Before the “Folk Boom” of the late 1950’s or the explosion of acoustic guitars into rock and roll a decade later, I was fortunate that my family was part of an extended circle of musical friends. several of whom owned guitars which, twenty-five years later, would be more valuable than their homes. Three of those guitars simply mesmerized me: a Gibson Roy Smeck, a ’30’s D-18, and a ’29 OM-45. Three of my Dad’s friends owned those guitars, and for almost fifty years I searched for a Roy Smeck that had the voice I remembered so well and was also healthy enough that it wouldn’t spend most of its life in the emergency room. After four tries, including one that had an unearthly great sound, but was doomed be in the ER forever, my friend Gordon French, acoustic manager at Rudy’s on 48th Street in NYC, called to say he had “The One”. It was indeed the Holy Grail, and I finally had that dream fulfilled.
It wasn’t very long before the FBG crew started thinking about what we might do with that iconic design being froggified… We started with the basics of the original and then began to incorporate new elements to vary from there. After a bunch of developmental effort we finally took an initial order for one from our dealer, Wildwood Guitars, in Louisville, CO. Brian Truesby, our point person at Wildwood, has an extraordinary design sense in the world of acoustic guitars. He asked for an S12 of Guatemalan rosewood and Adirondack spruce. When the guitar was strung up, the shop simply stopped; every one of us was really excited by that guitar. More than one offered some version of “I want it!” or “Maybe we should just hang onto this one.” Integrity prevailed and we shipped the guitar off to Colorado. The response from the staff at Wildwood was maybe even stronger than our crew’s had been: “Best rosewood guitar we’ve ever had here…”
I’ve always had a deep affection for twelve fret instruments. The S12 is unique in my awareness of them; I haven’t known any other design I find similar to it, and it stops players in their tracks unlike any other guitar we make. I wish I could hang around long enough to play one of them when it’s fifty years old. Sounds like heaven, one way or another.