La 10th édition of Paris Guitar Festival gave AWARDS for the second time :

• The 2022 Belle Guitare Prize (public award)

• The 2022 Innovation Prize (jury award) postponed to 2023 - Covid 19 – 

Belle Guitare Award : DE LEEUW GUITAR

Innovation Prize criteria :

• Presence of a process that increases or adds or modifies the sound characteristics of the instrument
• Presence of any other material* that increases, adds or modifies the sound or comfort of the instrument
• Original manufacturing (shape, size, instrument making) which increases, adds or modifies the sound and/or the comfort of the instrument.
• We will take into account the years of marketing 2019 / 2020 / 2021

Jury Member :

• Jacques Carbonneaux : Vice-president of the APLG, project manager at the CSFI and co-founder of the fair of the beautiful guitar – jury president
• Eric Gombart : profesional guitarist 
• Samuel Strouck guitarist composer, musical arranger, artistic director and producer artistique
• Pierre Journel : journalist, editor-in-chief of the guitar channel. 

Additional information on the composite material as a substitute for spruce

“It is a composite material, that is to say a combination of several materials which together have properties superior to each taken separately. This consists of several layers of flax, a lightweight, fast-growing material (here Paulownia, but it can be balsa, but also recycled plastic foams or even polystyrene), and in the last layer, a peeled or sliced ​​wood veneer , a way of sampling with little loss of material. Everything is coated in a matrix that will glue each fold together. The matrix is ​​composed of a very reactive resin and hardener, which will react together and stabilize in the final shape. This reaction takes place at room temperature. Faced with the very large number of possibilities when making a material from elementary bricks, we used a method that allowed us to anticipate the vibratory behavior of the soundboards in advance. For this we try to copy the mechanical behavior of a spruce top, in any case try to be as close as possible to it, enough so that it does not shock. This approach is called virtual prototyping. We then obtain a set of suitable possible recipes. Five instruments were made by the guitar section of ITEMM. This is the minimum number to then be able to make statistically valid comparisons, when comparing with five other guitars that will be made of wood. The objective is to check whether the musicians can tell the difference or not. ITEMM is currently working on the quantitative comparison between composites and solid wood, from an economic, energy, ecological, durability, resistance, repairability, feasibility, etc. point of view.” by innovation space of ITEMM responsable

An exceptional honorary award

The members of the jury were also unanimous on the fact of rewarding the exceptional work carried out by the luthier Fred Kopo since the end of the 80s with a double innovation: the use of flax fiber for the body of its instruments and a brand new architecture of acoustic guitars with, among other things, remote hearing.