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I am building a Ceylon satinwood (goldish) back/sides 000 and need ideas for all the details; neck, peghead veneer, binding/purfling, pickguard... Originally I wanted to do all dark blue. but don't know what's out there off the shelf.
Maybe stain the neck(hog) black? What to do with a spruce top to get some contrast. I saw one video on how to dye wood in a vacuum for the bindings & peghead veneer, pickguard...? it's all up in the air right now.
I will try to add a photo which I have on my android & my desktop email but may need some very specific directions.

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Mike McNerney

Your options are vast and it really depends on what you decide you might like. This is one of the most fun parts of this craft, but it can be overwhelming too. Hopefully, you'll get lots of ideas here; you'll have to decide what direction you end up wanting to go. Another good thing to do is google image search "satinwood acoustic guitar" (or something similar) and see what is out there that might inspire you.

Personally, I wouldn't worry about doing anything with the spruce top. Everyone is accustomed to seeing a spruce top no mater what the back and side woods are. It is readily accepted by the eye in this context. Some maple/spruce guitars have colors that are close but not close enough to really compliment each other, but it still works visually because tops are generally spruce so that is what everyone is prepared to see.

I think the ebonized neck could look really nice but again, a mahogany neck pretty much goes with everything for the reasons above. If you don't want to ebonize the neck but want to spice it up, you could add center laminations that coordinate with the binding and purfling scheme. For bindings, I would think anything brown, red or reddish brown would look great. That is a lot of options! One thing I keep wanting to try, but never seem to find the courage to, is using bindings that are closer to the back and side wood color. I've seen well executed examples of this but I always feel like I need contrast.

A wood like Osage orange (once it darkens with time) could be interesting, or it could be really bad. It is hard to say. One thing I started doing is mocking up scraps of my binding and side wood candidates, so I can keep looking at them and decide how I feel. Also, it helps to see how they will look as the wood ages. I'm usually planning projects well before I actually get to start them.



Here is an example of one of these scraps for a guitar I am working on now. This is right after I glued the woods together and planed the edge flush. A pretty dark piece of katalox for the sides, a cherry veneer and some redheart binding. I let this sit in the window for months so I could make sure I would still like the look once the redheart turned brownish red instead of the somewhat garish color it starts as.

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Bryan Bear PMoMC

Take care of your feet, and your feet will take care of you.

The guitar in the pic below is not satinwood, but looks very similar. The top is redwood, the bindings are figured gidgee, the rosette is spalted blackwood and gidgee. On this one I took a "continuum of colour tones" approach, which, of course, did not include blue! But that's not the only styling approach you can take.

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Trevor Gore, Luthier. Australian hand made acoustic guitars, classical guitars; custom guitar design and build; guitar design instruction.

http://www.goreguitars.com.au

Do people really bind acoustic guitars with vacuum? Wouldn't the body implode?

I would go with black binding, natural mahogany neck, black heel, black bridge and fingerboard, and satinwood peghead.

That's a beautiful B & S side set! I think black or very dark bindings, with cream or other light colored accents, would look very good. If you have one part that's attention-getting, it's often most effective to have the rest of the parts be in the background. If everything is colorful and competing, your guitar can take on a sort of carnival-prize quality. I think you have to be careful with unusual colors like blue.

I recently built a quilted maple and Engelmann 00, and considered ebony bindings, but decided to go with a reddish undertone in the maple and use cherry for the neck and bindings. I aged the cherry with a dilute solution of lye, which worked out OK, but at times I wished I'd just let it age naturally.

In my early teens I used to play my grandmother's 1915 Washburn "Model Perfect" parlor guitar, and I was impressed by its colored purflings, which has inspired me to use colors a bit. The 00, shown below, has blue purflings, which don't seem to compete too much with the wood's figure, but I may be biased. LMI's medium blue veneer goes pretty dark under finish, so I used that like I'd usually use black, and used "ice blue" veneer from B & B Rare Woods on the top where I wanted the color stand out the most. When I show people they guitar they comment on the maple's dramatic figure, not the purfling, so I think I got away with it.

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Tim Allen
"Never hurry, never rest."

I played a guitar many years ago many years ago by Randy Angella that had blue bindings. I was looking at Kohno and Ramirez guitars and it just blew them away. He seems to still be using blue. note the herringbone:
http://angellaguitars.com/