Re: New from SNAMM: Rick Turner's Renaissance Guitars Made Affodable
Here I is!
This collaboration with the folks at Michael Kelly has been a long time dream...to be able to apply what I've learned in 50 years of lutherie to making some really high quality musical tools affordable. I just can't do it in a small shop in Santa Cruz; though I do have a nice CNC machine, just doing good finish work costs too much money...the finish work was what really tipped the balance. I'd come up with a very innovative way to build a semi-hollow guitar body; with only five pieces of wood and no need to heat bend the sides, I could put the prototype bodies together in about twenty minutes. But...and it's big but (pun intended), I couldn't achieve any savings in neck carving or doing the finish, so I knew I'd have to work with an off-shore maker to make it all make sense. Fast forward about six years: Evan (Skopp) knew the Michael Kelly folks, and he had started his new "matchmaking" business, Inside Track, and he wanted to set up this MK/RT collaboration as one of his first major projects. I said that the one thing was NO COMPROMISES on pickups and electronics. Make everything else a bit less expensive, but keep the high end sound. Evan thought it was a great idea, and Tracy Hoeft, founder of Michael Kelly, went for it in a heartbeat...further enhancing my confidence in working with him.
I saw the first prototype at last January's NAMM show, and I'd rarely seen a guitar that close to being just right and just what I'd had in mind. We made a few tweaks, and a couple of months later, in came one each of the three models...steel string guitar, nylon string guitar, and four string bass. They nailed it. Those instruments were just shown at the recent Nashville NAMM show, and we're all looking forward to instruments starting to ship in October.
