Italian Alpine Spruce

Italian Alpine Spruce: a world-renowned typical italian product 

The soundboard is undoubtedly the most important part for the acoustics of a stringed musical instrument and that is where Spruce is mostly employed.

The great Italian violin making tradition has made the Italian Red Spruce known throughout the world.

We specialize in “Red Spruce” (Botanical name: Picea Excelsa o Picea Abies) and our supply comes from the North Eastern area of the Italian Alps, on the Dolomites, a place of excellence for this type of wood: the trees there grow at high altitude, from above 1400 up to 1800 meters. 

The dry climate, the long and cold winters, and a vegetative time of only 100 days a year induce a slow and regular growth. The growth time to obtain a violin or guitar log is about 150 to 200 years, and even more for a cello log. 

Among this large variety of woods, the Italian Alpine Spruce is our most important product: more elastic by nature and better at transmitting sound, it has proven to be exceptional throughout the Italian instrument making tradition.  

The average size of the Italian Spruce is much smaller and less regular than others kinds of Spruce, like Sitka Spruce for example.

However, there is no doubt that Spruce is a wood that combines extreme lightness and resistance with an excellent sound propagation capacity. 

This is what our experience - resulting from a forty years long work and daily and direct contact with our customers, stringed instrument makers from all over the world - has taught us.

Selecting Criteria:

The raw material is very important, but alone it is not enough. Strict criteria need to be complied to, in order to guarantee our customers:

- regular and narrow grain

- no twisted logs

- no knots or cracks or visible resin pockets

- perfect quarter cut

- eventual "maschiatura" or "bear claw", the typical markings of the Red Spruce, for the customers who appreciate it. 

A log in a thousand responds to all these requirements.