Grosh NOS VT Roasted Pine Series Faded Amber Burst/Timeworn

Roasted pine, hand-wound pickups, and a worn-in Timeworn finish. Early fifties chime with none of the compromises.

Pine has an interesting place in electric guitar history. Leo Fender used it early because it was cheap and light and available, then moved on to ash and alder once production scaled, and for decades afterward pine carried a reputation as the wood you used when you could not get better wood. Players who have spent time with those earliest instruments know that story has it backwards. Pine is light, it is airy, and it moves in a way denser bodies do not. The catch is that it is soft, inconsistent, and unforgiving to work with, which is why so few builders bother (plus it's difficult to find great blanks).

Thankfully, Don Grosh and his small CO-based team bothered. The Roasted Pine Series comes from a specific stash of wood he set aside, roasted to stabilize it and drive the moisture out, and the result addresses most of what makes pine difficult while keeping everything that makes it worth the trouble. This NOS VT shows it clearly. The body is light, the response is snappy and immediate, and there is an open chime to it that lands somewhere near an early fifties Tele without being a costume version of one.

The Timeworn finish is Don's aging/relic process, and it is handled with more restraint than the term usually implies. Nothing here is trying to convince you the guitar has a history it does not have. The finish is simply worn in at the points where your hands actually meet the instrument, so it feels settled from the first time you pick it up rather than after a year of playing it in.

Plugged in, it covers a lot of ground. Don winds the pickups himself, and the push/pull tone control splits the neck humbucker, which gives you a genuinely usable single coil voice on top of the standard positions. On a body this resonant, we found that the split is more useful than it typically is, since the guitar has enough acoustic character underneath to keep the thinner/split setting from sounding thin. Fantastic stuff!