Handcrafted rosettes

I’m kind of a restless spirit in this regard. The end result is no two guitars appear the same. When I start a guitar, I start by picking the requested materials and laying them out on our ping pong table. I then begin to sort through my ever increasing pile of hardwoods and veneers until an scheme pops into my head. The common thread from guitar to guitar is that I use naturally colored and figured hardwoods and veneers for lines, tiles, herringbones, solid rings, and simple mosaics.

-Rosettes-

Joseph LoDuca

The award winning film composer and guitarist Joseph LoDuca records with one of my guitars.  When Joe received a handcrafted classical guitar from me a little over a year ago, he took it to Angel Studios in London and recorded this for the movie, “The Edge of Love” starring Kierra Knightley:

joseph-loducafire-to-the-stars

He used the same guitar for cues in the TNT movie, “The Librarian: the Curse of the Judas Chalice”. Here are a couple of excerpts:

simones-story-excerpt

sunrise-excerpt

Please pay Joe a visit at http://www.loducamusic.com

1st recordings made with classical guitar #4

The 1st recordings from the original website:

Want an idea of what one of my guitars sounds like? Help yourself to any or all of the free music selections here. I took one of my guitars, just prior to it’s sale, into a friend of a friend’s recording studio, asked him to turn off any and all dsp’s and eq’s, set all tonal controls “flat”, and then I proceeded to play live into a pair of condenser mics, the mixing console acting only as a preamp into an ADAT. While cutting out the riff raff and mixing down to a cd, the engineer begged me to let him add a touch of reverb. I conceded, as it was quite dry. But other than that, this is as honest of a recording as one can get.

note from Ken: the following recordings were made with guitar #4, a cedar top braced with an open 5 brace fan using sitka spruce, SE Asian rosewood was used for the back and sides. Shortly after the recording, a ban was imposed on the export of rosewood from that region, and only recently has it been made made available again. Of course the price has increased considerably!

The first 4 tracks are from Oscar Chilesotti’s “Six Lute Pieces of the Renaissance”. Tracks 5 and 6 are by the baroque guitarist Ludovico Roncalli. Tracks 7-11 are 4 studies from Matteo Carcassi’s famous collection of 25 Estudios. Tracks 12 and 13 from Segovia’s (in)famous collection of 20 Sor studies. And 14 and 15 are a couple of Romantic era chestnuts from Francesco Tarrega. Enjoy!

vaghe-belleze

danza

se mi accorgo

bianco fiore

prelude

gigue

estudio #3

estudio #6

estudio #16

estudio #19

study #5

study#19

adelita

capricho arabe