Every design is made to a tender. A list of properties of the finished product. The goal for the Dorian guitars was not to design a new guitar, but one that was to combine as many desirable traditional characteristics, as possible. It was to sound and feel like a number of different iconic vintage guitars, rolled into one. On the spectrum of product-market combinations, it would be situated between hi-end boutique guitars, and original vintage guitars. Electric guitar players are a conservative bunch. That does not mean that we don’t like innovation, but we like the new stuff to be added on top of the familiar old stuff, but not instead of it. That goes for the new guitarists, as well.
The populace of electric guitarists gets younger, and more female, every year. Guitars no longer exclusively meet pairs of large strong hands, but delicate fast ones, as well. But still: also their taste is basically conservative. So, instead of an innovative tender, I decided to draw up a multi-conservative one, so to speak. And I wanted it to accommodate the changed target audience of women, youngsters, added to the familiar adult European male, and all left-handed players, Needless to say I ended up with a very long tender, bursting with conflict and contradiction. The sensible thing to do, after having composed an overcomplete tender, is weeding it out. You try to get rid of the apparent inconsistencies, and of all the stuff that is likely to make the design too difficult to accomplish, or the product too expensive to materialize.
For the Dorian project, I decided to skip that part, thus forcing myself to solve every conflict within the tender, instead of eliminating it. Now, that I admit is crazy, but I had my reasons. Over the years, I grew more and more suspicious of everything I thought I knew about electric guitar lutherie. The Dorian project started out a more or less hysterical rebellion against my baggage of experience, knowledge and beliefs. I got myself in for the long haul: eight years of a self-imposed regime that forbade me to cut corners. Nine frustrating prototyping stages, followed by six very rewarding ones, ending in one of the few realisations in my life I really got proud of: the Dorian Rondo. Now the funny thing: you have to innovate quite a lot, in order to achieve a very conservative result. Every feature that strikes you as new, is in fact born out of the desire to make the guitar sound and feel old. And many guitarists think of my design as innovative. I would prefer to call it conservinnovative.:-). Into the Dorian Rondo went more archeology than creativity. All the creativity got spent on making the archeology work. Sophie Dorian
