Taz is my workhorse. It was made by Darren Hippner, a luthier based in Point Roberts, Washington. (Point Roberts is a peninsula attached to the British Columbia mainland, accessible by land from BC, or by ferry from Bellingham, WA.) Darren is best known for classical guitars; he has made relatively few steel strings. Although Taz is an example of what Darren calls his OM model guitar, it is actually a small 00 in size.
I bought the guitar off ebay. I was quite confident that i would like the tone since at the time i owned a small Hippner parlor guitar that i liked a lot. Taz has Tazmanian blackwood (a close relative of koa) back and sides and a redwood top, both uncommon woods for guitars. The original finish on the guitar was rather disappointing — very plasticy looking, which obscured the beauty of the wood. I sanded off the finish and had a local repair person remove the bridge so that i could refinish with shellac using a French polish techinque. The French polish greatly improved the look of the back and sides. Unfortunately, an accident in the bridge reinstallation process and my own inexperience prevented me from doing a very good cosmetic job on the top. The tone, however, is excellent — mellow, with a good response throughout the spectrum.
I had David Wiseman install a K&K pure mini pickup, and have plugged in occasionally when performing.
For a while i experimented with a variation of Nashville tuning. I first replaced strings 4, 5, and 6 with strings from a 12-string set that allowed me to tune them an octave higher. Although fingered the same as standard tuning, the sound was sort of jangly because each of the major chords has a note duplicated on different size strings. I then returned to the usual on string 4, so that only strings 5 and 6 were an octave higher. A number of songs were quite interesting in this tuning. However, i have since returned to standard tuning, using my usual John Pearse 550SL Phosphor Bronze strings.