Blackbird Guitars, the San Francisco travel-guitar company founded in 2005 by luthier Joe Luttwak and Kyle Wolf, was one of the builders we caught up with at the NAMM Show. Blackbird launched with a single product at the 2007 NAMM Show, a carbon fiber travel guitar built for players who wanted something more durable than wood on the road.
From there, the company developed Ekoa, a natural composite made from flax linen and bio-resin, as an alternative to the tonewood favored by traditional builders. Blackbird’s entire line of guitars and ukuleles eventually moved from carbon fiber to Ekoa construction, built around the company’s own hollow unibody design, a single composite shell forming both the neck and body without the traditional internal bracing wood-bodied instruments rely on.
The Ekoa lineup grew to include the Clara ukulele, Blackbird’s first production Ekoa instrument, followed by full-size guitars like the Savoy parlor model and the El Capitan, the company’s first full-size guitar built entirely from the material. Each was pitched on the same idea Blackbird started with: an instrument that could hold up to temperature and humidity swings without losing the tone and feel players expected from a wooden instrument.
Blackbird Guitars has closed. A fire destroyed the company’s Mission District workshop in late October 2023, and the business never reopened; no rebuild has been announced. Luttwak has continued developing Ekoa through Lingrove, the material spinoff he launched in 2017, which now supplies the flax-based composite to architecture, furniture, and automotive interiors well beyond the guitars it started with.
Looking back at that NAMM booth now, it reads less like a new product launch and more like an early chapter in a longer story about what the material itself would become, one that has ended up in far more buildings and interiors than guitars.
