HT-SAKURA N,S/ATB

A travel guitar with a Cherry tree wood side and back

The Cherry tree wood not only gives us a stunning appearance but also thanks to the material being reasonably hard, it also gives us a bright and sharp sound, making it a good fit for either fingerpicking or strumming.

The ultimate travel guitar

HT shape stands for “Headway Tiny”

Headway master-builder Arata Furihata was both in charge of the main design and most of the important parts of the production.

Compared to the regular ATB series models that have a production rate of around 30 units a month, the HT models do not use molds for their shape and are made completely by hand, so only a couple can be made a month.

In the picture above we can see the iron mold used to make the HN shaped models. An additional spacer is added to the HN type to further reduce the neck side and body end side.

First, the side plate cooked in boiling water is bent with an HN shaped iron mold, and the plate bent into the HN shape is further bent manually into the HT shape. A bent plate that has been heated once will move to return to its original state if left as it is. Then, as you can see in the picture, we insert the bent plate into an HN + HT attachment mold, and glue and fix it together with the neck block and end block.

This is how we make every single HT model, one by one by hand. The design focus was on one point: How to achieve the challenge of "combining the ease of use of a small body with the rich tone of a full-size guitar".

We determined that a scale of 610 mm is the smallest we could go before the sound becomes weaker. As for the size of the body end, in order to maintain the volume feeling of the guitar sound including the low range, we downsized as much as we could.

Please don’t miss the chance to try this unique combination created by Furihata.