Sustainability
Sustainability is at the very core of the Breedlove experience, with no clear-cut woods used in any Made in Bend model or in the pioneering Organic Collection. Owner Tom Bedell has traveled to forests in Alaska, the Swiss Alps, Suriname, the Republic of Congo, and other locales around the world in a dedicated effort to ensure salvage or individual harvest practices that protect and preserve not only the trees, but also the wild habitat and the local forest communities. In 2020, Breedlove partnered with Academy Award–winning actor, musician, and environmentalist Jeff Bridges on a series of three signature “All in This Together” instruments based on shared passions for music and ecology. Breedlove is committed to a better world and a bright future and is constantly seeking new ways to accomplish the goal of complete and transparent sustainability.
Sound Optimization
Before the selected tonewood for your Made in Bend Breedlove guitar was taken off the shelf, the process of Sound Optimization had already begun. As billets of wood entered the workshop, each was carefully weighed, tap toned, and identified for its essential purpose as a potential top, back, or side. Each bar-coded, traceable, sustainable piece of clear-cut-free tonewood goes through a similar evaluation — which provides information for the design of all Breedlove instruments — at every step of a guitar’s construction. Tops and backs, for example, are sanded to target weights and specific fundamental frequencies, rather than simply milled to uniform thickness. With the sensitive touch of a Breedlove luthier, each element is hand voiced, leading to extraordinary consistency in tone, sustain, and projection. The finished guitar is given its final adjustments through the soundhole before heading out to your waiting hands, where the music is made.
Four Revolutionary Body Shapes
In the early 1990s, Breedlove rocked the acoustic guitar world with its unique concert body shape. A supremely ergonomic, comfortable, easy playing instrument, the Concert matched its physical design with its great sound — boasting rich, versatile tone, projection, and sustain in virtually any wood combination. Now, Breedlove offers four revolutionary body shapes, each based on the Concert’s clean lines and player-friendly dimensions. The dreadnought-like Concerto and the parlor-size Concertina are at once familiar and futuristic, with the former bringing new clarity and power to a large frame, and the latter defying expectations with its focused voice and room-filling presence. The travel Companion completes the quartet, compact and ready to go, yet tailored to play and sound like a full-size instrument.
Breedlove Play Styles
Breedlove understands that every guitarist is different. The true beauty of music is that it allows each of us to express ourselves uniquely, to unleash our soul and let it sing. Breedlove’s Play Style System, therefore, is not a set of rules, but a set of suggestions that may help guide you to your perfect voice. Each Breedlove guitar is suited to a Heavy, Versatile, or Light play style. Hoping to drive a loud rock and roll band or back a throaty, animated singer? A dreadnought-like Concerto, designed with a Heavy play style in mind, will fit the bill. Are you a fingerstylist, ready to gently dazzle with a new arrangement of The Beatles’ “Yesterday”? A parlor-size Concertina’s Light play style designation is just right. Do you do it all? Flatpick, fingerpick, strum, or arpeggiate to your heart’s delight with a versatile, mid-sized Concert body. Play your way!
The Tonewood Certification Project
Terroir. It’s a vintner’s term for a wine’s natural environment. It goes deeper than simply describing the soil conditions where the grapes were grown; it also describes how they were cared for and how they were harvested. Through its Tonewood Certification Project, Breedlove can tell you something about your instrument’s individual terroir, whether it’s born of Sitka spruce salvaged by a small family concern in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest or granadillo individually harvested in such a way as to preserve the health of the rainforest in the Amazon jungle. The Tonewood Certification Project, part of Breedlove’s ongoing pledge to sustainability, traces each piece of native and exotic tonewood to its source and offers Made in Bend players a Guitar Portrait identifying each element used in their instrument.
Breedlove and Myrtlewood
They’re almost synonymous. It was Breedlove, after all, that brought native Oregon myrtlewood to the fore as a popular acoustic guitar tonewood. Its complex sonic profile shimmers like its mesmerizing grain, with the hum of rosewood’s bottom, the warmth of mahogany’s mids, and the ineffable sparkle and brilliance of maple. The basis of Breedlove’s deluxe, ever popular Oregon series, myrtle grows gnarled, windblown, and sea-sprayed along the Pacific coast, not far from the maker’s Bend headquarters, in central Oregon’s high desert. Myrtle — also used in Breedlove’s Organic Collection Artista series, select Pursuit Exotic models, and Lu’au ukuleles — has a haunting, beguiling appearance, with each board, naturally tinged with swirling, sometimes flamey golds, grays, and blacks, as unique as your own fingerprint.
Exotic Tonewoods
Oregon myrtlewood. Brazilian rosewood. Hawaiian koa. So many wonderful choices, with each bringing its own special characteristics to the sound of your guitar. Breedlove’s legendary library of native and exotic tonewoods spans the globe, from the fabled Adirondack spruce of rural New York State to the mystique of Amazonian granadillo and the enchanting African mahogany and torrefied European spruce combinations of the sustainable, all solid wood, clear-cut-free Organic Collection. With Breedlove you can get wild with a Legacy or a Pursuit Exotic or go classic with the tried-and-true East Indian rosewood of the handcrafted, hand-voiced, Sound Optimized® Premier series. And Breedlove’s Tonewood Certification Project traces and tracks each element of every Made in Bend Breedlove model.
