Blackbird releases the Clara ukulele, a revolutionary instrument with the tone of vintage wood and the durability of cutting-edge, eco-friendly construction. Made from Ekoa – a proprietary, renewable material – the Clara is a game-changing instrument, delivering unmatched sustainability and performance.
“Blackbird has spent the better part of a decade developing small, travel-friendly, carbon-fiber instruments world class tone,” said Joe Luttwak, Blackbird’s chief musical officer. “With the Clara, musicians get what was previously unobtainable — the experience of a vintage old-growth wood instrument in a lightweight, durable, and sustainable package.”
Clara’s every detail is engineered to generate the acoustic quality of a much larger instrument. From its patented hollow-neck design to its high-tech eco-fabric and resin construction, the Clara is meticulously crafted by skilled artisans at Blackbird’s San Francisco workshop, aided by computer-driven precision technology.
Founded in 2005, Blackbird has built a loyal global following crafting uncommonly resonant and resilient carbon-fiber acoustic guitars and ukuleles. Designed for the most demanding musicians, these performance-grade, travel-ready instruments have weathered everything from packed concert halls to the brutal Antarctic winter. Building on this success, Blackbird dedicated several years of research and development to incorporating resonant eco-materials into advanced composite construction. The result of this effort is 
Ekoa — a unique, plant-based ‘tone’ material developed in San Francisco. Sustainable and renewable, lighter than carbon fiber, and extraordinarily strong, Ekoa combines the tone of vintage wood with superior responsiveness, stability and strength.
With professional-quality tone and legendary toughness in an earth-friendly compact package, Clara will no doubt inspire artists and adventurers alike.
The Clara concert ukulele starts at $1150. The inital limited production of fifty include a premium reinforced soft case.
ABOUT BLACKBIRD
Blackbird guitars was founded in 2005 to create a satisfying but durable travel guitar for taking out and about. Non-traditional product design and development resulted in radically new directions and a family of travel instruments that are the standard-bearers of acoustic performance.
ABOUT EKOA
Ekoa is produced in partnership with Lingrove, a distributor of natural high performance materials. It offers high performance with exceptional strength, dampening, resilience and even lighter weight than carbon fiber. Like all composite materials, Ekoa is made up of fiber reinforcement fabric in resin matrix, but one that is worker and planet-friendly. The plant-based fabrics and biobased resins have a beautiful designer material quality, which does not always require finishing along with distinct performance advantages over other composites. The Clara ukulele, is the debut application of Ekoa which is suitable for numerous other applications from sports equipment to furniture.
Source
Blackbird guitars, press release, 2013-11-19.
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