The Kim Breedlove Private Reserve Series is our most exclusive instrument series. Private Reserve instruments are designed and built by Kim Breedlove and his team, using select, highly figured tonewoods, and featuring incredible inlay work. Kim usually produces no more than five Private Reserve instruments in a year. The Private Reserve Series is by no means limited to guitars - one recent creation was a Tenor Ukulele.
New Private Reserve CM
Breedlove's distribution partner in France has commissioned a one-of-a-kind Breedlove Private Reserve guitar. Le Musicien is a generalist instruments shop, opened for the first time on June, 21st 2007 in Blois in the middle of the Chateaux de la Loire. Clarisse and Julien Thavaud, the owners, made the choice to specialized into very beautiful guitars. “We are lucky to live in a historic place which was the witness of Kings of France lifes. Our shop is just under the Chateau of Blois and so we had to offer to our clients the best choice in guitars, pianos and other instruments”. That’s why, when a client told them that he wanted a very special guitar, they made, together, the choice of Breedlove custom shop.
(Above: Le Musicien, Clarisse and Julien Thavaud. Below: Interview with Clarisse from Le Musicien)
Guitar Design and Development:
This extraordinary musical instrument began its journey through build process years ago. Timbers were cut, then band sawed into separate highly figured billets and finally cut by the re-saw into the individual slices to become the backs and sides of future guitars. After months of slow drying the wood was taken to the open air of our climate controlled Custom Shop. All of the other wooden guitar parts shared the same process and then rested curing in the open air of our workshop. All parts became in balance with each other at the same 70 degree temperature at 50% relative humidity.
The Private Reserve CM was made with these fine woods: Sitka Spruce, Figured Myrtlewood, Oregon Walnut, African ebony, Honduran Mahogany, Baltic Birch and Spanish Cedar. All parts were aged together before assembly of the guitar. The Myrtlewood was carefully inspected and two back-to-back pieces were splayed out like opening a book to reveal a mirror image of the wood grain, color and figure. The wood was laid out and trimmed by the jointer to create a strong seam that would hold the two pieces of wood together for a lifetime. The sides were selected from parts of the same beautiful tree. Each piece of wood was matched to this set for quality, tone, beauty, contrast and smell.
During first days of the build process the guitar woods were prepared in the woodworking area: thickness sanding to create the proper resonance, bracing to distribute the sound and structure, blocking and kerfing to connect the top, back, sides and neck, binding to protect and frame the beautiful tonewoods, and then a final scrape and sanding to level all of the parts and complete the geometry of the instrument. At the same time Kim Breedlove and Angela Christensen were designing the remarkable inlay pattern and fretscape.
