Breedlove Guitars
Elderly 50th Anniversary Custom Concerto Acoustic Guitar
Listed at Elderly Instruments · Lansing, MI
Tracked on Tonewood Atlas — view the full listing at Elderly Instruments’ site.
Photos hot-linked from Elderly Instruments’ site — never rehosted.
Specs
- Top
- Figured Myrtlewood
- Back / Sides
- Figured Myrtlewood
- Neck
- Honduran Mahogany
- Fingerboard
- Ebony
- Body shape
- Concert / Concertina
- Scale length
- 25.5"
- Nut width
- 1 3/4"
- Frets to body
- 14
- Strings
- 6
- Cutaway
- No
- Condition
- New
Breedlove Guitars
Breedlove has built guitars in Central Oregon since 1990, when founders Larry Breedlove and Steve Henderson left Taylor to make custom fingerstyle steel-strings of their own. From its Bend workshop the company became known for fluid, asymmetric body shapes and for "Sound Optimization" — a build philosophy that density-matches each top and back set and hand-voices the pair so the finished guitar rings as a tuned system rather than an assembly of parts. The Atlas follows Breedlove's Bend-built top tier — the hand-voiced Masterclass, Legacy, Premier and Custom instruments, often in exotic tonewoods — where that approach is taken furthest.
Elderly Instruments
Elderly Instruments has been a Lansing, Michigan institution since 1972 — founder Stan Werbin opened the shop in East Lansing with fifteen used instruments and no cash register, then spent fifty-plus years growing it into one of the largest specialty music retailers in the country while keeping it family-run (Stan still leads; daughter Lillian is the next generation). The store moved to its current home in a renovated old lodge hall in Lansing's Old Town district in 1983 and runs today with about forty employees, many tenured 20+ years. Their catalog is famously broad — Taylor, Martin, Fender, and Yamaha alongside Collings, Bourgeois, Lowden, McPherson, Santa Cruz, Goodall, and Atkin — and the in-house repair shop, a separate 3,000-square-foot space with a spray booth, inspects and sets up nearly every instrument they sell. A specialty music store that's outlasted every shift in retail and stays known for its repair expertise and customer care.
