It turns out that I DID get to take the Smoothtalker for a test drive this weekend. I saw Mervyn this afternoon (after the wife had been shopping at Brits). The guitar was assembled but not finished. It was strung and could be played, and we got through the exercise of deciding on the neck profile.
Bearing in mind that the cosmetic aspects are still to be taken care of, here are some pics....
Two soon-to-be-finished Smoothtalkers. Mine is on the right. The one on the left is a baritone. I think I prefer the visual balance of the baritone. Mervyn offers two different scale lengths for baritones - this one is is the shorter of the two. Mine has Mervyn's standard scale length, but the fingerboard is the same width as my Morgan - which makes it 1/16 inch wider than his standard.
The body size is the same as for Tony Cox's Smoothtalker.
Here you can see the multi-piece elliptical bodywork and the trapeze tailpiece. Woods used are
- Engleman spruce for the top
- Leadwood for saddles, tailpiece and fingerboard
- Kiaat for the neck and bodywork
- Rosewood for the face plate of the peg head
The finish is still to be applied. This will significantly enhance the colours and patterns in the wood.
So still to be done...
- Guitar to be left at concert pitch for two days to make sure nothing moves out of alignment
- Neck to be re-profiled - basically from a "D" to a "C" profile
- Dot markers
- Pickup to be installed
- Strap pins to be fitted
- Finish to be applied
- Scratch plate to be fitted
Interestingly there are some detail differences between, say, Tony Cox's smoothtalker and the current batch. The design is still evolving. The current instruments have 4 "hoops" for the bodywork (originally there were two) and the sound holes between the two horns are smaller now. Mervyn believes this will give the guitars a slightly tighter bottom end.
The guitar was much lighter in weight than I'd expected. It's VERY new, and I didn't play it for long, but I thought the bottom end was well defined, and the guitar had excellent separation between the strings. Pretty responsive as well. I didn't have to play it hard at all to get a good volume out of it.
A couple more pics at
http://picasaweb.google.com/megapode/Axes#
