The Parlor
Smaller, closer, and more articulate — a guitar that rewards a light touch.
The parlor is the older idea. Before the guitar had to fill a hall, it had to fill a room, and the small-bodied instruments built for that job do something a dreadnought cannot: they separate. Individual notes stay distinct inside a chord, and the midrange sits forward where the melody lives.
That makes it a fingerstyle guitar and a recording guitar. Put a microphone close to a parlor and you get detail rather than boom — less low end to fight in a mix, more of the sound of the string actually being touched. It is also, simply, a comfortable guitar to hold for a long time, which is not a small thing for an instrument you play at the end of the day.
Every Six Sides parlor is a commission. There is no stock model to order and no production run behind it. What follows is the starting point, not the specification — the spec gets built with you, around how you actually play.
The starting point
- BodySmall-bodied parlor, with a focused midrange and strong note separation.
- BracingVoiced by hand for the top in front of me rather than to a fixed pattern.
- TonewoodsChosen together. Spruce tops — Adirondack, Sitka, and others — over Honduran mahogany or rosewood back and sides.
- FinishFrench polish — shellac, applied by hand with a muñeca, the wound cloth pad the method is built around. It keeps improving after it leaves the bench. Why I use it.
- Build timeApproximately six months, one guitar at a time.
- Delivered withA hardshell case and a full setup for the strings and action you specified.
Scale length, nut width, neck profile, and every aesthetic detail — inlay, binding, headstock shape — are decided during the design conversation. Those are the choices that make a guitar fit a particular pair of hands, and they are not worth guessing at in advance.
Where the wood comes from
A small guitar is less forgiving about material than a big one. There is less top to work with, so the wood has to do more of the job. I buy from the people who do this seriously: Pacific Rim Tonewoods in Concrete, Washington, Hibdon Hardwood in St. Louis, Alaska Specialty Woods on Prince of Wales Island, and a few others.
What they have in common is that they know their own stock. They quarter it, dry it, grade it, and can tell you where a set came from and what it has been doing since. Alaska Specialty Woods works entirely in salvaged old-growth Sitka out of the Tongass, which is about as good as the story gets for a spruce top. Pacific Rim has spent years measuring what they sell rather than guessing at it — their Q-factor data is part of what got me thinking about measurement at the bench in the first place.
None of that guarantees a good guitar. It just means the material is honest, and that when a set does something unexpected under the plane, the surprise is mine rather than the supplier's.
Price
A $1,000 deposit holds your slot and starts the build; it is applied toward the total. Final pricing depends on wood selection and any custom aesthetic work, and is agreed before the deposit is taken.
If you want more volume and low end than this, read about the dreadnought. If you want to see the work itself, the gallery is the honest version — bracing, glue-ups, mistakes and all.
Write to start the conversation, or read how a commission works.