Here at Guitar World, we've seen people create playable guitars with some incredibly unorthodox materials.
Popular YouTuber Burls Art, in particular, is famous for just this, having – over the years – made guitars out of... (deep breath), jawbreaker candies, salt, coffee beans, skateboards, Lego bricks, newspapers... the list goes on.
Now though, Burls Art might just have a challenger to his crown in Filipino luthier Marlon Roxas, who recently built a fully-functioning electric guitar made with 10,000 leaves.
Given that summer's only just begun, it's a rather autumnal build – one that'll have you craving apple cider donuts rather than time on sandy shores – but also one that's an impressive feat of luthiery in any season.
Leaves are certainly not the most structurally robust of nature's materials, and Roxas' accompanying video documenting the build shows the steps he had to take to make them a viable material for the guitar.
After gathering and bagging up the leaves, he layers them atop an outline of a guitar's body, which itself is lined with epoxy resin, and applies pressure to them to flatten them down.
Roxas repeats these steps a number of times – using, after some trial and error, a heating blanket to further flatten the naturally uneven leaves before layering them over the course of a few weeks. From there, the luthier further shapes the body, and sands down its edges, before setting to work on the headstock and fretboard.
Eventually, Roxas fits his creation with a single humbucker pickup at the neck, and fashions volume and tone knobs out of wood he found while on a walk. Played through a Flatsons FGA-3 3W mini amp, the guitar sounds just as warm and inviting as it looks.
With its lovely instrumental soundtrack and lack of narration, this video is about as close to luthiery ASMR as anything we've come across on YouTube...
For more of Roxas' builds, visit the luthier's YouTube channel.
