Sustainably Sourced,
Affordably Priced

Breedlove’s new Organic Collection combines meticulously sourced tonewoods and superlative construction with MAP prices starting at $500.

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LOGGERS WHO TAKE DOWN trees illegally—that is without proper permits, on protected lands, or on private property—deforest an area roughly the size of New Jersey every year, according to research by the Yale School of Forestry. This widespread practice has obvious adverse environmental impacts, but also deprives governments of tax revenues, impoverishes local populations, and helps finance global criminal networks. As a miniscule fraction of the global timber market, some in the guitar industry shrug off any responsibility, reasoning, “we’re so small, what can we do to make a difference anyway?” Tom Bedell sees things differently. “If we don’t as a human population—and that means all of us—protect the whole ecosystem, we risk losing our planet,” he says.

This outlook has animated his approach to guitar building. After acquiring the Breedlove guitar company nine years ago, he implemented a stringent sourcing protocol, avoiding any wood that came from a clear cut, and working only with foresters committed to sustainable harvesting practices. These sourcing efforts were initially applied only to the Breedlove, Bedell, and Weber instruments produced in Bend, Oregon. This year, however, they will be applied to the company’s newest line of Asian imports, the Breedlove Organic Collection. With MAP prices starting at $500, the guitars are every bit as “sustainable” as U.S.-made products costing four times as much.

"I wanted to be the same person
for the customer buying a $500 guitar
and the customer buying a $5,000 guitar."

During his tenure heading Pure Fishing, the country’s largest manufacturer of fishing tackle, Bedell sharpened his environmental consciousness, reasoning that clean water and conservation was essential to the health of his company. He brought this sensibility with him when he entered the guitar business a decade ago. “We had been buying wood through brokers, and while we were compliant with the Lacey Act, we didn’t pay much attention to how it was being harvested,” he explains. “I started asking, what kind of impact are we having on the local communities and the integrity of the forest neighborhoods?” When closer investigation showed that some wood suppliers didn’t share these concerns, he implemented a hard and fast rule: No wood from clear cut trees from any forests anywhere, only individually harvested trees that were taken with a minimal impact on the forest ecosystem.

Drafting a sustainable wood sourcing policy is the easy part; Tom Bedell has visited forests around the world to ensure that loggers are adhering to the rules.

Writing rules in a comfortable office was the easy part; actually enforcing them is where it got hard. Rather than simply taking wood suppliers at their word, Bedell traveled extensively, visiting forests in Africa, Europe, and North and Central America to ensure that loggers were abiding by his harvesting protocols. The result of this is that all incoming wood at the Bend factory has its own “curriculum vitae,” detailing the precise location of where it was cut. After establishing this record-keeping system for his U.S. production, Bedell was plagued by a nagging question: Why couldn’t he apply the same standards to the larger volume of Asian-made Breedlove guitars? “It was a source of conflict for me,” he says. “I wanted to be the same person for the customer buying a $500 guitar and the customer buying a $5,000 guitar. If forestry practices for our U.S. guitars were the right thing to do, they should apply to our Asian product as well.”

Resolving this conflict was no easy task, given that Chinese manufacturers are notorious for skirting environmental rules and seem inimical to record keeping. Indiscriminate harvesting practices by Chinese furniture makers had even prompted the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to tighten regulations on trade in rosewood. Despite warnings from NGOs involved in forestry issues saying that environmental compliance in China was a “black hole,” Bedell persisted.

"It was essential that I could track
where the wood came from
and how it was harvested."

His first step in implementing improved wood practices was locating a guitar factory in Southern China that was both capable of meeting tough quality standards and willing to let him select the forests where the woods would be harvested and the logging contractors. “It was essential that I could track where the wood came from and how it was harvested,” he explains. That was followed by teaming up with Forestry Stewardship Council certified loggers in the Republic of Congo and Switzerland to secure mahogany and spruce, respectively.

Bedell’s Congo forester has a strict policy of taking no more than 2% of a specific species from a tract of land, and then letting the area regenerate for 30 years before returning to make another cut. “They took me to a large tract of land where they had made a cut 20 years earlier, and you couldn’t tell that they had ever been there,” he says. In an Alpine forest that borders Germany, Austria, and Lichtenstein, loggers use an elaborate crane system to remove individual spruce trees, leaving little trace in the fragile high-altitude ecosystem. These meticulously harvested woods are then sent to the Chinese plant.

Wood sourcing may be important, but the market ultimately judges guitars based on their tonal quality and playability. That’s why Bedell engineers and product specialists spent the past three years fine-tuning the designs that have become the newly introduced Organic Collection, arguably the first import made from completely traceable wood. Available in four series and four body styles with the instantly recognizable Breedlove aesthetic, the guitars all feature thin tops and finishes for vibrant tone, all solid wood construction, and premium electronics. At the entry level, Signature Series guitars boast African mahogany back, sides, and neck, paired with a torrefied European spruce top and a MAP price of $499. Next up is the Wildwood Series, made entirely of African mahogany with MAP pricing starting at $649. The Performer Series, made from African mahogany and European spruce, with an ebony fingerboard, features more elaborate ornamentation, including gold-plated frets and hardware. MAP pricing starts at $699. The Artista series has Oregonian-sourced Myrtlewood back and sides, like many of the U.S.-made Breedlove instruments, paired with a European spruce top. MAP pricing starts at $799.

For consumers, the Organics Collection means sustainably sourced guitars costing hundreds instead of thousands.

The spruce tops on the Organic Collection are all torrefied, a process that involves heating them in a controlled environment to cook out the oils, sugars, and resins that naturally evaporate over a period of years. Torrefaction yields tops that mimic the tonal quality of vintage instruments. Also, by removing much of the cellulose between the wood’s growth rings, they absorb less moisture and are less likely to crack with changes in temperature or humidity. For the ultimate in tonal performance, Bedell says nothing compares to a naturally aged spruce top that “has been broken in through years of playing.” However, the torrefied tops on the Organic Collection represent what he calls “a high-value compromise,” especially given that “the people who buy guitars in this price range don’t take care of them as well as the people who buy $4,000, $5,000, or $6,000 guitars.”

The Breedlove plant in Bend has developed a wood processing system dubbed “Sound Optimization” that takes into account the naturally occurring inconsistencies in wood. Bedell argues that if you shape every piece of wood to the same dimensions, without taking into consideration differences in weight, density, and flexibility, you’ll end up building guitars with inconsistent tonal qualities. “Variation is our friend,” he declares, meaning that adjusting for the natural differences in wood is the path to creating guitars with uniformly excellent musical properties.

At the plant in Bend, individual spruce top blanks are measured for weight, stiffness, mass-per-square-inch, and frequency response. These data points then guide the production process—stiffer tops are used for larger bodied guitars, like the Breedlove Concerto models, while more flexible tops work better in smaller sized instruments, like the Concertina models. The weight and density of the tops dictate the thickness. A particularly dense top might be milled down to 95 thousandths of an inch thick, while a lighter top would be milled to 115 thousandths of an inch. Tone remains subjective, but Bedell argues that “Sound Optimization” has resulted in the best guitars in Breedlove’s history.

"If we just take care of the forests we have,
we could go a long way
towards arresting climate change."

The labor involved in Sound Optimization precludes applying it to guitars destined to hit price points in the $500 to $800 range. However, an abbreviated version has been applied to the Organic Collection. Without quantifying each piece of wood, Breedlove engineers have specified optimal dimensional averages for the tops used in the Organic Collection. The results may not match the best U.S.-made instruments, but Bedell says, “they are amazingly good guitars for the money.” The fact that they are produced thoughtfully adds to their appeal.

Good forestry stewardship is a complex process that involves science, effective regulation, and consistent enforcement policies, paired with a recognition of economic realities.

Economics are vital, because to cite one example, the destitute population of Madagascar that views selling an ebony log as the only way to survive is less likely to adhere to strict conservation rules. From his travels, Bedell says, “Some countries in Africa are working hard to develop sustainable forestry; others are not. If you’re going to save forests in the Amazon or the Congo, you need to have a government that cares about it, and provides economic benefits that sustain people, and gives them an incentive to conserve.” He recognizes that the efforts of a single guitar company aren’t going to have a significant impact on global forests. But he hopes that by raising the awareness among guitar buyers, he may prod others to follow his example. “You have to start somewhere,” he says. “Some say if you plant three trillion trees, you could arrest climate change. I think that if we just take care of the forests we have, we could go a long way towards that goal.”

www.breedlovemusic.com