Appalachian Tonewood

Story by Leah Tuckwiller
Photography by Josh Baldwin, Sheena Pendley and courtesy of Appalachian Tonewood

Travis Holley and Luke Bair, booted up and wearing a mix of Carhartt and flannel, step softly into a mixed stand of hardwoods and spruce. They are a long way from anything like a cell signal or gas station. Their eyes are constantly searching through the underbrush, looking for their tree-of-choice, the mighty red spruce. Through thick limbs, and downed trees covered in bright green moss, they eventually see something in the distance. Travis, crouching down on his haunches to get a better view, calls to Luke, pointing, “Look at that guitar tree over there!”

Delicately, but with single purpose, they make their way to what looks to be a red spruce of over 30 inches in diameter. This is what they have come for.

The leap from a living, standing tree to a guitar, while fairly obvious and mostly straightforward, takes a meander through the tonewood industry, where folks like Travis and Luke run their show—finding the best trees, for the best wood, for the best sound, for the best instruments.

Tonewood is a vital part of the music industry—without it, we’re less a huge number of our favorite instruments, especially guitars, mandolins, and other stringed instruments, including soundboards for pianos. The tonewoods are carefully selected for their distinct tonal qualities and meticulously dried so it can be cut, shaped, and made into the best instruments possible.

Travis and Luke undertake all of the hand-selecting of trees, as well as the precision drying, followed by careful and custom cutting of the gorgeous West Virginia red spruce, and other domestic woods.

“The most an instrument maker can strive for is to preserve the beauty of the tree,” says Travis. “Every stage of the process deserves the attention that the final instrument will receive.”

So why West Virginia, then? As it turns out, what we have is a combination of good wood and great elevation that makes the area ideal for tonewood—as with a growing number of other industries, West Virginia is stepping up to fill a niche. At a fairly consistent 4,000 feet high, the Appalachians produce slow-growing trees, which provide grain, density and other features that instrument builders actively seek. 

Travis and Luke have been cutting and using tonewood for decades between them. Travis began by cutting wood for John Preston and Old World Tonewood, a respected name in the industry. After working for and helping develop Old World for several years, the sale of the business left him to strike out independently, which is when he teamed up with Luke, a veteran luthier, to create Appalachian Tonewood in 2018. Luke, who has been building custom guitars, mandolins, and more for over 25 years, attended the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery in 1995. He’s still building instruments today, and that gives him a keen hands-on feel for tonewood as well as a formal knowledge.

“We exist between a love for the forest and love for music,” says Luke. “At the transition from a growing tree’s 250-year journey to a century as a guitar.”

This care for their work also shows its face in their product availability. After the trees and logs are selected for their tonal potential, Luke and Travis direct-cut them, using their two-person team to their advantage; they cut each piece themselves, and can make them to fit buyer specifications in a wide range of grades.

While there isn’t a wide industry standard for grading tonewood like in the lumber industry, Travis and Luke use a consistent internal grading system (A, AA, and AAA) that’s easy to understand. Their own attention to detail, eyes for quality, and care for their work sets their standard high and only moves upward as the grades get higher. In limited quantities, they sell wood as finely classed as master grade.

Within the tonewood industry, there’s another niche that West Virginia (and Appalachian Tonewood) is uniquely suited to fill. Red spruce is highly valued and rarely used as a tonewood, largely due to the fact that it doesn’t exactly grow like wildflowers. But before World War I, red spruce was setting industry standards, and is still used for high-end custom lines by companies like Martin Guitars.

Picea rubens, the red spruce, grows well in West Virginia, as the elevation lends itself to the tree’s high strength-to-weight ratio and the lack of competing spruce breeds means that what red (or Adirondack) spruce is available grows true and unhybridized. West Virginia red spruce may well be a cut above the Adirondacks, too, with companies like Gibson on the list of Appalachian Tonewood’s clients.

As with any limited resource, though, it requires careful management. Appalachian Tonewood isn’t looking for status as the world’s top purveyor of bulk red spruce tonewood, but providing instrument makers with high quality wood is certainly Travis’ and Luke’s niche, as red spruce appears to be West Virginia’s.

Appalachian Tonewood is sourcing responsibly in other ways, as well. Woods from all over the world have proven themselves as tonewoods, with many exotic woods favored by domestic instrument makers. This isn’t always the most sustainable option for tonewoods, however, as supply and demand shift over time. Travis and Luke are part of a push for the use of more domestic tonewoods, such as the red maple, sugar maple, walnut, cherry, and other woods that grow strong and hearty in the mountains. 

Occasionally, Travis and Luke are able to rescue wood that’s already been cut, saving guitar trees from life as fence posts. The wood is there, the quality doesn’t suffer, and it’s one more way to take an active part in the responsible management of the forests.

It’s important to Travis and Luke that the Appalachian woods they live and work in are taken care of as much as possible. They always try to replant trees when they take them, and they provide volunteer work as well as financial support to organizations like The Nature Conservancy and the Appalachian Forest National Heritage Area. The business may be cutting wood, but Appalachian Tonewood does so with a great reverence for the forest and methods, craft, and products they create.

So no, guitars don’t grow on trees—but if there’s a guitar to be found in the woods, Travis and Luke can find it, coax it out, and make sure it gets the care it deserves. In addition to a shop where the cutting is done, Travis and Luke have a presence at Lee Street Studios in Lewisburg, among other local artisans. If you’re looking for them, though, it’s likely you’ll find them in their beloved woods, peering sharp-eyed through the undergrowth in search of their next guitar tree.  For more, check out appalachiantonewood.com.