Maybe it is just the grandpa in me, but if hands have their own body language, something about this picture looks just like a new father holding his first-born baby, the left hand holding the body, and the right supporting the head. Right down to the masking tape diapers.

The Ridgewing self-tuning headstock consists of an aluminum body and a screw-attached aluminum back plate which holds in the side-lever string tensioning mechanism. An inlaid streaked ebony veneer is applied to the headstock to try to add an old-timey touch to an otherwise fairly non-old-timey headstock. When the tape comes off, the sides and back are gleaming CNC aluminum. 

The yellow pearl and green abalone inlay was done by Precision Pearl of Austin, Texas, who were great folks to work with in going back and forth to adapt Ridgewing’s dragonfly logo design to their tooling capabilities. The finish is spray-painted clear lacquer from Stew-Mac. The un-sanded and un-polished surface texture reflects the light in a soft and gentle way that I really like, and that the subsequent sanding and polishing process will take away and replace with a flat glassy stare.

I just don’t get this thing about flat glassy finishing. I was trained in it and have done quite a lot of it over the years in the belief that what is actually a pretty toxic process was just required for some unspoken reason. My favorite spots on my old guitars are where the nitro lacquer has chipped away and gotten dirty from the players’ hands.

The lower edge of the face of my 1973 Froggy Bottom 12-string (Mike's first) bears a swarm of bite marks from little peoples’ teeth. My favorite tuning is Open C, and when my kids were very young I would tell them to bite the guitar, their lower teeth digging into the Brazilian rosewood side and their front incisors digging into that gorgeous German silver bear-claw spruce soundboard. The first time I told them to do this they would hesitate, properly, and look concerned as the idea of biting their Dad’s favorite guitar (maybe is Dad crazy?), but they would do it. Then I would give those gleaming 12 strings a mighty strum, and the their eyes would open very wide and look up at me in astonishment as that beautiful sound swept directly into their fragile little skulls through their upper jaw, the powerful musical reverberations reaching their inner ear mechanisms from the inside, quite overwhelming whatever sound came into their ears the usual way from the outside. Then I would strum again, and they wouldn’t let go. And their eyes would get even wider. I would look at them thinking: Be in awe, Children, of the power of a guitar’s musical signal. Experience it roaring into your consciousness directly from the strings, unfiltered and undiminished by the usual filters of the wood and air of the guitar, the poorly reflecting walls of the room, the fleshy folds of your little ears, and the imperfect tiny bone lever mechanisms of your inner ear. Listen from the inside, and be transformed.

So now whenever I play this guitar and look down at those sweet little teeth marks, I am transported back to that moment when the love and trust of my children was sufficient to overcome their fear of the unknown, to see what would happen when they bit their Dad’s 12-string guitar.