Galiano shaped guitar, back

The 1920′s Galiano shaped and inspired guitar is in process. It is being custom made for Eric Schoenberg  of Schoenberg Guitars in Tiburon, California. The shape of this Madagascar Rosewood guitar is traced from a 1920′s Galiano that was in Eric’s shop for some time. Eric asked James to make him a Schoenberg Galiano inspired by this guitar. The shape is of course modified by the cutaway; Galianos did not have cutaways. The book-matched back is now glued and the back strip is in, and the back bracing is done.

Carving back braces
Carving back braces

 

The bracing on the soundboard of the Deep Lake is made of Adirondack Spruce and is nonstandard elliptical bracing.  The soundboard is Carpathian Spruce. This particular Deep Lake has a custom elliptical soundhole.

Carving the Bracing on a Russell Deep Lake

Deep Lake Bracing Close-up
Russell Deep Lake Bracing

 

Russell Slack Key Back Bracing

The Russell Guitars News Blog is up! Here we will be posting news and updates from the Russell Guitars shop in Northern California. This is a site addition we have envisioned for some time, and we are pleased to see this goal coming to fruition.

We are extremely happy that James Kendall, aka JTk, updated his Ginseng Coffee WordPress theme and feel it is an excellent fit for our site. Thank you so much, JTk! Layne spotted this theme months ago and knew it was the one, and now it has been further developed and is even better suited for our needs. We, of course, will be customizing it somewhat, but are very pleased with its basic design, layout, and capabilities. James does beautiful work.

So here we are on our new blog!  Welcome to Russell Guitars News!

And just in case you area wondering about this photo…it’s a shot of the back bracing carving process on our new slack key model. The back and sides on this guitar are flamed curly Koa. We will post be posting photos with all blog posts, so there will be many guitar making and shop shots to come.

- James and Layne Russell

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