More delicate colors than the Paua and Blue Paua, the SGA has pastel reds and blues and greens. This is also a very popular shell and works beautifully against darker woods such as rosewood, western red cedar and redwood because it is lighter in color and the colors are not as dark or intense.

Possibly the most colorful and iridescent of any shell in the world. The greens (and many blues) are rich and intense. This selection favors blue hues.

So, what do luthiers do when (almost) no guitarist is looking? Of course they work their magic to make awesome guitars, search the world for the perfect piece of wood, study the properties of resonances and string tension and whatnot...

Here is a new video by my friend Matteo Gobbato, a nice arragement of "Clarity" by Zedd. Matteo is playing his fanfret Danube with an Italian spruce top and cocobolo back and sides.

It's my custom jumbo shape, with a nice Ryan style bevel and a deep reach cutaway, and a 25-26'' fanfret scale. Nice little details are a couple of custom inlays, stainless steel frets, compound radius fingerboard, buffalo horn nut and saddle, pinless bridge, Gotoh 510 tuners, carbon fiber reinforced neck, custom wood rosette.

Right after the harp guitar was finished and I posted the pics on the site I started getting messages and thumbs up! What a day.
In the meanwhile Francesco is playing on it 12 hours a day, taking it everywhere, skipping breakfast to play...

A few friends jamming @ the Maxmonte Guitars' booth at the 2012 Sarzana Acoustic Guitar Meeting

A short video of me glueing the back braces on the go bar deck with hot hide glue. 

Francois Sciortino having fun on a Italia spruce and Madagascar rosewood Columbia at the 2009 ADGPA convention.

Well, I must say that Sarzana this year was a lot of fun! 

Here is the wood for a new Danube... The top is a very crispy sounding Italian spruce, and the back and sides are cocobolo.