Robert Ruck Cedar/Fan braced

Top: Cedar/Fan braced
Back and sides: Rosewood
Scale: 650mm
Origin; USA
Price: SOLD

This excellent Ruck has quickly found a new home, if you are seeking a fine Ruck please contact me!

With Robert’s wait list now permanently closed he seems to be feeling much less pressure about keeping current on deliveries etc, and is just relaxing more, enjoying life a lot, and in my opinion, making some of the best guitars of his long and illustrious career. Manuel Barrueco, so far as I know, still performs all his recordings on his Ruck, and so many fine players have played and owned Ruck’s over the years I have literally lost track of them all. And it does not stop there, some of the worlds finest luthiers, including Matthias Dammann note that Ruck was a significant influence on their development and thinking as a builder.

So it is with more than a little excitement that I find myself sitting down today with a brand new, just off the bench, Robert Ruck Cedar fan braced concert instrument. Carefully lifting her out of her case for the first time I am once again impressed by Bob’s impeccable flawless building technique and skills, really his construction technique’s, design and materials are simply “standard setting” and at the highest level in the world. The finish is flawless, and he selected one of my favorite Rosette’s of his for this guitar that creates a stirring rich crimson halo around the sound hole. Smooth Gotoh tuners and an elevated fingerboard. Just lovely.

Tuning her up I can already sense that certain ‘vibrational connection’ that you experience with the best guitars, where the notes flow through the entire instrument, out into the world and simultaneously all through your body, have you felt that? It always portends something special and you can often feel it within the first few notes, even while tuning up. I was instantly swept up in the experience the instrument created, at once giving me more than I asked for at every touch, strong vibrant singing trebles, with superb separation of voices especially for a cedar guitar, surrounded by basses that sing in loving support of the melody, really just perfection, elegant, clear and with great focus and complexity to each note. The lucky ‘extra’ ? Somehow Bob through his vast experience building both solid top and sandwich top guitars, has managed to imbue near double top volume from his fan braced solid top guitars.

A hauntingly lovely instrument from Bob, once again