SP Signature Parlor - Boswell Lost Tunnel Redwood & Claro Walnut

Irvin Guitars is the one-man shop of Wayne Irvin Johnson — he builds under his middle name — in Springfield, Missouri. He came to it the long way round: a Sears Silvertone at six in 1967, a Martin D-28 in 1978 paid for with two summers of hay-field wages, then a 1995 detour into hand-built acoustics that carried him through James Olson's shop and, years later, to Sergei de Jonge's School of Lutherie, where Irvin Guitars began. He offers four shapes — the SJ small jumbo, the 12-fret SP Signature Parlor, the SD dreadnought and the compact SB — and builds slowly by policy, on the conviction that every wood set has a best voice in it and that finding it takes as long as it takes.