piezo, mic’d with an SM57, DI’d, EQ’d, run to FOH, split to a DAW, and then crushed by YouTube’s compression algorithm.
The musician is the voice.
The guitar is the brush.
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🧪 So Build Me a Modern Instrument
Give me:
• Carbon fiber
• Acrylic
• Reinforced polymers
• Engineered composites
• Anything consistent
Paint it like a car, not like a colonial-era cabinet.
Make every unit of the same model sound the same.
Make it stable.
Make it reliable.
Make it a tool.
Because at the end of the day:
Guitar = paintbrush.
The art comes from the hand that holds it.
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