At Siragusa Guitars, we pride ourselves on building high-quality handcrafted instruments. To achieve this, we focus on four objectives:
The instrument must have a great tone. The tone is controlled by several factors in the building process, including the type of wood used, the shaping of the components (e.g., internal braces, tone bars, soundboard, bridge, saddle height, etc.), the finishing process and so on. You can read more about this on the Instrument Building page.
The instrument must feel good in the player’s hands. The shape of the necks of our instruments is somewhere between a modified low oval shape and the “C” shaped necks. We have found this to be a comfortable shape that suits the hands of most players. We take particular care to ensure that the neck of our instruments can be adjusted for various playing actions. The frets are shaped (crowned) to make for comfortable playing.
The instrument must have structural integrity. Musical instruments will be exposed to several stresses including varying climatic environments, handling at gigs, and so on. As with all finely crafted instruments, there is a fine balance between shaping components (e.g., braces and soundboards) in order to get the best tone possible and maintaining structural integrity. Cheaper instruments tend to be built on the heavier side to speed up manufacturing and to avoid warranty claims while sacrificing tone and playability. You can feel comfortable with the normal use (e.g., practicing, rehearsing, playing gigs, etc.) of our instruments, but be aware that they are more vulnerable to cracking than cheaper heavier instruments. You can read more about caring for your instrument on the Warranty & Care page.
The instrument must be aesthetically pleasing. As with most professional players, we consider the first three objectives listed above as the most critical. However, we also pride ourselves on creating instruments with aesthetically pleasing details including the rosette design and binding arrangements. Cheaper guitars are often coated with a thick high gloss finish, which may look good to the unsuspecting, but there is little consideration to the tone. The finishes we apply to our instruments are resilient enough to resist certain stresses (e.g., from environmental changes, player’s sweat, etc.) without restricting the movement of important tone influencing components (e.g., soundboard). The finishing schedule we use at Siragusa Guitars is listed on the Instrument Building page.
