Look what the wife brought in! A guitar case in bubble wrap with stickers of address and verification. From Greece, yet! This all in 2003.

I had not really been expecting it since Mr. Charalambos and I never really agreed on the exact guitar he would send me.

You have to admit that I was frightened to take delivery because of the very poor packing job, had no knowledge that it was actually sent, and worried what could be inside. You know how package handlers hate packages, and this looked like a nightmare.

But I had spoken, by email to Koutsialis Charalambos, and I had searched him out as I always do, searching for great and unusual guitars. He had impressed me with his early guitar and I was interested to see his work in Spruce.

With crossed fingers, sometime in 2003, I cut the bubble wrap and opened the case, and there in the case was a cedar toped guitar. I had clearly asked for spruce, The Colorful. If spruce is The Colorful cedar is The Warrior.

Yes, I was expecting a spruce guitar, and I strummed this cedar one, and it hit me that it was a cedar top guitar, I put it away and that was that. At certain times in a life with an ear, those ears may respond to a certain sound, and spruce was my sound.

A few years passed and my life underwent a process of diminution, my family quaked with irreconcilable differences, and my house became an apartment with little room, and a vast cold blowing wind generated by soul searching, and a focus on the essential, food, sleep and the finishing of a novel. Yes, I wrote a novel because music cannot express fine graduations of the inner movements through turmoil.

As diminution may lead to reconstitution, guitars and possessions go, and life becomes normal, at least, a normality that is tolerable and workable, there is my Greek guitar. Back, shortly after I received it Kenny Hill said, "this guitar has too many innovations on it." I never understood what he meant except that it is an innovative guitar. I liken luthiers examining another luthier's work to a composer examining another composer's work. It is with a firm conviction that there is nothing better than your work and if another's work is good, it has some fatal flaw that catapults you to a higher order. Gods damn, it never fails.

But Kenny's influence was absent, it was two years ago that he said that, and all had faded. I was faced with a very interesting guitar.

I had mentioned that cedar was not my wood. I had played so many spruce guitars that when I touched a cedar, things in my right hand started going wrong and my interaction with the instrument began to crumble. I'd start to get uncomfortable. But who knows what changes happen in a person's ear, their conception of sound changes towards one polarity or another nuance, and sonic life has evolved to make what was unacceptable before, acceptable now.

The Charalambos guitar is in cedar and Indian rosewood, my most undesired woods. The workmanship is sloppy, finish is not evenly put on, bindings are crooked, the fretwork is not so good and there is evidence of changing one's mind on different sized machine heads with a poorly put in decorative pearl dowel on the headstock.

From the bending of the sides you can see, center in the waist, stress in the wood that darkens the finish. There are signs of an early guitar, sloppy and needing time just to learn how to push wood to get the cosmetics down.

With a new set of ears, new through a purging of old manners of hearing yourself, and regulating your hands to bring that out, I played this guitar and the wonder of the sound hit me. I hadn't realized that this guitar was so beautiful in sound. With Savarez Corum/Alliance hard tension a sweet, but very focused tone came from the guitar that few guitars carry.

There are so many reasons, from the surface examination, that make for a great sound. The first thing that will clear a cedar/Indian guitar out, from the more normal too sweet oversaturated with harmonic sound, is to take the neck angle and use what we now know as the cantilevered or raised fretboard. This has a string angle into the top at a more "from above" angle. That is, some raised fretboards are so "above" that they are considered harps only by the way the strings come into the soundboard.

Another thing that may contribute to this wonderful sound is that there is a curvature on the back that allows sound waves to not cancel out each other. If the back and top are parallel they have a tendency to move together and phase cancellation can happen, blocking out certain frequencies.

The Charalambos plays very well, that raised fingerboard is about 1/3 of what a Humphrey uses, I notice it more for the sound than I do for the ease of playing. I can reach the top two frets of this guitar no more easily than I can with a normal neck angle. Just me I suppose, maybe it will be a wonderful epiphany for you.

Let me make a projection: Koutsialis Charalambos is now making better guitars. I would bet they are cleaner and even sound better than this excellent sounding example. Read this, send him an email and ask. Tell him that New Millennium Guitar Publishing thinks he should report in and sell us some guitars if he is ready.

One thing you should know about me is that I don't really care how they look, how detailed they are or how many accoutrements lavish the beautiful shape, I just want to hear and play them. They are beautiful to look at but more beautiful to play and hear.

I consider this guitar by Koutsialis Charalambos to be one of the top three great sounding guitars I've played in the last five years. It has lasted well.

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