Choosing wood for a commission isn’t just picking a species — every billet has its own stiffness-to-weight ratio, and two pieces of the same species can behave differently enough to change how we graduate the top.
For No. 51’s Sitka spruce top, we set aside three candidate billets and tap-tested all three before Chladni-testing the two closest matches to the player’s stated preference (more low-end punch than treble sparkle). The billet we ultimately used wasn’t the stiffest of the three — it was the one whose mode pattern, at the frequency that mattered most for this player’s strumming style, showed the cleanest, most symmetric nodal lines.
That’s a level of selection that doesn’t show up in a spec sheet, but it’s most of what separates a bench-built instrument from a production-line one.