The LAG Sauvage-ACE — the guitar behind ASimpleGuitar

One guitar, 420 takes

When you record a sample library the way ASimpleGuitar was recorded — every semitone, every velocity layer, every articulation — you spend a lot of time with a single instrument. Every note you hear in the plugin came from the same guitar, played in the same session, in the same room. The character of the instrument is baked into every sample.

So the choice of guitar matters. A lot.

The LAG Sauvage-ACE is not the most famous guitar in the world. It doesn't have the name recognition of a Martin or a Taylor. But it has a character that suits fingerpicked recording work particularly well — and it comes with a backstory that is genuinely interesting.

Who makes LAG guitars

LAG Guitars is a French company, founded in 1981 by luthier Michel Lâg-Chavarria in Occitania — the sun-drenched southern region of France that stretches from the Pyrenees up toward the Massif Central. The company started building electric guitars by hand in a small workshop, and over the following decades grew into one of France's most recognised guitar brands.

Today LAG designs its instruments in France and manufactures them in a dedicated factory in Tianjin, China — a setup that is common across the industry and that LAG has invested in significantly, working with renowned French luthier Maurice Dupont to maintain quality control. Their guitars are sold in over 40 countries.

What sets LAG apart from many acoustic guitar makers is a willingness to do things differently. Their headstock shape, their body binding, their approach to wood selection — these are not guitars that look or feel like slightly cheaper versions of better-known instruments. They have a distinct design identity, and the Sauvage series is where that identity is most visible.

The Sauvage series and the Green Guitars initiative

The word sauvage is French for wild, or untamed — and the series earns the name. The back and sides of a Sauvage guitar are finished with a rough-sawn texture: the wood is left raw and unvarnished, showing its natural grain and surface rather than being sanded smooth and lacquered. It looks like something that was pulled directly from a workshop rather than polished for a shop window. It is either ugly or beautiful depending on your taste, but it is undeniably its own thing.

The Sauvage series was designed around a specific environmental philosophy. Traditional guitar building relies heavily on exotic tonewoods — rosewood, ebony, mahogany — many of which come from slow-growing tropical forests that are under significant pressure from logging and habitat loss. LAG's response was to build a range of guitars that avoids these materials entirely, using alternative woods that can be sourced and processed without the same environmental cost.

The rough-sawn finish on the back and sides isn't just an aesthetic choice, either. Leaving the wood unvarnished eliminates the solvents and finishing chemicals that conventional guitar production requires in significant quantities. It is a detail that most buyers probably never think about, but it represents a meaningful reduction in the environmental footprint of the manufacturing process.

BrankoWood — the material at the heart of it

The most distinctive element of the Sauvage-ACE is a material called BrankoWood, which makes up the soundboard — the top of the guitar, the part that does most of the acoustic work.

BrankoWood was developed by Branko Hermescec, an Australian scientist who spent roughly two decades working on a process to make fast-growing, low-grade pine perform like the slow-grown tonewoods traditionally used in instrument making. The process is involved: the pine is dried to a low moisture content, then impregnated under pressure with catalytic agents and natural resins, then dried again, then impregnated again. The result is a wood that is denser, more stable, and acoustically better behaved than the raw material it started as — with tonal characteristics that have been compared to aged rosewood.

The back and sides of the Sauvage-ACE are smoked eucalyptus — another fast-growing species that doesn't require the decades of growth that rosewood or mahogany need. The neck is Khaya, a type of African mahogany that is considered a more sustainably available alternative to the South American mahogany traditionally used in guitar necks. The fretboard is Brown BrankoWood.

How it sounds

The auditorium body shape is a middle ground between the smaller parlour and the larger dreadnought. It produces a balanced, articulate tone — enough low-end body to sound full, but not so much bass that it becomes muddy in a recording. The auditorium is one of the most recording-friendly shapes precisely because of this balance. It doesn't dominate. It sits.

The rounded back is worth mentioning specifically. Where most acoustic guitars have a flat back, the Sauvage-ACE has an arched, rounded back profile. This isn't uncommon — classical guitars and some archtops use a similar approach — but it is less usual in steel-string acoustics. A rounded back changes how the sound projects from the body, generally producing a fuller, more three-dimensional tone with a slightly different resonance character than a flat-backed instrument of equivalent size.

The BrankoWood top contributes a clarity and openness to the sound. Notes separate well. There is a natural brightness in the upper-mid frequencies that makes individual notes articulate without becoming harsh. For fingerpicking in particular — where clarity across individual notes matters more than the collective wash of a strummed chord — this works well.

The graphite nut and saddle are a practical detail: graphite is harder and more consistent than the bone or plastic used in many guitars at this price point, which helps sustain and keeps the string contact points consistent across the whole range.

Why this guitar

The honest answer is that it was the instrument at hand, it sounded good, and the more time spent with it during the recording sessions, the more clearly the right choice it turned out to be.

The tone sits in a warm, clear middle ground that fingerpicked playing suits naturally. It is not a flashy guitar. It doesn't have the projecting brightness of a spruce-topped dreadnought or the dark richness of a rosewood parlour. It has an even, balanced character that translates well to recording — one that works across a wide range of musical contexts rather than pushing strongly in one direction.

That evenness is, in retrospect, exactly what a sample library needs. A guitar with a very strong sonic personality can be difficult to fit into a variety of productions. A guitar that sounds clean, warm, and natural leaves more room for the music around it. Every sample in ASimpleGuitar carries the character of this instrument, and that character is, as it turns out, a good one to carry.