I have been playing guitar for quite a few years now and have owned many different guitars. I stopped playing electric guitars years ago and now have two acoustic guitars and a ukulele. One of those guitars is a wahine slack key tuned Guild, which was the first really good guitar I ever owned. That was back in 1970 (she’s 46 years old). The other is a RainSong WS1000, my basic rockabilly instrument.
I first encountered this beautiful and unusual RainSong guitar while on The Big Island. I stopped into a music store and saw this guitar hanging on the wall. The store owner asked if I would like to play and handed the guitar to me.
The sound was amazing! But I couldn’t wrap my head around a carbon fiber guitar. After all, a fine guitar had to be made of fine wood. Right? I thought anything else was sacreligious. Over the years I sampled this guitar whenever I was in a shop that carried RainSong. I didn’t know that I was falling in love. And then the day came for me to take the bride home.
The complete review follows.
Excerpted from a review written by Guy Little August 17, 2015
Unedited
RainSong Guitars began on the Hawaiian island of Maui when a fledgling classical guitarist John Decker witnessed a torrential downpour while attending a wedding. The guitar player performing for the guests had a bit of a dilemma: carry on playing and risk being drenched by the tropical shower, which would cause irreversible damage to his treasured guitar, or run for cover and risk the wrath of the bride. That day, John Decker was inspired to create a new kind of instrument, one that would play beautifully while enduring life’s summers and winters, bumps and bruises – and, well, most things life could throw at it (save for, say, a brick).
The instrument that John Decker created became the world’s first all-graphite guitar, known as theRainSong guitar (get it?), and it now comes in all shapes and sizes, from a parlour travel guitar to a boom box of a dreadnought. But that’s about where the similarities to a conventional guitar ends – these instruments are packed with forward-thinking technology that means you could submerge it into the Arctic ocean and it’d still sing beautifully for you. Or, if you fancy, you could drag it through the Sahara strumming it on the back of a camel without worrying about the neck warping or soundboard splitting.
Since the mid-’90s, RainSong guitars has been building high-end graphite guitars that deliver a clear, balanced tone while remaining unaffected by humidity and temperature changes – for this reason alone these guitars were/are a big hit with travelling guitarists. Along the way, the company, now based in Washington State, USA, has refined its designs and construction techniques, notably developing apatented Projection Tuned Layering process that allows the body to be built with no bracing whatsoever – and let me tell you, this takes a little getting used to. Just don’t look inside the soundhole; it’s a trippy and uncomfortable experience. Not because it’s some wormhole to a Manchester nightclub in the ‘90s, but because it just doesn’t seem right without any kerfing or soundboard braces. Continue reading RainSong Guitars
