A couple of weeks ago I received my Octigan guitar. This guitar has beautiful cherry burst soundboard made of curly maple with equally gorgeous curly maple back and sides. The neck is maple with blackwood. A stunning guitar to look at and even more to hold. Many jazz guitarists seek a laminate construction for both its electric tonal quality and its feedback resistance and yet finding a builder who works with laminate is not easy. I found all of these things with this guitar.
In the past when I’ve bought guitars I loved in the shop I would get them home and find something that annoys me about the guitar that would never really go away. With this guitar, the more I play it the more I enjoy it. The tone is superb. Unlike some laminate guitars, this guitar has a woody resonance akin to that of many solid top archtops, especially when unamplified. It is acoustically the loudest laminate archtop I have ever heard. Amplified it is wonderful. It has tight, controlled basses with beautiful singing, clear trebles. The guitar sounds organic and slightly acoustic – a quality present in many vintage archtops but much harder to find in modern ones. The fretwork is perfect, the neck extremely comfortable, with a gorgeous tone and beautiful finishings – this is a guitar that easily exceeds the Gibson archtops it emulates, of any era.
You can see from simply holding this guitar why a handmade guitar is far superior to a factory one. I played many of Rod’s archtops when I was looking for a guitar and all were superb. Rod is making instruments of a quality and value that is many times higher than what he charges for his guitars, making these handmade instruments excellent value. Rod is a wonderful and passionate craftsman and his instruments deserve to be in the hands of a far greater number of musicians.
Nick Russell (Sydney, February 2017).

Thanks again for the amazing axe!