It’s an honour and a privilege to have a John Veleno guitar in our Rare Star Guitar collection especially as it was formerly owned by Sonny Bono. Whilst John Veleno pioneered the all aluminium guitar he was also a member of the Society of Tool and Manufacturing Engineers and directly involved in manufacturing components for the first manned space flight, lunar landing module and space travel equipment. It is therefore no surprise that Veleno aluminium guitars hold the record for the highest percentage of guitars owned by world class musicians and that the Veleno guitar became known as the Stradivarius of the guitar world.
Handmade Custom Guitars from Italy
Which brings us to the Italian built Di Donato guitar. Di Donato are based near the unique Barena of Venice and more usually specialise in crafting Violins, Violas and Cellos. Their guitar represents a 6 string instrument built in the Italian Violin makers tradition – a tradition that stretches as far back as the 14th Century in Brescia, Italy.
Di Donato handmade Guitar
The Di Donato guitar is centred around an entirely hand cast and sculpted aluminium central “soundboard” with two Kaya mahogany resonance pieces to create a stunning work of guitar art. The aluminium heart of the guitar is contoured and shaped much like a violin soundboard to transmit vibrations to and from all of the guitars components.
Guitar Art
This attention to detail is maintained in each exclusively handmade guitar neck: Kaya Mahogany, zero fret Rosewood fingerboard with ebony dot markers. The guitars’ pickups are also handmade and individually tuned by ear for each specific instrument, and, the magnets are magnetised in house so as to guarantee the sonic response of every component. The selected first class electric components are handwired and the knobs also hand cast.
The final result is a work of stunning sonic art that has drawn the high compliments of both Tony Remy and Massimo Varini!
Handmade Guitars – Cigar Box Guitars
We are running a series of interviews with backwoods guitar and instrument builder Marten Ten Broek, so if you are interested in making guitars in the “cigar-box” tradition click here and follow the interview.
For the Daddy Mojo cigar box guitar article click here.
