Garrison G20CE Acoustic Cutaway Guitar

Why not start with undeniable value? We use only SOLID Canadian Birch for the back and sides. Beautiful looking, with outstanding contribution to tone. Add a SOLID Cedar top, with its rich coloring and inspired visual warmth... and our G-20 sets a new standard in its price point. Solid Cedar... it delivers a warm, well-balanced tone that goes well with any style of music. From strumming chords to fingerpicking arpeggios, you’ll love to play this guitar. top solid western red cedar - satin finish back & sides solid canadian birch - satin finish neck solid mahogany fingerboard solid rosewood bridge solid rosewood nut & saddle TUSQ rosette herringbone pattern wood inlay inlays mother of pearl dots tuners Garrison individual chrome-plated strings D’Addario EXPs warranty Limited Lifetime - 5 year transferable intonation Buzz Feiten Tuning System nut width 1.7 inches scale length 25.4 inches finish option high gloss - top, back and sides The Griffiths Active Bracing System is a revolutionary method of guitar construction. By integrating the binding, kerfing, bridge plate and all the braces into one glass fibre component, the top is activated by having all parts vibrate in unison. It also provides enhanced structural stability that would have taken hours to construct using traditional production techniques. We do it in 45 seconds. The technology is not designed to cut corners... but add value. A single-unit brace means no matter where you create a vibration inside the guitar, the resonance has an uninterrupted path to travel throughout the instrument. The neck of your Garrison Guitar bolts through the neck block with machine screws into two high quality inserts. Not all that uncommon. Except... your neck block is also made from long-strand glass fiber that "locks-in" to the bracing system. This achieves two things. First, it allows for significant tone transfer between the neck and the body of the guitar. Second, it transfers stress. The tension of the strings on the neck joint is shared with the entire bracing system so the neck block doesn’t have to work all on its own. Stronger. More consistent. Intelligent. Building a better mousetrap.... what separates our system from traditional bracing? The internal reinforcement (typically called braces) of an acoustic guitar's top and back are critical to adding support that will combat the tension from the strings when they are tuned to pitch. That's simple you say. Just add more wood supports or make the top thicker. Not so fast! The guitar's top works like a speaker in a stereo - the more it vibrates the better and louder the sound. Sure we can keep it from warping under the string tension by adding more mass but that, in turn, reduces the amount that the top can vibrate resulting in poor tone. What we need is strategically placed supports that add strength where necessary but still allow the top to vibrate as freely as possible. Thousands of luthiers before us have perfected the best way to add strength to the top while still producing great sounding guitars. But there is one problem - it requires numerous pieces of individually machined and installed pieces of wood and a skilled artisan to make sure it all goes together correctly. Typically, there are 22 individual braces (including the bridge plate and back strips) that are used to strengthen the top and the back. Considering that these braces start as large pieces of lumber in a factory and end up as small wooden reinforcements, that's a whole lot of work, time and skill. The Braces I don't know if you've noticed but the top back and sides of an acoustic guitar are made out of pieces of wood that are very thin (the thickest being 1/8"). That's fine and dandy until you have to glue these pieces together at their edges, at 90-degree angles. You know, where the top and back meet the sides. Well, 1/8 of an inch is just not enough of a gluing surface to create a strong bond for the top and back to mate with the sides. So, every manufacturer has to glue a lining to the sides to increase the gluing surface in order to ensure a strong bond. This lining, known as the kerfing, is glued to the edges of the sides. The strips of kerfing not only have to be manufactured from scratch (typically out of mahogany or cedar) but the strips have to be glued in by hand using clothespins (or a similar type clamping device) to hold them in place while the glue sets. Attaching kerfing to a set of sides for the top and back can take as many as 12 strips of kerfing and 120 clothespins just to complete this process! When that's done, it still needs to be sanded flush with the sides (because there's no way your gonna nail that every time - or ever for that matter). All this just so the guitar won't fall apart. The Kerfing Once the acoustic guitar's body is assembled, there is an obvious join where the top and back meet the sides. Typically, guitar manufacturers will route a small thin channel around the perimeter of the instrument on the corners where the woods meet. This is to facilitate the installation of a plastic or wood binding to hide the join and make the instrument more cosmetically pleasing. Besides the fact that this binding has to be manufactured, it must then be carefully glued into place by hand using a chemical bonding agent, scraped and then sanded flush with the top, back and sides. While the glue dries, the binding is held in place by masking tape or rubber bands. Theoretically this does add more strength as the binding acts as a third party to which the top, back, kerfing and sides are now glued. But trust me, it's not worth talking about. Again, the main purpose of the binding is a cosmetic one. The Binding Now, if you were to take the guitar apart, you would notice that the binding touches the kerfing, the kerfing touches the bracing and all the braces touch each other (including the bridge plate). So...why not make the kerfing, binding and braces all out of one piece? Brilliant idea! The Griffiths Active Bracing System combines all these pieces into one unit for the top and another unit for the back. The entire process of manufacturing the kerfing, binding and braces is now done in less than 45 seconds. No, that's not a typo; we make this system in 45 seconds using a unique variation on an injection molding process. Now, in order to assemble a guitar, we combine the Griffiths Active Bracing System with the top, back and sides and the body is done. We take dozens and dozens of individually machined and individually installed parts and make them into two pieces. This process, if you haven't already guessed, saves a TON of time and increases the consistency of how our guitars are put together. We have saved an awful lot of time and that means we have also saved a lot of money. We have taken that extra money and used higher quality raw materials (all-solid wood) for the top, back and sides. That means we build better guitars for less money. What is the Griffiths Active Bracing System made from? The short answer is - GLASS. The GABS is made mostly of glass but since injection-molding glass alone is frighteningly complicated, we created a composite resin material that carries long, thin strands of glass into the mold. The composite resin has characteristics that closely match that of spruce, which is what braces are normally made of. Glass is strong and it carries vibrations very, very, very well. What kind of glue do you use? We have developed a bonding agent to work specifically with the glass and resin composite to insure reliable bonding to wood. In every other part of our guitar we use standard wood glues like every other manufacturer