Try this sometime-- break out your phone book, let your fingers do the walking, and find a dealer of premium lumber.

Put on some sturdy shoes, hop in your car-- don’t forget a pair of tough, splinter- proof leather gloves-- and pay them a visit. They’re probably out in the boonies somewhere, not in the center of town, and certainly not at a strip mall.

You want an establishment that’s been around for awhile, the longer the better, dealing in woods like maple, spruce, swamp ash, poplar, basswood, butternut, maybe even tropical woods like mahogany.

First you’ll have to get past the folks in the little booth or office out front. If the place is really old school, they may be a bit cranky, and will likely want to know your reason for invading their preserve.

Having gotten permission, stroll on into the yard. You’ll find yourself confronted by humungous stacks of wood, all looking like, well… pieces of wood. Maybe some will have been planed on one face to show the grain, but don’t count on it.

There are no signs that say "Great Guitar Wood in This Stack!"

Haul a board or two off one of the smaller palettes. You’ll see that this stuff is a far cry from the glass smooth, vibrantly beautiful material you see in the guitars hanging on the wall at home, or in your local music store.

This stuff is, in short, a mess.

Much of it will be weathered, and you’ll be hard pressed even to tell one species of timber from another. Mahogany, if there is any, will stand out because of its color, ash because of its wide-open grain, but to the untrained eye rough-cut basswood looks pretty much like rough-cut poplar.

In virtually every board you look at, you’ll find defects of one sort or another. The textbook perfect woods mentioned in guitar making books have long since gone the way of the dinosaurs. There will be knots, water stains, cracks, splinters and shakes.

Ask yourself--out of all those hundreds and hundreds of pieces of rough, ragged lumber, how would you go about selecting boards suitable for making guitars?

Wood is simply too variable for textbook rules; when it comes to selecting it for guitars there isn’t any school other than direct experience. Picking good guitar wood is more art than science. It takes a lot of effort to develop an eye that can see beneath such gross raw material to the qualities hidden within.

Unlike other solid body guitars with a thin maple "cap" glued to a piece of mahogany or some other wood, the Fly Supreme body is constructed entirely of curly maple, which is difficult to season, and tricky to work in direct proportion to the amount of flame.

A curly maple cap can easily be cut from an inch thick board. Though it doesn’t show in the completed guitar, the Fly Supreme, like all other Parkers, must begin with a board twice as thick.

Out of perhaps five palettes of curly maple at the yard, only 15% or so will make it past the on-site inspection. And of the boards that actually make it into the factory, another 40% or so still won’t make the grade after we do the preliminary milling. Sometimes an entire board will yield only enough wood for a single guitar. The remainder will get used for furniture or other projects.

Sitka spruce, used in the Artist, Concert and Spanish Fly, deserves special mention as well, because Parker is the only solid body manufacturer using it, despite the fact that it’s been the "de facto" standard for acoustic guitar soundboards for the past half century.

Why this should be so is a mystery. Perhaps other manufacturers, who do not have Ken’s background in building custom acoustic arch tops, don’t have the requisite knowledge to get the best out of this superb tonewood in a solid body guitar.

Which brings us to an important point--every guitar maker on earth claims to use "the best wood" in their instruments. What else are they going to say? That they use what they can scrounge?

Despite the reams of purple prose that have been written about the sonic qualities of wood, the truth is that even great wood does not necessarily make a good guitar, never mind a great one.

You can’t play a piece of raw wood. You can only play a guitar made out of it, and the skill of the maker has at least as much to do with the sound as the wood itself… if not more. The most perfect wood in the world will yield nothing to write home about, in a pedestrian design built by mediocre hands.

Different kinds of wood definitely play a role in the final tone of the instrument, but as Ken says, talking about tone is like fishing about architecture. Nowhere is this more true than with wood, which is only the beginning of a great guitar.

Your idea of great tone may be quite different than someone else’s. The reason Parker makes guitars out of more different woods than any other manufacturer is simple--sonic choice, which is ultimately up to you!