The Great Notion Redwood AAA Acoustic Top Dreadnought (DT) Set

  
Meticulously crafted grading system for Redwood tops. Highest standards of lumber grading for all tonewood. Texture: Describes wood's growth patterns and annual ring count (Fine to Coarse).

Medullary Rays: Natural, silky patterns running perpendicular to growth rings. Stiffness: Resistance to bending across the grain, crucial for tonal quality and structural integrity. Detailed Grading: For guitars and smaller instruments, up to the size of a cello.

Differences between grades are subtle and require experience to discern. AAA Grade: Very uniform texture and color, not as consistent as Master Grade. The "Great Notion" Redwood History. The Santa Cruz Guitar Co. "Great Notion Redwood" is named in tribute to Ken Kesey's story of the defiant Stamper logging family of postWWll Oregon, played in his 1970 film by Henry Fonda.

Paul Newman and Ned Beatty. The adversarial conditions of "Gyppo" logging were vividly represented in Ken Kesey's fictional novel portraying the Stamper family of "Gyppo loggers" in post-WWll Oregon. Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) was made into a popular film in 1970, only 20 years after the tragic events that inspired Kesey's moving narrative.

Santa Cruz buys in quantity to meet its high standards. It buys the finest wood directly from its source rather than further down the distribution chain, where the best has already been taken.

With an output of only a few hundred unique custom guitars per year, they can offer superior tops that exceed their needs to their colleagues. These close-knit family loggers, dismissively called Gyppos by their powerful corporate nemesis, faced violence and ruin as they challenged the giant wood products conglomerates for access to what they considered their birthright, the remnants of the once vast Great Northwest Coastal Forests.

In their dedication to responsible harvest, Santa Cruz Guitar Company sourced this superior old-growth tonewood by reclaiming hard-to-find timbers that sunk or were beached along the Klamath River. Santa Cruz is making a limited number of Great Notion Redwood tops available.

Santa Cruz's 50 years of expertise in reclaimed tonewood selection identify these timbers as originating in virgin forests, where up to 1,500 years of slow, uninterrupted growth creates a uniform grain and density perfect for a luthier's finest instruments. In AAA and Master grades, this scientifically proven tonewood yields the same tonal benefits as found in old stringed instruments through 75+ years of natural seasoning, the hardening by polymerizing its formerly sticky resins into a super resonant material. Although all timbers reclaimed from waterways can be called "'sinker, " only specific conditions and certain minerals create a striped appearance. The Great Notion Redwood bears unique and subtle markings.