Attention guitarists - the future of ebony

I turned off at the bit when he talked about locals pulling out the high value species from the forests.

It sounds a bit like an angry parent blaming Colombian growers for his daughters crack habit.

Foriegn industrialisation of the area and mass clearance for agriculture, or pillage if you prefer, that keeps the locals on barely subsistence level wages might be a better target for addressing the cause than those left desperate enough to carry out what he calls 'poaching' on their own land.

It's possibly a sweet, well-intentioned initiative he's on about, but it's coming across as sanctimony to me.

Maybe somebody else can bear to watch it and break it down so I can understand it better.

He is basically saying the trees are endangered, they were cutting down 10 ebony trees to find one "useable" ebony tree, meaning it is black with no coloration. The other ebony trees are going to waste, so they are going to start using the ebony trees that have some color mixed in. Which you may start to notice on fretboard

That is a much better explanation than his.

IOW because other manufacturers have recently been busted for such wasteful conduct it's now time, from a good business perspective, to educate the consumers that it's OK to have streaky coloured fingerboards and also come across like they've been best friends of the earth all along.

That could have been called an 'initiative' if it had been done 50 years ago.

Better late than never I suppose...

Ebony fret boards are my favorites, but I've seen some really cool alternatives.  My current build will feature a 5A flame maple fret board just to be different.  I keep hearing that maple fret boards are "slower," however, that's hardly a concern for me!  I have friends that can play for real faster than I can play air guitar so shredding is definitely NOT for me.  I used to be able to play faster but, after I broke my arm in '84 and did some nasty damage to the nerves, my hand doesn't work like it used to.  If I were to try and play the lead at the end of Freebird (for example), I can actually feel some clicking inside my hand and it tends to go numb after a bit (of course that could be just from the song itself too - lol!).

craigb


Since pictures are always more fun than me typing out 1,000 words, here's what the new neck will look like (remember that the guitar body will be a nice red).

Thats awesome!!!!