Alethean Guitars

The name comes form the Greek word "aletheia" which means disclosure or truth. We live in a global culture where much of what we purchase with our hard earned money is often times valued by how much we're willing to pay. This arbitrarily assigned value is called Phantom Value. So what does that have to do with guitars? A lot!

I hate to use Parker Guitars as an example, because Ken Parker is such a great guy and a personal hero of mine. For me, he's up there with Les Paul, Leo Fender, and Ned Steinberger as far as guitar design innovators are concerned. But since Parker guitars are no longer made in the US, and Ken is no longer part of it, let's talk Phantom Value in Parker Guitars. The best way to illustrate this is by comparing two specific models. The Fly Deluxe, and the Fly Artist are identical guitars except that the Deluxe uses a poplar body and is painted while the Artist uses Spruce and has a clear coat. That's it! Everything else is the same. The Deluxe and The artist share the same body shape and hardware. There are small cosmetic differences. The sperzel tuners on the Artist are black as opposed to the satin chrome ones on the Deluxe. Yet the Artist's price tag is about $2,000 more than the Deluxe! 2000 dollars is a lot of money to pay for a few pounds of spruce. Maybe if the Artist was made from the timbers of Columbus' ship Santa Maria that would make sense. But it's not, it's phantom value.

To add to the confusion, there is a growing movement of luthiers and guitar players who don't believe that wood has anything to do with a solid body guitar's sound. Acoustic guitars are different, but to them, a solid body's sound comes entirely from the pickups, and not the wood. To them, there's no such thing as tonewoods for electric solid bodies. Personally I believe that wood does affect the overall sound of a solid body. I've been a player for more than 35 years and I do hear it. The way I see it, everything solid has a resonant frequency, and sound bouncing around a medium with a resonant frequency will get colored somehow. But the reality is that the sound from the wood needs to bounce back to the strings loudly enough to be heard by the pickups to make an impact. It's there. But what I think is happening is that it's so subtle some people simply can't hear it, even some professionals. Some manufacturers would like you to believe the prettier the wood, or the more exotic, the prettier the sound. One thing’s for sure, the prettier the wood, the prettier the guitar, and the more expensive.

Exotic wood just means a species closer to extinction, and more expensive. It doesn’t necessarily mean a better tone. A quilted maple top doesn’t sound any better than a non figured maple top. The later being more acoustically desirable in some applications. Tone woods do have their sounds though. I love the sound of mahogany, it's pretty, not too expensive, readily available, and has a nice warmth to it. But people don’t realize that the wood used to make all those lovely vintage guitars (Swietenia Mahagoni) is gone! Even the stuff they replaced it with (Swietenia Macrophylla) has been commercially extinct since 2003. All commercially available mahogany now is traded as "true" mahogany. But it's not the stuff we traditionally used. The "true" is a marketing label used to boost buyers confidence in the product. In other words, we haven't had real mahogany for years!

So really no one should be a tonewood snob, and be all high and mighty about purity and tradition. Because unless you have a stash of really old mahogany, the stuff you’re using is a different species altogether. Honduras, and African Mahogany used on high end, expensive guitars are actually alternatives to the alternative. They are the next best choices because they approximate the sound of real mahogany. The truth is, every piece of wood will sound different from batch to batch, within the same species, or within the same tree. The wood may even sound different across the length of the piece. That’s because wood was once alive, and many factors affect its growth and therefore its grain.

So what do you do when wood is naturally inconsistent, and tonewoods are slowly becoming extinct. You use Flaxwood. The Alethean "Prota" uses Flaxwood for its neck, and hollow body. Flaxwood is made from natural recycled Spruce fibers, mixed with a modern polymer that behaves much like wood. Spruce is an excellent tonewood used on pianos, guitars, and violins. The Spruce and polymer binding process makes Flaxwood very predictable and homogeneous. It also allows sound to propagate more consistently across the fretboard. Sound travels in the direction of the wood grain. Flaxwood doesn't have a unidirectional grain like natural wood does, so the sound travels more like ripples in a pond, outwardly. This characteristic of Flaxwood makes the guitar more balanced and responsive to play.

There are no "dead" notes, or notes that ring more than others across the fretboard. And what's more, the Alethean "Prota" is semi-acoustic, so the material does affect the guitar's sound, whether you're a Tonewood believer or not. Being a composite material Flaxwood is impervious to changes in the weather. This is especially great for travelling musicians. It also means your instrument stays in tune better, and for longer. It has one more advantage over traditional wood. Besides it being made of recycled wood, the finished material itself is recyclable! You can melt it down to reuse. I don’t know many people who’d melt down their favorite axes but nevertheless this makes for a very eco-friendly building material. Once you’ve cut a few pieces of wood to build a guitar neck or body, most of the wood that lands on the floor is waste. Not so with a Flaxwood guitar, since all waste can be melted down and reused. -Al