Suhr Modern Custom | Waterfall Burl Maple (Special Selection Top)

This Custom Suhr Modern features an extraordinary Special Selections Waterfall Burl Maple top, personally hand-selected by us during our visit to the Suhr factory. What sold us on this piece was the big amber patch in the figure. We asked Suhr to put it right in the dead center of the body so the grain would look like it was bursting out from under the strings. They nailed it.

And just look at the back. The two-piece Black Limba body has these long, dark chocolate streaks running through the golden wood, right from the tips of the horns down to the bottom edge. Around the cutaways, those lines bend and fan out with the carve. The natural gloss lets you see every bit of it, and the scraped binding gives you a crisp line where the maple meets the Limba.

Then there’s that Macassar Ebony fingerboard. A broad copper-brown ribbon starts right at the nut and runs down the board, narrowing and curling through the darker grain as it gets closer to the pickups. You can see that contrast even in the full-length shots, and it’s wild up close. The mother-of-pearl dots sit right against that striped grain, and the matching Waterfall Burl Maple headstock brings the look of the top all the way up the guitar.

We spec’d it with a satin roasted maple neck, Suhr’s Modern Elliptical profile, a 10"–14" compound radius, and 24 jumbo stainless steel frets. A Thornbucker in the neck and Thornbucker Plus in the bridge are wired to a five-way blade with volume and tone controls. The gold two-post tremolo and Suhr locking tuners pick up the warmer tones in the wood. We built this one around that particular piece of maple, and the Limba and ebony ended up being two of our favourite things about it.