Evolution Series Guitars – Evo-FF and Evo-FX
Unsurpassed sound quality with louder acoustic volume and richer and fuller overtones than you have heard before in a steel string guitar. Add to this beauty of craftsmanship and you have a world-class guitar that is both a joy to play and a joy to hear!
Specifications:
- Acoustic steel string guitar 650mm scale
- Evo-FF – Custom designed f-hole soundboard with fan bracing
- Evo-FX – Custom designed f-hole soundboard with X-bracing
- Ebony fingerboard with customized 22-fret fingerboard extension reaching to high-D
- Custom designed headstock for extra strength to avoid the all-to-common acoustic guitar headstock cracks
- Custom designed pinless bridge coupled with Sperzel locking tuners for effortless and quick string changes
- Pinless bridge means more comfort when playing
- Extended soundboard means more volume, deeper basses, clear trebles, and richer harmonic overtones
- Contoured sides means greater comfort when playing
Background:
The “Evo” guitar soundboard was designed through and organic evolutionary process in order to create the best sound possible in an acoustic steel string guitar – loud and powerful with balanced, rich and full harmonics.
As a guitar player who studied intensively and played electric, steel string, classical, and flamenco guitars, I was baffled as to why a well built standard design classical guitar sounds louder with fuller bass than a well built standard x-braced steel string guitar – even though classical guitar strings have only about half the tension of steel strings and their body sizes are much smaller than standard jumbo folk guitars. After great consideration, it became clear that the Spanish classical guitar design that has remained virtually unchanged since Antonio de Torres over 200 years ago exhibits an unrivalled efficiency in the mechanical amplification of sound generated by the vibrating string. This Spanish guitar design is largely analogous to an electronic speaker – specifically, a dense core from which the vibration is driven, surrounded by a rigid circular diaphragm that is loosened near the edges to allow the diaphragm to vibrate freely, thus amplifying the principal vibrations of the strings.
Compare this efficiency of mechanical design to a standard x-braced steel string guitar. With its 14-fret to body design, the core (the bridge) is no longer placed in the centre of the rounded lower bout, and the diaphragm has a huge hole (the sound hole) cut in it at a relatively close proximity to the bridge. Have you ever seen an electronic speaker made with its core offset from the centre of the diaphragm, and add to this a huge hole in one side of the diaphragm? It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it. As much as different companies and builders have tried to loosen the x-braced design in order to allow the diaphragm to vibrate more freely, the x-braced design’s relatively fewer main stress carrying braces (the 2 x braces versus a Spanish guitar design’s 5 to 7 fan braces) must still be made very rigid in order to resist the pull of the steel guitar strings. In guitars where this rigidity has been “loosened” in order to free the diaphragm by scalloping both ends of each x-brace, the result of this practice is that the braces lose their stress-resisting power just above the waist where the tension loads onto the braces, resulting in warping soundboards over time (concavity) and in extreme cases results in soundboard cracking.
The beauty of the 14-fret-to-body Evolution series design is that with the standard sound hole removed, the bridge first becomes centralized on the diaphragm, and due to the loosening effect provided by the f-holes on the soundboard, the diaphragm is able to function as an “interpolated circle”. Add to this the extra sound creation enabled by forgoing cutting a huge hole in what should be a highly functional portion of the soundboard, and the Evo series of guitars is able to produce deep and full sounding fundamental tones with rich harmonics on all strings. And because the soundboard is effectively larger, so is the power of this guitar – even though the guitar is slightly smaller than a standard “dreadnought” style guitar.
Those who have been lucky enough to have tried an Evo guitar unanimously agree – its sound is unrivalled by standard guitar designs, even those made by top-quality private luthiers and in factory-hand-made settings.
Single note lines loud enough that you need to raise your voice to be heard above the guitar…
Chord strumming loud enough to make your ears feel as though you have been listening to music too loud for too long…
Rich harmonics and effortless volume production during fingerstyle playing…
This is the power of Evolution!