Jake Wildwood
62 FOLLOWERS
I'm Jake Wildwood and my business is located in our family store ("The Wildwood Flower") in Rochester, Vermont. This blog is where I post up glamor shots, history, and information about the instruments that I repair, restore, and sell.
Jake Wildwood
18h ago
This slightly-downtrodden guitar is unmarked but more than likely German or Italian in origin, I think. It has that look and construction style about it. If I'm completely wrong about that, my last guess would be Japanese -- though most Japanese classicals at this point were ply-top instruments and this one is solid.
It was in for some rough, quick work -- we needed to level/dress the frets with a heavy hand and then modify the bridge enough to get the intonation and action at a place where it was quick and easy.
Post-repairs, it has a good, even sound and decent volume, too. If anyone knows ..read more
Jake Wildwood
18h ago
This is the x-braced, 000-size version of this Gretsch model which ran back into the '50s. These are sturdy, nice-necked, good-sounding, woody-sounding instruments. I like them a lot of chordal backup work.
This one is a local customer's instrument and I only had time to take a few snaps before it got picked-up. It received a neck reset, fret level/dress, replacement bridge, and setup work before going home ..read more
Jake Wildwood
1d ago
This is one of two SST steel-strings (the other is a '97 in "ebony" finish) a local musician brought in. He had us bypass the onboard preamp and wire the undersaddle pickup directly to the output jack. After that it just needed a level/dress of the frets and glorified setup work.
These sound excellent plugged-in, are essentially solidbody instruments except for a small "sound chamber" near the bridge, and also have pretty killer stage presence with their lack of a soundhole, star inlays in the board, and classical-guitar-influenced cutaway shape ..read more
Jake Wildwood
1d ago
This is one of two SST steel-strings (the other is a '93 in "natural" finish) a local musician brought in. He had us bypass the onboard preamp and wire the undersaddle pickup directly to the output jack. After that it just needed a level/dress of the frets and glorified setup work.
These sound excellent plugged-in, are essentially solidbody instruments except for a small "sound chamber" near the bridge, and also have pretty killer stage presence with their lack of a soundhole, star inlays in the board, and classical-guitar-influenced cutaway shape ..read more
Jake Wildwood
1d ago
This snakehead L-4 is a stunner in many ways. It's a customer's instrument and was in for glorified setup work -- some seam repairs on the back/side join, a level/dress of the frets, bridge adjustments/modification, and setup -- and now that it's done-up it's serving admirably.
A previous repairman had thinned-up the back of the neck a bit and so compared to the average old-style L-4, this guitar is much more playable. It's more like handling a late-'30s Gibson neck as opposed to a chunky '20s one.
Tonally, it's much different than what an L-4 was in the 1910s and early 1920s as the body is ..read more
Jake Wildwood
1d ago
There's no doubt about it -- these small-body Gibson archtops from the 1910s and 1920s sure are easy on the eyes. They've got great lines!
This one is a customer's guitar that was in for a variety of reasons, but now that it's repaired (fixed seams at the neck joint and various side spots, a level/dress of the frets, fitting of an adjustable bridge, and setup work) it's playing bang-on.
It has a good, choppy, band-leading sort-of sound that's a bit alien to today's tastes but would have made a heck of a lot of sense in an era when a steel-string guitar was used both like a guitar and also l ..read more
Jake Wildwood
1d ago
This beaut was just in for some glorified setup work but I definitely had to snag pics and a video. These don't appear out in the world all that often!
I've worked on several similar models (see here, see here, and see here) made by Gretsch but this was the first time one of these Town & Country (like a fancier Gretsch Rancher) models has graced the shop.
It's a pretty guitar and, like all Gretsch instruments, has a very distinctive style. It also has a very distinctive bridge design that, combined with the ladder-braced top, yields a guitar that flits somewhere between flattop and arch ..read more
Jake Wildwood
1d ago
I bought this guitar from my friend Kevin in a lot of instruments. It's a nice old, Levin-made Goya from '67 and is basically like a Levin take on a Gibson LG-0. It's solid mahogany throughout, 00-size, has a 14-fret neck joint, is ladder-braced, and has a folksy/woody/bluesy vibe going on. I mean... if your eyes were closed and you heard this you would probably guesstimate it might be an LG-0 or something pretty similar.
Its neck is very curvy, though -- it has a slim-medium C profile on the rear but a really tight, ~7" or so radius on the board. It feels like playing a '60s Fender -- quic ..read more
Jake Wildwood
1d ago
Andy, who's our bowed-family repair-maestro, brought this guitar in for his Dad the other day. He gave it a level/dress job on the frets and then set it up nicely.
It's an MD60 model which, in Alvarez parlance, translates to this guitar -- a cedar-topped dreadnought with mahogany back and sides and restrained (but nice) appointments. I'm a fan of cedar tops on guitars (see: Daion models, see: Seagull models) as they sound dang good (for the most part) right when they're built and have a sound that's on the "atypical" spectrum -- it's familiar but perhaps a little woodier and perhaps not as ..read more
Jake Wildwood
2d ago
This completely-bizarre guitar was made by Davide Melo in the Azores Islands. The owner had it built for him as a custom job as Mr. Melo normally builds traditional Portuguese island-style instruments -- as might be obvious, because this has the body shape and styling of a viola da terra (a 12-string, 5-course, oddball instrument).
The top is solid spruce (I think) while the back, sides, bridge, and fretboard appear to be lightly-colored purpleheart. It has a short (22") scale length and so we strung it with 56w-13 mediums to make up for the short scale slack in the strings.
As you might ex ..read more