When I made my first guitar there was only one book available on how-to-make-one: Irving Sloane’s Classic Guitar Construction, published in 1966. Now there are more than two dozen – not counting scores more of table-top books about collectors’ guitars, this or that factory’s most prominent models, lists of various makers and their work, famous players and their guitars, etc. And there will be yet more. As far as how-to-make-a-guitar goes, those books list the same cutting, shaping, and assembly instructions, albeit differently worded and with different photographs.
Sloane’s book included a bit of history and background about other makers, as well as a section on how to make one’s own tools and jigs. Most of the newer books don’t include much ancillary information (design basics, the physics of energy-use in the guitar, engineering considerations of structures, guitar history and development, musical uses of the guitar, fine points of action and intonation, different bracing layouts, who’s who and who pioneered in what, other sources of information, acoustics, monocoques, different technologies, etc.). You’d think that a luthier would be better at his work if he knew his guitar and its history better.
SOME THOUGHTS ON GUITARS AND SOUND
Learning about the people who play different kinds of guitar, and their music, does make one a better guitar maker. Better technically? you ask. Well, no; but it certainly helps one to respect the guitar’s enormous appeal, sticking power, complexity, and versatility. It helps to know, for instance, that the classical guitar community — as a culture — pays more attention to a guitar’s sounds than the steel string/folk guitar playing communities do. In my experience, in fact, most steel string/folk guitar players don’t know how to listen to a guitar, or what to listen for – which is a topic I’ve written about elsewhere. They learn what notes to play, ¾ time or 4/4 time, and fingering variations, about volume, etc. But they tend to not have much of a vocabulary for sound. The reason for this difference is twofold. First, steel string/folk guitar music has focused mostly on rhythm, melody, and song — that is, on the music and the song. But not so much on its musicality.
The other reason is that music for the classical guitar is purposefully written with the intent of expressing a wider and subtler range of the tonal/emotional spectrum. This involves learning about, and appreciating, music’s and the guitar’s musicality – which includes orchestration, dynamic range, composition, warmth, projection, evenness of tonality across the strings and up and down the fretboard, etc. Or, in other words, the qualities of the sounds that can be produced – and the playing techniques that will produce the widest range of tonalities . . . whether in single notes or various notes played at the same time.
These are more the focus of the classical music appreciator. Subtleties of techniques are learned and used to express nuances of tone and shadings of sound, from warm to mellow to sweet to staccatto or con brio, or sharp, cold, lingering, as well as dynamic range, tonal bloom, soothing, harmonics, harsh, crescendo & diminuendo, vibratto, etc. To further complicate things, while music for the majority of people everywhere contains song, European culture also has had a soloist-to-orchestral class tradition of music without song. And music without voice accompaniment can offer a palette of the subtle tonal aspects of musical sound (more so in the nylon string guitar than the steel string one) that can please the experienced ear – just as the subtleties of wine can please the experienced palate, and the subtleties and textures of food taste can please a gourmand.
[SIDEBAR: It is true that these enjoyments of the more rarified aspects of musical tone can make such people feel superior to ordinary people. But other groups of “ordinary” people can in turn ignore that group with equal ease because they have songs that they can all enjoy, love, and sing. I mean, how many upper-crust wives sing, or even just hum opera, or Bach, or Chopin as they . . . uh, well, their servants, actually . . . make lunch or dinner?]
A guitar’s Dynamic Range contains many tonal elements. It refers to the range of sound that is available depending on whether one is playing gently or normally or vigorously. Then, a guitar’s own palette of tone coloration (as opposed to just volume or balance) comes out of how its strings are plucked or stroked with different amounts of energy, or plucked with the flesh of the finger or a fingernail or a plectrum – and even the material that the plectrum is made of — or even plucked at different distances from the bridge. In a musical culture it’s the difference between (1) it’s this note instead of that one, and don’t worry about anything else, and/or (2) it’s this note played like this, and/or (3) it’s played like this or like that, but not this other way [ENDNOTE 1].
ENDNOTE 1: The topic is variety and range of tone as a focus of playing technique. There is a difference in how “serious” and “the other” musics are taught. For the “serious” music, the teacher of course tells the student how the music should be played; but he also tells the student how the music should sound at various points. The written music itself tells the player how it should sound at various points, because the composer wanted certain musical effects in place — such as suggested tempo, accents, rubato (delayed notes), staccato, loud or quiet or really quiet (forte, piano, & pianissimo). getting loud or even louder or quiet or even quieter (crescendo & diminuendo), speeding up or slowing down, etc. The “non-serious” music teacher, in contrast, places more focus on what and where the notes and chords in the piece are than what its specific qualities of tone should be. There’s a lot of overlap between these two . . . but there is different emphasis too.
These things are themselves based in the nature of these different musics. Music for the “serious” classical guitar is informed by, and participates, in the music of the classical composers (Bach, Mozart, etc.), and Renaissance music, and modern atonal (Satie, Antheil) music, as well as Romantic, Ukranian, Russian (Scriabin, Stravinsky), Experimental, Modern, Spanish, Expressionistic, Twelve-tone, Early 20thcentury (Fauré), etc. If you go to Wikipedia you can read about classical guitar composers from seventy countries, who have added something to the oeuvre, each with their own “flavoring”. And not only are different national tonalities expressed in such musics, but the emotional range of the music is quite wide as a result. It can be happy, sad, frightening, inspiring, meditative, mysterious, warm, abstract, distant and alienated, tender, seductive, screechy, descriptive of the outdoors, expressive of solitude, harmonious, dissonant, auspicious, sweet, heartbreaking, intimidating, sensuous, portentious, spiritual, soothing, languorous, hair-raising, exciting, boring, climactic, heady, thunderous, contrapuntal, smoothly melodic, dramatic, ominous, Cosmic . . . and so on. To have a bit of a sense of this, treat yourself to listening to “Peter and the Wolf” by Sergei Prokofiev. It’s a kaleidoscopic hoot . . . and it’s really good music too. And listen to music by Aaron Copeland.
This is all, honestly,