Alvarez MPA66ESHB Masterworks Acoustic Guitar Shadowburst Gloss Alvarez

The stunning MPA66ESHB Parlor offers simply incredible craftsmanship, tone and beauty. Our flawless Shadowburst finish looks fantastic over the solid mahogany top, and the hand-crafted Paua abalone purfling frames the body beautifully. This acoustic-electric version is fitted with the fantastic LR Baggs Element pick-up and StagePro EQ for optimal live performance.

We created our Masterworks Series to be the best value all-solid guitar line available to players today. Their specification is incredibly high in relation to their cost and they perform as all-solid professional guitars should, with fantastic response and projection.

Nothing can really match a guitar made from all-solid wood. The deflection of the notes is quicker, the quality of the sound is better, you can obtain optimal response and the sound of your guitar only improves as it ages.

After 55 years of making guitars, continual improvement through the use of emerging technologies, processes, and materials is still at the heart of our culture. Alvarez guitars are constructed correctly in every sense, from raw material preparation to construction and manufacturing processes.

Our tonewoods are carefully cured; our components such as neck blocks and wood joints are carefully designed. The painting, sanding and polishing techniques we use are continually researched and developed, and our tone is impeccably crafted and married to a stable, consistent and lively soundbox.

This caring approach to development comes from one simple goal: To deliver the best guitars in the market at every price point, instruments that are truly amazing value and offer a fantastic player experience.

The term “all-solid” refers to the guitar top, back and sides being made of solid wood rather than laminated. However, even when the guitar is made of all solid tonewood, it only performs to its full potential when it is designed to get the best out of its materials and components. The tops we use in Masterworks are premium grades, which means we can make them slightly thinner to heighten vibration. The radius of both the top and back are also refined to help increase volume.

Each guitar is designed to get the best out of its components, and for them to work together. These components include our FS6 bracing system, bi-level bridges, real bone nuts and saddles, carefully seasoned tonewoods and a thin finish.

FS6 is a forward shifted X brace design. This means the axis of the X is closer to the soundhole, creating a larger soundboard area to harness more energy and vibration. Both the X braces and asymmetric tone bars are carefully scalloped, a design that was the result of continual development in our Yairi workshops. Our FS6 system brings uniformity across Dreadnought, Grand Auditorium, OM and Parlor body sizes, so that the voicing has a similar character, but the individual tone is more purely influenced by the size and shape of the guitar.

The Masterworks personality is open and powerful. FS6 also creates very good balance so both the treble and bass registers are clearly present and balanced in relation to each other. All of our tops are selected by our team and graded independently of our suppliers, then cured with care using traditional ovens and modern thermo-kilns.

Along with a more angled headstock, our bi-level bridge increases string tension by making the break angle of the strings from the saddle to the top more acute. Improved string tension adds to our sound, feel and response, which are also heightened by the use of real bone nuts and saddles.