Picture an acoustic guitar and what do you see? The classical guitar with its wooden body and circular sound-hole, right? Yep. That guitar was designed sometime in the 1850s by Antonio de Torres, and has pretty much been the same for nearly two centuries, with the exception of the invention of the electric guitar. Maxwell Custom’s custom-made Infinitum guitar takes that age-old form and applies design-thinking to it… the design brief? How do you make the Acoustic Guitar with a harmonically rich and responsive sound that is rewarding for players and audiences alike?
The Infinitum takes the existing design and tweaks it to create a new and improved experience. The body comes CNC machined out of native New Zealand timbers (kahikatea and black maire), and features two major upgrades. The iconic sound-hole is bid adieu for four ‘vents’ on the front and back that allow the sound to emanate outwards in a way that makes it easy for the player as well as the audience to hear the music. The second significant upgrade is the absence of the bridge, or the piece of wood and metal that would be glued to the guitar’s body, holding onto the strings from one end as they wind around the turnkeys at the other end. Maxwell’s Infinitum actually integrates the bridge into the guitar body, by providing small, precise cutouts in the wood that allow the strings to literally be connected to the body of the guitar. This enables the vibrations from the strings to pass onto the echo chamber inside the guitar body more effectively, allowing your music to be louder and clearer, making the guitar, overall, more interesting… both visually and acoustically. Seems to me like they nailed the design brief!
Designer: Maxwell Custom
