Mail Order Guitar

Labeling Requirements

Sometime in 1976 or 1977, a Navy Utilitiesman in Port Hueneme, California purchased a Yamaha FG-75-1 steel string acoustic guitar from a mail order catalog. The guitar, which I am looking at right now, has a black label inside the body that reads:

REPUBLIC OF CHINA

MADE IN TAIWAN

Country-of-origin labeling emerged in the late 1800s for socio-political reasons, but musical instruments are different. Look inside an acoustic guitar, mandolin, bouzouki, or any other stringed instrument and you are liable to find not only the country of origin, but also the name of the maker, the city or town in which it was completed, and other potentially useful facts ( even if the label itself is a forgery , that tells us something, too). But the labels themselves are only an entry point into each instrument's story.

There are no fewer than two dozen named parts of a guitar, made of materials that come from every place to which humans have ventured and returned. The manufacture of even a single instrument provides a lesson in global trade, technology, and cultural transmission. It is made from wood sourced by traders in Paramaribo, Makassar, Kochi, the Salish Sea. It is shaped by tools machined in Hyōgo, New England, Sheffield. It is built with methods derived from makers in Almería, Vienna, Paracho, and Southern California and shared in journals such as American Lutherie .

In the ideal form, each instrument is a marriage of hand, eye, memory, and the tools to shape wood, bone, shell, and metal. Mass production and accelerated wood seasoning techniques have made short order of producing guitars since the mid-twentieth century, but the shape, and importantly, the sound are still judged by standards dating from earlier times, and are preserved in the work of today’s luthiers, some of whom we will meet in the course of this project.

The Uncertain Fate of Tonewoods

Musical instrument use represents a fraction of the global timber harvest. It would be hard to argue that the 12 cubic inches of ebony that make up a fretboard blank is driving any single decision to cut down the endangered tree. The largest driver of forest loss is conversion to agricultural land use, responsible for a third of the total losses since 2000. This is regarded as permanent, compared to losses from the two other major causes: logging and wildfire, which occur on lands that will presumably be reforested.

Instrument makers are an experimental bunch. Ever since the six-stringed guitar we know today emerged in nineteenth century Spain, makers have introduced new materials, sometimes driven by opportunity or novelty, but often in recent times by scarcity. I recall being aware of the imperiled status of ebony and koa wood by the time I was in high school. But worries about musical instrument supply chains date back much further: records from the C.F. Martin Guitar Company discussed the scarcity of Brazilian rosewood in the 1960s, and American luthiers effectively lost the use of Adirondack spruce following World War II, until efforts to restore the species showed enough success that limited harvests have resumed within the past decade.

The 1983 volume, Global Deforestation and the Nineteenth-Century World Economy , tells of concerns over forest clearing in India documented by contemporary British Gazetteers. A chapter on Brazil describes severe erosion caused by careless logging, resulting in what locals termed terra podre (rotten earth). Beating them all to the punch were local authorities in seventeenth century Japan who began to restrict tree harvesting in response to growing scarcity.

So what are we doing about it today? Legal institutions and economic constraints make up part of the response. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) is a multilateral treaty with 185 signatories that governs international trade in flora and fauna. The agreement provides methods to control the movement of endangered and threatened species through licensing and monitoring programs implemented at the country level. One of the most prized guitarmaking materials, Brazilian rosewood (Dahlbergia nigra), was added to CITES Appendix 1 - the most restrictive category - in 1992. There are also country-level controls. The Government of India is the s ole marketer of East Indian rosewood (D. latifolia), and limits commercial sales to plantation-grown lumber .

Questions about whether the instrument you are holding contains Dahlbergia nigra, latifolia, or Honduran or Bolivian rosewood (D. stevensonii and Machaerium spp., respectively) carry moral and cultural consequences as well. Guitar makers tend to be very aware of the ecological impacts of their craft. Solo luthiers avoid mainstream vendors by developing their own sources of supply. They also build from reclaimed wood: pianos, shipping materials, even one hundred-year-old buildings made with old growth Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii). Larger companies such as Taylor Guitars and Fender have supported urban wood salvage projects in several U.S. cities. Yamaha Corporation, possibly the single largest user of wood for musical instruments, devotes pages of its annual reports to ESG issues, such as reforestation and social-economic development projects in the countries from which it sources materials. I plan to look at all of these initiatives in more depth.

Luthier's Choice

How did makers settle on these species in the first place? In their book, Guitarmaking: Tradition and Technology , William Cumpiano and Jonathan Natelson write: “…the guitar is a device built to release the kinetic energy found in its strings and to transform some of that energy into audible, controllable sound.”

The top, or soundboard, needs to be strong enough to bear the stress of the strings, yet also be lightweight and resonant (the German synonym for tonewood is resonanzholz, or resonance wood) to achieve what Cumpiano and Natelson describe as “a favorable balance between structure and compliance.” Spruce and cedar usually perform this role. Hold a billet of Sitka spruce or western red cedar up to your ear, tap it with your fingers, and you may hear a marimba-like tone, murky-deep with hints of emergent brightness. These are the raw sonic materials from which the luthier shapes the instrument.

Other parts of the guitar require more structure than compliance. The back, sides, and neck are most often hardwoods such as mahogany and maple. Other parts - nut, bridge, saddlepiece - must efficiently transmit the energy of vibration throughout the instrument’s mass. When you consider the whole moving, breathing vessel, it seems fitting that the work of describing the parts of musical instruments is termed organology .

Back to my Guitar

I have a photograph of my dad playing the Yamaha. He's sitting on a short tree stump, dressed for work in a Navy Seabee hard hat, playing an A-flat major chord:

Thanks to the collective contributions of dozens of posters on the YamahaMusicians.com forum , the Yamaha Vintage FG Forum , and the company itself, we can reconstruct some of this guitar's history. It was one of a few hundred guitars finished on September 15, 1976 at the Kaohsiung Yamaha factory in Taiwan. The guitar is made of slightly different materials than I expected. According to the Vintage FG Forum, the '75s were made from:

A top of an undetermined species of spruce. Some of the forum contributors claim the tops are made from laminated, not solid spruce, but without a better set of eyes, I have not been able to visually confirm this

Back and sides of agathis

A neck made of nato (Mora spp.)

I had to look up those last two woods. Nato is native to the forests located between the mouths of the Orinoco and Amazon rivers. Agathis species are found in the Pacific-facing regions of Indonesia and Australia. Neither are listed as threatened, but according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) , they have seen a decline in area in recent decades. Even so, their stories are tied to international trade and cultural production as much as rosewood and ebony.

What's Next?

I think about the journey of that spruce top, which started decades ago, possibly within a half-day's drive of where I write this. I imagine following it out the mouth of the Columbia River and on to Taiwan before being assembled with its sylvan cousins and loaded back into a container en route to the Port of Los Angeles or Long Beach:

Similar stories can be told of other guitars, violins, dulcimers, their makers, players, and listeners. Imagine for a moment looking down on the earth from a great height: right now there are other instruments in varying stages of conception, coming into being, transiting the planet, making music. Let’s start looking at a few of them.

Note on references and links: No endorsement is implied for the links in any of these posts.