Can your Guitar be Vegan? It’s an interesting question considering the modern focus on healthy eating patterns. Let’s take a look at what to consider if you have the urge to make your guitar Vegan:
Before we get into the details it would be important to be clear on the definition of what a Vegan is.
“A person who does not eat or use animal products.”
Wood
The first and most obvious choice would be to look at the wood of your guitar. With so many to choose from and most of them as beautiful as the next, it’s safe to say, we are Vegan-friendly when it comes to wood. The woods for our beautiful guitars do not come from animals. A point for the guitar heroes!
Strings
Secondly, let’s talk about your guitar strings.
Gut strings are derived from the small intestines of a sheep. This means that your guitar isn’t Vegan if you prefer the gut strings often used on bowed instruments. The flamenco flick doesn’t seem so sweet on those gut guitar strings anymore hey!? It wasn’t until around 1948, due to restrictions from World War 2, that the Nylon string was put into production. The strings are made of a Nylon Polymer which is a thermoplastic. Good news for us, no animal products.
Nylon strings make your guitar Vegan. Steel strings are derived from an alloy of Iron. It has evolved over the years and this was amplified due to the introduction of the electric guitar as well as acoustic guitars that used steel strings. This also caused the introduction of the bronze and nickel wound steel strings. Steel strings make your guitar Vegan. If you are interested in checking out the above information in more detail, check out this website for a history on strings: https://acousticmusic.org/research/guitar-information/guitar-strings/
Mother of Pearl
The problem comes in the form of the beautiful details of the upper-end guitars. Mother of pearl inlays on the guitar fret board, beautifully dancing its way around the sound hole of acoustics, and sometimes gracing the tuning pegs with its glorious pearlescent shimmer. Mother of pearl is defined as; a smooth shining iridescent substance forming the inner layer of the shell of some molluscs, especially oysters and abalones, used in ornamentation, and in our case, on guitars. This does NOT make your guitar Vegan.
Vegan-Made Guitars
This is obviously a topic that has got people thinking. Is there a market for Vegan guitars? This company certainly thinks so. Check out Bedell Guitars: https://bedellguitars.com/guitars/series/black-bird
These guys have a vegan series of guitars that are guaranteed to make sure you are living the healthiest and least impactful lifestyle possible. Your guitar can make you Vegan!
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This article is pretty good, I definitely learned some things, but you have made one glaring omission: Nut Material.
A lot of high end and vintage guitars use bone nuts, and ivory nuts can also be found on older instruments
Thanks! Yeah the nut was an oversight but a simple fix with TUSQ (bone like material) from Graphtech can sort this out.