The handmade guitars we sell on the rest of this website are works of art, wonderful to play and to hear. But to take one up on stage inevitably entails some sort of compromise. As discussed in our FAQ, when trying to amplify your guitar, the closer you get to reproducing the truly warm, full tone of that full-bodied instrument, the more likely your guitar is to feed back. One solution is to use a pickup that resists feedback, but many pickups that resist feedback produce a tone that is far from natural. Renaissance Guitars are built from the ground up with this understanding: The pickup is a Turner-designed undersaddle pickup, but since the feedback resistance comes from the body design (no soundhole, plus a center block to support the bridge), the pickup is free to be as acoustic as possible.
These guitars will never be mistaken for typical acoustic guitars, nor should they be. You'll never take a Renaissance to an unplugged singalong with a bunch of friends. With no soundhole in the guitar, all they'd hear is your singing, and depending on your voice, that may be a risky proposition. But if you're looking for a handmade stage guitar that will solve your feedback problems and sound incredibly good at the same time, then you've found your answer in Rick's guitars.