esomogyi – Page 3 – Ervin Somogyi

THE MODERN GUITAR: AN ICON OF ROMANCE AND HEROISM

I’ve spent close to fifty years by now being fascinated by the six-string guitar, exploring its possibilities, and making various versions of it — despite the fact that underneath it all it is no more than a long-term but nonetheless a contemporary convention and a fad, and not essentially different from propeller airplanes, typewriters, lutes, galleons, vinyl records, bows and arrows, and the Roman Empire. It is simply a wonderful, useful, interesting, and effective cultural element and icon of our times . . . but by any long-range measure it is surely impermanent, and temporary.

The guitar as we know it is only some 170 years old and has ALREADY morphed into something that the originators would only recognize with difficulty. At the same time the challenges of daily life, of growing up, of finding meaning and significance, of the interactions between the sexes, of personal gain and loss, of identity, and the problems family and money and survival and responsibilities and bringing up children . . . are permanent and are the stuff of life itself. The guitar itself, morphed or not, is only a part of all that.

MORPHY’S LAW

Speaking of the guitar’s having morphed, it’s morphed very interestingly. Let’s start with the fact that the humble guitar started out as something to plunk, twang, and strum songs on, and nothing more. I mean, Antonio Torres, the man who “invented” the modern guitar, was a carpenter, for cryin’ out loud, so there wasn’t much of a bottom line attached to making guitars. There were proto-guitars and guitar-like stringed instruments, but nothing approaching even a hobby as far as the modern guitar is concerned!

Actually, I mis-spoke with my comment on the guitar being useful for twanging and plunking on; that was mostly true of the American steel string guitar. The precursor of the Spanish guitar was being used early on to compose and play sophisticated melodies on; this speaks to the different cultures that had adopted the guitar; there were people even then who saw serious musical possibilities in it. Then, eighty-plus years later, about the time the guitar was beginning to be electrified, the acoustic steel string guitar’s voice began to be heard for the first time by itself and without accompanying instruments — in the singing cowboy movies of the 1930s and 1940s. You know: the ones where the good guy — the one with the white hat — fought off the black-hatted evil guys and through sheer virtue and pluck overcame them and won. As it happens, these movies served a social need. They came to the fore in the Depression-era social landscape in which people needed something to feel hopeful about. And Hollywood capitalized on that — and singing cowboys became stars!

At the ends of these morality-with-six-guns films the triumphant hero would pull his guitar out and sing a song. And instead of riding off into the sunset with the girl he departed with his horse and his guitar . . . with his sexual virtue intact. These movies were chaste; there was no sex in them and the hero’s chief love object was his horse. I can tell you with authority that that formula really works for ten-year olds. And it certainly did so for an American population that was beaten down by the Great Depression and sorely needed heroes and upbeat entertainment . . . especially when no one knew that the actors and actresses were, in real life, fucking like rabbits when off-camera.

And then, in the early 1950s, Elvis Presley came along and shocked everyone by swaying his hips seductively and strumming on his guitar on national television; it was the first time a whole lot of people had ever heard the guitar’s voice more or less by itself. In any event, while this history has failed to give the acoustic steel string guitar anything like the cachet of sophistication that the classic guitar has managed to attain, it did something else just as remarkable: it has driven the steel string guitar deeply and indelibly into people’s minds as something associated with the honest, hard-working, always-acting-in-good-faith-against-strong-odds working man and good guy. And winning.

Consider this: not one of you reading this has EVER seen ANY movie, film, or stage play, or tuned in to ANY TV show, or read ANY magazine or book … in which the bad guy plays the acoustic guitar.

It just isn’t done. The acoustic guitar is the hero’s instrument. The bad guy plays the piano, the organ, or the ELECTRIC guitar. Check this out for yourselves.

Wow.

DEAR DR. DOVETAIL, Part 2

Dr. Dovetail is a [humorous] advice column for luthiers. It consists of some earnest letters of inquiry that Dr. Dovetail has been helpful with.

Be it noted that no one is named who has objected to their name being used, and other names have been disguised to protect the innocent. There is no subtext, there are no hidden messages, there is no weirdness or backstabbing going on outside of my own silliness. If I really don’t like someone, I certainly don’t make fun of them in public. I go after them in sneaky ways.

On the other hand, nothing is trickier than writing humor. It’s more difficult than any other kind of writing; it’s impossible to not offend someone, no matter how hard you try. So if this isn’t going to be quite your cup of tea, please don’t read on.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I recently bought a Ribbecke guitar with a huge bulge in the lower bout on the treble side of the face, at my local flea market. The guy selling it said it didn’t need de-warping ‘cause it was made like that. He said it was a bubbled-top guitar. What’s the deal with this?

Signed: Bubbles, in Champaign (Illinois)

Dear Bubbles in Champaign:

What you have in your hot trembling hands, you lucky innocent, is one of the Ribbecke bubble-top guitars, manufactured in the 1970s. The genesis of the design is obscure: at first it was thought to be simply a metaphor for the essential post-modern deconstructionist paradigm. However, industrial sources report that it was the result of a search for a way to make guitars more sexy by giving them cleavage, and Ribbecke’s bulgey design ultimately provided the inspiration for the Miracle Bra. Having only a single bubbled mound on the treble side, however, these early attempts at representing cleavage came off as rather half-assed.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

Having been a member of the National Luthier’s Guild for some years now I’m puzzled by the fact that its publication, Guitarmaker, is only published a few times a year. Other magazines are published at least six times a year, if not monthly or even weekly, and, given the sheer amount of interest in lutherie and woodworking out there, I’d expect that there would be more than enough material available to publish an informational journal more frequently. What is the explanation for such a lapse?

Signed: Elmore Pulitzer

Dear Elmore:

Being a somewhat in-house publication, it is felt that the normal rules and considerations don’t apply to Guitarmaker. It is furthermore felt that this publication, like other things in its publisher’s life, more than makes up in size and quality for what it lacks in frequency.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

My wife recently surprised me by buying me a Humphries “millennium” guitar. The sense of occasion of the moment, unfortunately, was somewhat blunted by our getting into a heated argument about when the millennium actually began: in 2000, or in 2001? If I’m right, my wife threatens to return the “millennium” guitar and says I’m free to repurchase it myself on any date I wish. Can you help clarify this most vexing situation?

Signed: Stanley Kubrick (no, not that one)

Dear the-other-Stanley:

No need to worry: no actual, current time line is violated in the purchase of a Humphreys millennium instrument. Because the cachet of the current new millennium had already been co-opted by numerous commercial franchise ventures which had bought all rights to it, Mr. Humphreys’ guitars actually refer to the third millennium B.C.,which was still up for grabs. Keep your guitar and enjoy it. We understand these guitars are really great for playing old-timey music.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I keep hearing that luthiers and lutherie folks are diamonds in the rough. That is, lots of them don’t have a lot of formal schooling, but they’re really smart anyhow. Are any members of this group particularly educated in a formal way, and how well did they do academically before they went in for lutherie work?

Signed, P.H. Dee, PhD

Dear P.H. Dee:

Todd Taggart quickly comes to mind. He’s often told us that he was in the top 98% of his graduating class.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I’ve been excited to hear about Julian Gaffney’s new all-Brazilian-rosewood (top, back, sides, neck, braces, bridge and case) guitars, but have been hearing mutterings of dissatisfaction about these instruments. What gives? Brazilian rosewood isn’t all that bad a bad wood, is it?

Signed, Rio Janeiro

Dear Rio Janeiro:

We can only say that, for reasons which we don’t have the space to get into, it is generally felt that with the recent release of his “Save the Rainforest” line of Presentation Model all-Brazilian-rosewood guitars this man has hit rock bottom and begun to excavate.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I’ve been on the periphery of the world of lutherie for quite some time and informally followed the careers, successes and failures of some of the more prominent members of the guitarmaking community. I couldn’t help noticing that Ericson Reid, who had been active in guitarmaking and finishing, seems to have dropped out of sight. Does anyone know why?

Signed, Nah Yusseem Nahwa-Yudunt

Dear Nah Yusseem:

This firmly-established luthier made a bad mistake some time ago in building a guitar for a very important client who was connected with the Mob. He mistook the massage lotion for the wood glue and used it on that project. These substances look quite alike, you know, and this is an easy mistake to make. I’ve done it myself. Anyway, this individual had to leave town quickly and has gone into the Federal Luthier’s Protection Plan, and no one knows his whereabouts. We think he may have been sent to Costa Rica to work anonymously.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I’ve been hearing a lot about Ervin Somogyi lately: his unusual sense of design, his controversial politics, his pioneering nontraditional methods, his eccentric teaching style, his checkered work ethic, his highly Bohemian manners of personal behavior, his groundbreaking body of work, and the heroic array of medications that keep him going. This guy has made quite a splash. I hear he started out with nothing. Is this true?

Signed, Gudfur Nottingham

Dear Gudfur:

Yes. And common sentiment is that he still has most of it.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

How long have Alembic guitars been around? I seem to have heard about them all my life. And didn’t Rick Turner make them?

Signed, Old Timer

Dear Old Timer:

Turner guitars have indeed been around for a long time. As a matter of fact, diggers at a prehistoric archeological site in North Central Southeastern Germany recently unearthed a perfectly preserved petrified wood Rick Turner guitar. Experts said it was the earliest example of a rock guitar they’d ever seen.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

Why do archtop guitars have so much bigger pegheads than regular acoustic guitars?

Signed, Angelerenzorinaldi Manuelmauriccio

Dear Mr. Manuelmauriccio:

It’s because Italians have such long last names.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I’ve been trying to come up with a great, socko byline for my guitars, but I’m hitting a brick wall. All the good slogans have been taken. Do you have any advice for me?

Signed, Looking for a good Line

Dear Looking:

Before Boaz El-Laskin got on the bandwagon with his new slogan “Guitars so good you’ll plotz!” he was going to use “Miracle Guitars: if it sounds good, it’s a Miracle!”. This was originally intended to be marketed to seminary students, but he changed his mind after rethinking his demographic. It’s become available should you want it. Also, we hear that D. Angelico Corleone was going to release his new “il Padrone” model along with the slogan A Guitar You Can’t Refuse. But, since his mysterious disappearance, that one seems to be available as well.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I’ve been hearing about Larry Robinson’s inlay work for a long time and I finally got a hold of some of his books. Wow. Where does he come up with these complicated, intertwined, colorful designs and images? But aren’t they a bit on the busy side?

Signed, Snowblinded by m.o.p.

Dear Snowblinded:

Well, yes, but overall there’s general agreement that Robinson’s work is quite a lot better than it looks.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I’m a wealthy collector of fine things who is considering buying some guitars. My problem is that the most expensive guitars are made of rosewood, and my home is decorated in Danish modern style, so the guitars really wouldn’t match the décor. Do you have any suggestions?

Signed, Max from the Hamptons

Dear Max:

Why yes, I do, and your timing in asking this couldn’t be more perfect. Luddite’s Mercantile Inc. wood supplier in Healdsburg, California, has just received a large shipment of extremely expensive Brazilian rosewood which was recently culled from a pocket of the Amazon basin in which there has previously been little logging activity. This new wood is quite amazing. Far from looking like the same old dark Brazilian rosewood which everyone has been using for years, different samples of this new wood have the appearances of Danish maple, oak, Finnish birch, Dutch mahogany, and even Swedish chromed metal. Our staff feels that guitars made from unique materials would undoubtedly make the perfect accent statements to go with your couch, curtains, or gazebo.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I haven’t seen any of the Greedlove guitars around in a while and I heard that the company went out of business. What gives?

Signed, I. M. Curious

Dear I. M. Curious:

Unfortunately Greedlove & Co. got involved with the advertising company that was also Enron Corporation’s former Public Relations organ. Everything started to fall apart when, through the error of a dyslexic adman, the advertising for their new Domed-Top Guitars was spelling “domed” with a double “o”.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I‘ve been a guitar maker for a while now, but I’m finding the politics and egos involved are complicating my enjoyment of the work much more than I ever thought such things could. What advice do you have for a young guy with the hots to make it in this game, but doesn’t want to either take sides, get politicized, or alienate some people?

Signed, Disconcerted Dave

Dear Disconcerted Dave:

There are Four Golden Rules to follow in negotiating the complications and pitfalls of working with others. First, look for the humor in every situation. Second, don’t take sides. Third, never tell people everything you think.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I’m a bit disconcerted by the entry of so many foreigners into guitar making. Used to be that it was only real Americans that did this work — for instance like Roy Noble, one of the real old timers.

Signed, Patriotic

Dear Patriotic:

Yeah, I know what you mean, but in this case I have to pop your balloon. Roy Noble’s family originally came from Eastern Europe, where their family name was Nobulshitzky. They shortened the name to something easier to pronounce when they arrived here.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I’ve been reading Al Carruth’s articles for years now with increasing fascination. He has the most impressive grasp of musical acoustics and dynamics, and all done from a very scientific point of view. Yet, outside of his brilliant writings, no one I’ve talked to seems to know much about him. What can you tell me about this intriguing but shadowy figure?

Signed, Al Anon

Dear Al Anon:

In truth, Al is all but impossible to describe adequately. The best I can do is tell you the fact — widely agreed on by his friends — that if there were a contest for which First Prize would be a dinner with Al, then Second Prize would be two dinners with him. Third Prize would be three dinners with him. And so on. You get the picture.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I understand that luthier Martin Einstein has a PhD. in philosophy and is very smart. I met him once. I was standing on a ladder, trying to throw a tape measure up to the top of a flagpole, hoping to catch the flagpole’s tip. I needed to measure the flagpole’s height, you see, and I wasn’t having much luck. This fellow took one look at me and said, ‘hey, wouldn’t it be easier if you took the flagpole out of its socket, laid it out on the ground, and measured it like that?’ Then he walked on. I thought that was a pretty silly thing to say, don’t you?

Signed, Flagpoleman

Dear Flagpoleman:

Yeah. Obviously, he didn’t understand that you were trying to measure the flagpole’s height, not its width.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I’ve been hearing about something called the Doppler Guitar. Is it made by someone named Doppler? Who is he, and what are his guitars all about?

Signed, Coming & Going

Dear Coming & Going:

The Doppler guitar is the brainchild of luthier Martin Gibson. It’s based in the Doppler effect, in which objects approaching at high speed make a high-pitched sound and objects withdrawing at high speed emit a low-pitched sound — as when a car zooms past you on the highway as you are hitchhiking in the desert.

This enterprising designer saw a possibility of using this principle of physics to improve the response and tonal balance of his instruments. He is, at this time, attempting to patent a guitar the sound of which has its high end boosted as the player runs toward the audience with it; and the bass register is enhanced as one runs away from the audience, while playing the guitar. A special guitar harness is included at no extra charge, and this guitar provides something no other brand can boast of: tremendous aerobic and health benefits.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

My brother and I used to see Gustav Taylor at many guitar shows, but haven’t seen him lately. Has he dropped out? We’ve been really hoping to see and play some of his newer guitars.

Signed, Isaiah Wahoppen

Dear Mr. Wahoppen:

I’m happy to tell you that Gustav is still making great guitars. He went through a rough patch a while back and has simply found it hard to get to his tables at shows, because of all the restraining orders against him. Watch for someone who looks heavily disguised and it’ll probably be him.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I’ve been reading your column for years and I think you’re making this stuff up. No one could write real letters like this. I’d like to see what would happen if you were hooked up to a polygraph.

Signed, Wired for Soundness

Dear Wired for Soundness:

You’re not the first one to bring this concern up. Not long ago I made an appointment with a luthier-polygrapher to settle people’s suspicions once and for all. Since he too had thought that I told incredible whoppers, he hooked me up not to a polygraph but a seismograph — in anticipation of getting truer readings. The needles held rock steady.

At least, until he plugged the machine in.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

As a marketing student on my way to an M.B.A., I know that Ford, Oracle, 3-M, Toyota, Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, Pepsi-Cola, etc. have long since zeroed in on the perfect sound-byte for increasing sales and market share. I’m wondering what might be the absolute best marketing slogan you’ve ever come across from a guitar maker?

Signed, Future Biz-Whiz

Dear Future Biz-Whiz:

My personal favorite is from Ervin Somogyi’s pre-lutherie career, when he was making vacuum-cleaners. His slogan was Somogyi; Our Products Really Suck. His business went under just before the advertising campaing that was to use this line got off the ground. Too bad; he really had high hopes for it. We hear that he has been working on an entirely new model of guitar called “The Miracle Model”, to soon be marketed as “The Miracle Guitar: if it sounds good it’s a Miracle!”. We wish him luck.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

My most embarrassing moment in lutherie happened one night when, in the dark, my girlfriend and I mistook the white glue for the massage lotion. The next morning the fire department had to be called in to hose us apart. Living in a small town, everybody was there to see the show. It was really embarrassing. Say, this is the “most embarrassing moments” column, isn’t it?

Signed: Togetherness in Tillamook

Dear Togetherness in Tillamook:

It is now.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I really need help. I’m an alcoholic with a bad problem that’s getting out of control. I’d like to try one of the 12-step programs, but I can’t afford them. What should I do?

Signed, My Wood is Drier Than I Am

Dear Dryer Woods:

I’m glad you wrote, because there’s a fix. Luthier’s Anonymous offers a fifteen-percent-off, ten-step, program which has had good results. To make the transition easier, L.A. takes you off the hard stuff gradually by putting you on a temporary diet of wines which are specially developed for luthiers — and which are the same stuff the National Luthier’s Guild bigwigs enjoy at their symposiums (have you ever noticed how sober they look?). The current offerings are the award-winning Vin du Pay Forever, this year’s best near miss Chateau Clos But No cigar, the somewhat overinflated Le GrandPinot Envee’, and the perennially asymptotic Maison Clos-To-Being-Done. Good Luck!

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I’m puzzled by some aspects of Harry Fleishman’s persona. In his writings, he comes across as a thoughtful, highly professional and smart guy. But in person, when he lectures or gives classes, my impression of him is that he just woke up. Am I missing something? What gives?

Signed, Puzzled in Peoria

Dear Puzzled in Peoria:

Harry really is, in fact, a phenomenally gifted, charming, witty, and urbane man of penetrating intelligence who is, after everything is said and done, sparklingly brilliant. Because of this, the directors of lutherie events have long made it a point to ask Harry to mumble, stutter and say inane things when he makes public appearances. It makes people in the audiences not feel so bad about themselves.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

As fur as hand-applied finishes go, do ya’ think that if’n I rubbed sausage grease all over mah guitar I could call it a French Polish finish?

Signed, Jes’ Wonderin’

Dear Jes’ Wonderin’:

That does it. I quit.

DEAR DR. DOVETAIL, Part 1

Dr. Dovetail is a [humorous] advice column for luthiers. It consists of some earnest letters of inquiry that Dr. Dovetail has been helpful with.

Be it noted that no one is named who has objected to their name being used, and other names have been disguised to protect the innocent. There is no subtext, there are no hidden messages, there is no weirdness or backstabbing going on outside of my own silliness. If I really don’t like someone, I certainly don’t make fun of them in public. I go after them in other sneaky ways.

On the other hand, nothing is trickier than writing humor. It’s more difficult than any other kind of writing; it’s impossible to not offend someone, no matter how hard you try. So if this isn’t going to be quite your cup of tea, please don’t read on.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

My boyfriend is a luthier and I’ve been going to lutherie shows with him for some time now. I’ve noticed something odd going on. All the luthiers part their hair on the left. Is this some weird membership or dress code thing? Why do they all do this?

Signed, Puzzled in Topeka

Dear Puzzled:

Their mothers were all right handed.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail,

I am thinking of hiring some luthiers for my guitar factory. I have heard that Leo Buendia is a fine luthier that I should get to work for me? What do you think?

Signed, Anxious

Dear Anxious,

You will be very lucky to get this man to actually work for you and I would waste no time in hiring him.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

My teacher at the Roverto-Benn school gave me a lutherie problem to solve: A famous guitarist is playing a big concert in a renown music hall in City A at 8:00 p.m. City A is 200 miles from City B, and 300 miles from City C. A luthier in City B wants to sell the performer in question a guitar and starts hitchhiking with his guitar to City A, at noon. He averages thirty miles an hour. But, unfortunately, he forgets to take his medication along. A second luthier, in City C, also wants to sell a guitar to this musician. He starts driving his Yugo toward City A at 10:00 a.m., flooring it all the way. He averages 40 miles per hour. Unfortunately, he leaves his concert hall tickets at one of three bars he stops at to ask for directions.

Which luthier gets to the musician first and makes the sale?

Signed: Al Thumbs

Dear Al Thumbs:

Obviously, the luthier at the bar who found the mislaid concert hall tickets.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I’m a part-time luthier and computer hacker and I’ve just hacked into the central C.I.A. database files at Langley to find out what kind of dirt our top national security agency has gathered about the. board of directors of one of our larger lutherie supply organizations. Amazing!!! These people are the most incredible bunch of misfits and ne’er-do-wells I’ve ever read about. They’ve run their own businesses into the ground, cheated on their partners, colluded in price fixing of a vast array of their shoddy merchandise, have wild sex orgies at their annual sinposiums, and take drugs regularly. The most disturbing thing was that none of them seems to have ever been convicted of anything. Do these people have any previous convictions?

Signed, Amazed

Dear Amazed:

Well, yes; they all used to believe that honesty is the best policy.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I have a problem. I have two brothers. One is a luthier. The other was put to death in the electric chair for murder. My mother died in an insane asylum when I was three years old. My two sisters are both prostitutes and my father sells narcotics to high school students. Recently I met a girl from a reformatory where she served time for smothering her illegitimate child to death. I’m really in love with this girl and I want to marry her. My problem is this: if I marry her, how do I tell her about my brother who is the luthier?

Signed, Fred in Omaha

Dear Fred in Omaha:

It’ll sound better if you tell her he’s on the Board of Directors of a nationally prominent luthier’s supply organization with certain connections to a major national security organization.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I understand that individual guitar makers, having no advertising budget, are forced to market their instruments by going to guitar concerts and hawking them backstage, after the shows. Amazingly, some luthiers do very well at this. I’m told that Jason Kostal has been particularly fortunate in this method of marketing. How did he start?

Signed, For The Record

Dear For The Record:

This luthier’s early career in somewhat vague, but we have an unverified report that before he was a guitar maker he made grand pianos. He would drive them to concerts and haul them backstage to show musicians. It was working pretty well for him, but his back eventually gave out and he needed to lift lighter things.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

Supposing you are making a guitar out of Egyptian Yew and Baltic Wormwood that have a density of six point two and five point nine pounds per cubic foot, respectively, at 26 degrees centigrade and 36% humidity. The woods are worked to .130″ during light Santa Ana wind conditions in October, when Young’s Modulus for the topwood is precisely 3. The braces are made out of Thuringian poplar felled at a 7000 foot elevation in December, with a grain count of 13 per centimeter. The air cavity is 17.85 liters and the soundhole is 4.25 inches in diameter. The bridge, made from rare aged Tasmanian Devilwood, weighs 39.7 grams at sea level at 60 millimeters of barometric pressure.

What would you expect the effect on the guitar’s 0,1,1 resonance dipole to be, and also on the impedance midrange transient of the 5000 to 8000 Hertz band (including bass signature roloff), of increasing the scale of this guitar by one centimeter?

Signed, Scientific Guitarmaker

Dear Scientific Guitarmaker:

None at all, unless you put strings on it.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I’ve been reading about the Kasha bracing system, with its radial asymmetrical bracing and impedance damping split bridges. I find this radical approach thought-provoking and intriguing, as it seems to come out of a heretofore unexplored concept of guitar acoustics that has ramifications into both monocoque and structural engineering, as well as exciting implications for entirely new bracing systems. Can you explain some of the dynamics and thinking behind this important contemporary breakthrough in guitar design?

Signed, Fascinated

Dear Fascinated:

No.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

Frank Ford, of A.S.I.A.’s board of directors, is a well known repairman and an avid adherent of hide glues. He recently wrote the definitive History of Glue. Is this book any good?

Signed, Curious about Yellow

Dear Curious:

No one on the staff here could put the book down once they picked it up.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I hear Ervin Somogyi has broken ground as an artist by developing a new art form: woodcarving art inspired by the techniques and materials of lutherie work. Some people say this artwork-for-the-wall is pretty brilliant. What have you heard?

Signed, Aesthetic Woodworker

Dear Aesthetic:

The consensus in the art gallery world and among the doyens of the National Endowment is that at least Somogyi’s wall-art work, if not the man himself, is quite well hung.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I’m impressed with Michael Bashkin’s guitars, as well as his marketing acumen. He has worked hard at placing his instruments in the hands of prominent endorsers and is constantly striving to increase his market profile. What advertising blitz will we, the members of the public, be treated to next?

Signed, MBA plunker

Dear MBA plunker:

This man has really surpassed himself by recently signing an exclusive-use endorsement deal with the prestigious Gallaudet University Guitar Symphony Orchestra. They love the sound of his guitars! Look for their CD soon on the Music Mime label.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I want to buy a guitar, but am concerned that I find one that’s made with New Age Consciousness, with regard for all living things, and with an attitude of respect for the earth. What brand do you recommend?

Signed, Conscientious in Fargo

Dear Conscientious:

I’d try a Taylor. They don’t use laboratory animals to test their products. They use real consumers instead.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

It’s been a long time since anyone’s heard about Larry Robinson, the famous guitar inlay artist. He made it Big Time in the seventies and eighties, but then ran into trouble with controlled substances, gambling debts to the Mob, various nervous breakdowns which led to hospitalizations and electroshock therapy and, of course, some sexual escapades notorious to the point of becoming legendary. What ever happened to him?

Signed, Reminiscing

Dear Reminiscing:

The individual you named has really cut a wide swath through the barrel bottoms of life, there’s no denying. After several attempts at drug rehab, counseling, and ultimately finding religion, his parole officer assures us that Robinson has turned his life around a full 360 degrees.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

Me and my brother-in-law Biff went into partnership to import inexpensive Mexican guitars. Our business plan has been to rent a truck, drive to Mexico, buy a load of cheap guitars, and haul them back across the border to sell. We’ve done this a few times, buying the Mexican guitars for $50 each, driving them across the border, and selling them for $40 each, stateside. Cash flow is terrible, and we’re just scraping by. We’ve been tryin to figure out what to do about this situation. What do you think we oughtta do?

Signed, Mack from El Paso

Dear Mack from El Paso:

You obviously need a bigger truck.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I read that the National Luthier’s Guild. recently completed some rigorous controlled listening tests on guitars made by its members. What were the findings?

Signed, Acoustician in Nashville

Dear Acoustician:

The N.L.G. found that Nothing sounds better than a Manzer guitar. Much better, in fact.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

It’s always interesting to know how various prominent luthiers got their start. After all, it’s not as though one could go to school to learn these skills, until recently, and all the old timers segued into guitar making from something else. One of the most fascinating individuals on the scene is Kasha Michael, who heads a world-famous enterprise that carries his name: how did he get his start in designing and making soundboxes?

Signed, Anecdotally Curious

Dear Anecdotally Curious:

He started out making caskets for dead pets.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

The name C.F. Martin is known the world over. The first initial stands for “Christian”. It seems to me that to have four generations of the most famous guitar making dynasty in the world having this name can’t be an accident in this day and age. Do you know anything about the nexus between Christianity and guitars, which this name suggests? There’s probably a significant history, perhaps even an entire metaphysic, involved. Can you cast any light on this?

Signed, Christian luthier

Dear Christian luthier:

There’s been a lot of speculation about the nexus. You can read all about it in the recently published The Day Christ Died: The Real Story Behind “X” Bracing, which is available through The Luddite’s Mercantile catalogue.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I’ve been following Lewis Santer’s career for some years now, and I’m really impressed with his work. What accounts for his fabulous success as a repairman?

Signed, Motown groupie

Dear Motown groupie:

This man’s work is motivated by an attitude of extremely conscientious, almost compulsive, carefulness and fastidious attention to the smallest details. Why, he’s so meticulous that when he misplaces something, the place he finds that thing is not the last place he looks— just to make certain he didn’t lose it somewhere else! No one else we know of functions at this level.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I’m a psychologist and part-time luthier. In doing archival research for my doctor’s thesis in weird personality disorders, I’ve stumbled onto the fact that Bick Doak, who is associated with the Marlin Guitar Company’s custom shop for many years, once aspired to become an engineer as well as a writer of literature. He wrote at least one book in which he tried to combine engineering, fiction, ethics, marine science, whaling, theology and topology, but it seems to be out of print and I can’t find any references to it tell me what it was about either. Can you help?

Signed, Rosewood Sheepskin Man in Tulsa

Dear Rosewood/Sheepskin:

Mr. Doak has indeed had a varying palette of interests in his past lives. The book you refer to is Mobius Dick, (or What Goes Around Comes Around), which became an obscure but intensely studied cult classic some years ago. It was unfortunately doomed by vicious academic infighting between the engineering and ethics departments of the Universities at which the book was taught, that culminated in the unfortunate and subsequently hushed-up lawsuit between the Vatican and M.I.T. Psychologists have argued that the book, which carries the author’s first name in its title, is autobiographical. Pirated versions can still occasionally be found on the Vatican’s website. Mr. Boak is presently working on a specialty catalogue of inexpensive woods and materials for the guitar maker, titled Cheap Thrills In The Woodshop. We can hardly wait for it to come out.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

Many luthiers have had previous careers in everything from business to photography to the arts, and have been successful in these. Furthermore, when they become guitar makers they often bring specific skills and attitudes from their former occupations with them, and use these to great advantage in mastering the skills of lutherie. I understand that one of the most prominent female luthiers on the scene today used to be a lawyer. What legal skills did she transfer over?

Signed, tax-accountant/guitar maker

Dear tax-accountant:

She actually wasn’t ever a lawyer: she was a dyslexic law student who dropped out when she found out she wouldn’t ever be joining the American Bra Association. But, even so, she did have a bit more trouble at first than the average second-careerist in transferring her legal skills over into lutherie. Due to a semantic misunderstanding, she believed that her guitars’ ease of playability needed to be actionable. She made many like that.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I went to the opening of a fancy new yuppie restaurant in my town and was attended by a most attractive waitress. When she asked me what I wanted I told her that I wanted a quickie from her, and she slapped me. She said that she didn’t do that kind of thing, and what did I want? Brought up short as much by her reflexes as by her looks, I repeated that I really did want a quickie from her. She slapped me again, and said for me to forget that, and what did I really want? I didn’t want to get hit again, so I left. What gives?

Signed, Bubba von Dresdner

Dear Bubba:

It’s pronounced keesh. We could recommend a good finishing school for you.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I’ve been hearing reports about Santer Instruments but I can’t quite get a fix on them. I hear that they have a guitar model called the “Zero Defcets”, which happens to be my name. Can you tell me something about its founder?

Signed, Zero Defcets

Dear Mr. Defcets:

Miroslav Santer is a man who has achieved the American dream. Originally an immigrant into the U.S. from New Jersey, Mr. Defcets started out with nothing. But like many self-made men he has, through sheer hard work and will power, made his way to the very highest pointof the Bell Curve.

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Dear Dr. Dovetail:

I’ve long been fascinated at how guitar making work has attracted aficionados who previously have had other jobs, interests and careers. I’m particularly fascinated at how these creative individuals have brought with them the skills and disciplines of their former work lives — be they training in fine arts, machining, architecture, pattern-making, cabinetwork, commercial design, music or physics — and adapted them to guitar making. Have any luthiers come from the automobile making industry?

Signed, Edsel from Detroit

Dear Edsel from Detroit:

Why yes, there is one prominent luthier, whom we cannot name, who has come from that well-established industry. His current main project is a guitar with listener’s-side air bags. Frankly, it’s generally felt that his instruments really do need them.

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Dr. Dovetail’s column will be continued in the second volume of this set.

What I’ve Been Up To, February 2019

I try to stay away from the news these days. The lies and lying really get to me.

Speaking of lying, there was a t.v. series called Lie To Me, starring actor Tim Roth, a while back. He played an expert in reading body language and facial expressions, who was brought in to solve a crime or mystery when something really bad had happened. Roth figured out who the bad guy was by interviewing people and following out those kinds of facial and postural clues. It was an interesting show; particularly because in explaining how various body and facial tics indicated lies, photos of various real politicians’ faces (when they were being interviewed, questioned, or just speaking) were used in illustration. My God but our leaders are brazen and mendacious.

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Having mentioned actor Tim Roth, I want to say that he starred in one of the best movies I’ve ever seen . . . and that no one has ever heard of. I found it by accident surfing channels late one night. It’s titled “The Legend of 1900” and, as I said, nobody has ever heard of it. But it’s a GREAT movie. It’s about a piano-playing prodigy who is born in the year 1900; it’s basically a romance, but without any actual romance — and with a cameo by actress Melanie Thiéry, who is one of the three most achingly beautiful females who have kept their clothes on that I’ve ever seen on a screen.

The musical high point of the film is a sequence in which the famous Jelly Roll Morton (“the Father of Jazz”) challenges the Tim Roth character to a public piano-duel. That sequence is to die for. Give yourself a treat some evening and watch this gem.

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On a different level entirely, I want to show you an image of my “Diospyros” guitar. Diospyros is the generic name for ebony, and this guitar is made up of lots of ebony tiles mixed in with contrasting tiles of Yellowheart wood. Overall, the pattern looks a bit like all the Midwest farmland that one flies over and sees if one looks out of the airplane window; or, on a different scale, a stylized version of the fitted-together-cobblestone streets one finds in Mexican towns.

This guitar was, in fact, inspired by exactly that: the appealingly geometric look of the fitted-together cobblestones one can see on Mexican streets.

There’s a bit of a story behind this, of course. Part of that story has to do with how I notice, and get distracted by, the visuals in the world around me. I notice patterns, colors, textures, proportions, disproportions, continuities and discontinuities of line, evenness and unevenness, and all kinds of beauty in things no one else seems to notice. Textural stuff REALLY grabs my eye. This propensity really gets in my way when I’m trying to get anything done; so I try to hide when I’m working so as to get away from interruptions. Interruptions REALLY kill my focus and concentration.

Anyway, I was in a relationship with a woman some years ago. As I was married at the time it was, technically, an adulterous relationship — although my wife knew about it and really didn’t care. The marriage had, how should I put it, passed its “discard after . . . “ date.

This lady and I went to Puerto Vallarta for a week’s . . . uh . . . romantic getaway. Puerto Vallarta has long ago been converted into a tourist trap and is not nearly so pleasant a place in which to spend time as the travel industry might want you to think. The tourist hotels are about a mile out of town and isolated from the riff-raff. Those resort buildings are magnificent, impressively large, and soulless. They also jettison an awful lot of sewage directly into the ocean, not far from the town. Charming, that.

Puerto Vallarta is picturesque but has the scuffed and worn look of something that’s fallen on hard times. It’s right on the ocean; but the beach sand itself is a shockingly narrow strip . . . and it’s brown and looks dirty; it looks like a brown sugar truck had a major spill there. (The tourist hotels, in contrast, had imported tons of white sand that really does look nice, although the overall effect is that of an incongruous patch of white off in the distance, in the middle of an otherwise brown landscape.)

The main industry in the town is tourism, of course: the stores, restaurants, tours, crafts objects and imported merchandise, street vendors, etc. are all geared to that. (The crowning touch is that in order for the government to protect its tourist income, Puerto Vallarta is policed by soldiers from a nearby army facility who are armed not with pistols and rifles, but with machine guns.)

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It was during this romantic getaway that I found out that I didn’t really like the woman I was with. She was . . . well, let’s just say that we were appallingly mismatched. It was sort of like going on a romantic hideaway trip and discovering that your partner is a transvestite.

This lady was smart, attractive, and, among other things, a competitive scrabble player. For months, she beat me every time we played. I didn’t really mind; I like words and playing with words, and I didn’t have anything riding on whether I won or lost. And, in any event, the more we played the better I got and the closer the gap between our scores became. We took the scrabble set down to Puerto Vallarta and it was while we were down there that I beat her at scrabble for the first time. MAN, WAS SHE PISSED! Outraged, in fact. And she had a major tantrum. Such . . . uh . . . misbehavior for such a seemingly trivial reason . . . well, it was pivotal for me. The relationship went quickly downhill after that.

In any event, after that tantrum, rather than to hang out with her, I walked around Puerto Vallarta a lot. As I walked, I noticed beautiful visual patterns and textures everywhere. I hadn’t quite realized until that week how much these things impinge on me; but IT WAS VERY PLEASANT for me to simply walk around and see the sights. I looked at wrought iron work on the houses, the colors of the buildings, the cobblestoned streets, iguanas for sale, etc. I learned a bit about Puerto Vallarta itself, too.

For instance: there are insect in that region that live in hidey-holes at the bottoms of small craters that they make in the dirt; if you go out of town you’ll see lots of these little conical craters in the soil. These “V”-sided craters are about the size of a walnut, and their sloped sides are lined with VERY FINE sand. Being fine sand, these craters are a lighter color than the surrounding dirt, and are therefore not hard to find; but of course insects don’t care about color. Anyway, when another insect walks into one of these conical depressions the sand all around is so fine that it cannot get its footing and it slides down to the bottom of the dip; then the insect jumps out of its hole, grabs the unsuspecting victim, and eats it. This predator is called a “Lolita” by the locals, by the way.

Who knew Puerto Vallartans were so literate? Anyway, it was fun to look and learn.

Fast-forward some years. I came into possession of a coffee-table book titled ARTEFACTOS, which has lots of photographs of arts and crafts artifacts from Latin America. One of the photos was of a beautiful cobblestones street of the kind I’d seen in Puerto Vallarta, where squarish and rectangular-ish stones (rather than more rounded or oval ones) were fitted together. Wow. That image just jumped out at me. And I filed that away as something that I could do something with at some point.

Fast-forward a few more years to when I had a hankering to make a guitar for myself — for no other reason than that I wanted to do something different from all the usual stuff. Enter the idea for the Diospyros guitar. The attached image is of this instrument.

I have to tell you that carrying this project out was VERY time consuming . . . but I didn’t really mind. Just like losing at scrabble. I was chasing something new simply because I really wanted to do it. And I could. And eventually the Diospyros guitar was completed.

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The thing of it is: it probably never would have been made had I not disliked that girlfriend as much as I did and stumbled on the otherwise invisible beauties of Puerto Vallarta. (I mean, who ever goes anywhere to look at pavement?) I have to tell you that in a weird way I feel indebted to her; the Diospyros came about, in part, with her unwitting help. I have more than once been struck by a philosophical sense of how an irritant can ultimately become a pearl.

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Speaking of “philosophical”, I had a Mondegreen experience with that word some years ago. A Mondegreen is a mishearing of a lyric or poetic line in which one imagines that something quite different has been said.

The Mondegreen originates from a Scottish ballad where the hero of the narrative is slain . . . “ and . . . [they] laid him on the green”. Someone heard that as “. . . and Lady Mondegreen” instead . . . and thus Mondegreens were born.

Anyway, when I was in High School there was a popular Harry Belafonte song called “Island in the Sun”. It’s a Caribbean tune that goes:

This is my island in the sun

Where my people have toiled since time begun

Though I may sail on many a sea

Its shores will always be home to me

Oh island in the sun

Hailed to me by my father’s hand

All my days I will sing in praise

Of your forests, your waters, and shining sand . . . etc. etc.

The song goes on to the phrase “. . . and Calypso songs philosophical . . .” And that’s when I Mondegreened. I thought Belafonte was singing “Calypso songs full of Soffy Cal”. I couldn’t figure out what Soffy Cal was. For years I thought it might be some exotic Caribbean substance.

O.K. I’ll clam up about that now. It’s just getting too nacreous and chatoyant around here.

More later.

-Ervin

A Digression Into Matter of Top Thickness

The following is an excerpt from the new book that I’ve been writing for the past three-plus years. It will be another while before it sees the light of day; but it’s copyrighted and if any of you wants to use it for anything you have to ask permission to do so, and then give me attribution for it. Sorry about that: it’s how business works.

I had, in earlier writings, brought up the matter of top thickness and my refusal to reveal the magic numbers. Well, the top’s thickness is, along with the layout of the bracing, the most debated and tinkered-with area of lutherie. It is so for two absolutely important considerations. The first is that the guitar top is the “soul of the guitar” (that is, its physical characteristics set the stage for tone) along with the corollary that “the lighter the construction of the top is, the better the sound”; in fact, there is an adage among Spanish guitar makers to the effect that “the best guitars are built on the cusp of disaster”. And this brings us to the second consideration: there is a minimal top thickness/stiffness/strength that must be respected if the plate is not to cave in under string load. If sheer durability were one’s principal consideration then the guitar could be made of 2 x 4s ; that will make any instrument very durable indeed. But if sound is one’s objective, then the luthier’s skill lies in finding the correct balance point between the imperatives of ‘not too light’ and ‘not too heavy’ construction; and that balance point will be where the guitar is just strong enough to hold together.

In my work, I take my tops to a target deflection under a standard weight rather than to a predetermined, formulaic thickness. I’ve worked like this for a long time now and have written about my thinking and techniques at length. Still, my method may not work for everyone. There are a lot of guitar makers out there who swear by specific target measurements, and I’m not sure I have the right to say they’re wrong to do so. My own preferred method is different; it just means that, because of the variations of specific physical characteristics of any individual guitar top, each of my tops is a little bit different in thickness. The question comes up, then, of what is the proper justification for focusing on one or another specific number for top thickness? And, what would that number be? Well, it seems to me that a good place to begin would be to have some idea of where the measurements that we do know about, read about, have heard about, and use come from.

Many of my generation of American luthiers got our start by reading Irving Sloane’s seminal book Classic Guitar Construction, which appeared in 1966. This was, after A.P. Sharpe’s 32-modest-pages long Making the Spanish Guitar (published in 1957) the first available ‘real’ book on guitar making. Sloane advised the reader to make his tops 3/32” thick, which is equivalent to .094”, or 2.34 mm. Mind you, this instruction appeared before any of the two-dozen-plus books on lutherie that are now available, and before the plenitude of secondary sources of information that now exist. How did Mr. Sloane — who was not only writing very early in the game but had, as far as I can ascertain, only built a few guitars on his own then — come up with this number? Well, perhaps by reading Sharpe’s book (which recommends the same measurement), and very likely by measuring some guitar tops and by talking with some contemporary makers.

He doesn’t seem to have spoken with Vicente Tatay, one of the early Spanish luthier-transplants to the U.S., though. Tatay came from a prominent Valencian family of guitar makers and presumably knew what he was doing, guitar-making-wise, even before he took his plunge into the New World. Once here, he wound up working out of a store in Greenwich Village and became, by so doing, one of Mr. Sloane’s fellow New Yorkers.

There’s a wonderful article by Steve Newberry, published in American Lutherie (“Vicente Tatay and His Guitars”, issue #66, Summer 2001, pp. 47-49)about the state of lutherie and its lore in the U.S. many years ago. It is told from the point of view of the author who, as a teenager, became fascinated by Mr. Tatay’s work and talked him into being allowed to hang out in Tatay’s shop after school hours and be of some help by sweeping, cleaning, etc. In exchange he got to observe Mr. Tatay at work, of course. This turned out to be a mixed pleasure: Mr. Tatay is described as having been a gruff, cantankerous, cranky and closed-mouthed chain smoker who had an explosive temper and spoke only Spanish. Still, one afternoon toward the end of the Summer, in an uncharacteristic moment of expansiveness and letting down his guard, Mr. Tatay motioned the young Newberry over to his workbench and, using hand gestures and some coins, indicated to him that the secret to his lutherie was to make the guitar top about the thickness of a nickel in the middle, and the thickness of a dime at the edges. (I should add that a lot of Spanish guitar making in those days was done just like that: by skilled feel and eye, and with amazing accuracy.) Tatay might or might not have known the numerical values of his thicknesses but he certainly knew how to work to such tolerances at the workbench. Incidentally, nickels and dimes are about .075” (1.9 mm) and .050” (1.34 mm) in thickness, respectively. Give yourself a treat and look that article up; it’s as well written as anything Mark Twain ever wrote.

Four other books on guitar making followed Irving Sloane’s pioneering work on guitar building. Classic Guitar Making y Arthur Overholtzer, published in 1974, immediately doubled the available information on this subject. The other three were Donald Brosnac’s The Steel String Guitar; Its Construction, Origin, and Design (1973), David Russell Young’s The Steel String Guitar; Construction and Repair (1975), and Irving Sloane’s follow-up book Steel String Guitar Construction (1975). These last three were the first sources of published information on the steel string guitar and their recommended guitar top measurements were 3/32” (.094”) . . . 3/32” (.094”) . . . and 7/64” (.109”), respectively. Overholtzer’s top measurements took into account wood density and hence presumably stiffness: for classic guitars his recommendations are 3/32” (0.094”) for soft spruce and 1/16” (.062”) for hard, dense spruce. For steel string guitar tops he recommends 3/32” to 1/8” (.094” to .125”).

With the exception of Mr. Overholtzer, who had been a violin maker for some years previously, the others were pretty much acting as novice discoverers, craftsmen, and pioneers — as I myself was, except that I hadn’t written a book yet. I think it’s safe to assume that these young makers/authors were following each others’ and the Martin Company’s leads; and I was certainly following theirs. The Martin Guitar Company comes into this discussion because it was the best known steel string guitar producer of that time and would have been everyone’s main point of reference for making a steel string instrument. Certainly its most recognized and popular model, the Dreadnought, was that. (The Gibson company’s guitars were almost as well known as the Martins; however, all considerations of quality and tone aside, that company simply put fewer of its resources into advertising and its level of public recognition/popularity would have been consistent with that. The Guild company would have come in third in name-recognition; but it copied the Martin dreadnought shape, thus further reinforcing that model’s dominance.)

Irving Sloane, whose second book Guitar Repair (1973) focused on steel string guitar repair procedures, was surely in the Martin camp: the photos were taken on the Martin Guitar factory premises, and the repair procedures that are described were carried out on the Martin company’s workbenches — on Dreadnought guitars. That guitar model was David Russell Young’s and Don Brosnac’s primary focus as well, in their books. I asked Mr. Brosnac where he got his book’s recommended measurements from; he told me that he got them from Jon Lundberg, the legendary Berkeley-based Martin guitar retro-voicing pioneer, who was in those days possibly the world’s leading expert in that guitar — at least away from the Martin factory premises.On the other hand, both Overholtzer and Sloane seemed to take a lot of cues toward their classic guitar making from the work of Robert Bouchet (1898-1986), a noted and innovative French builder. While information in general seems to have been scarce in those days, Bouchet appears to have been relatively open with information. The established Spanish makers weren’t talking or writing anything about their approach to guitar making.

In 1987, twelve years after the last of the above books was published, the bibliography of guitar making took a major step forward when William Cumpiano and Jon Natelson published Guitarmaking: Tradition and Technology. This was the first book to address making both classic and steel string guitars; its recommended top thicknesses were the most comprehensive yet because it recognized that not only does (1) size of guitar and species of wood used make a difference, but that (2) different makers have significantly different building designs and ways of using their materials because (3) a guitar’s intended target sound might not be the same in every instance. A maker might use a thinner top with increased bracing, or a thicker top with minimal bracing, or a different bracing pattern entirely, or use different strings with different string pull and torque, etc. Accordingly, top thicknesses are suggested rather than instructed.

Top thickness targets for classic guitars are given as around .100” (2.5 mm) for spruce and .110” (2.8 mm) for softer wood such as cedar. For steel string guitar the recommendation is 1/8” (.125”, or 3.17 mm) for a first-time project, but otherwise ranging from .095” up to .130” (2.4 mm to 3.30 mm) depending on size and shape of instrument as well as species of wood used. One can see that thinking about top thickness was getting more sophisticated — although, given that these are all method-books, the suggested measurements must still all be considered to be Rules of Thumb.

In 2009 I published my two-volume book. In it, I didn’t give any specific measurements for optimal top thickness; instead, I dwelt on the practice of thinning to deflection rather than to dimension; this has always seemed to me a better guide than the thickness of the wood is, in order for one to most meaningfully track their progress over time. I also wrote at length about the balancing act that one is called on to make in matching a guitar’s bracing to its top’s stiffness. I furthermore said that I worked to thinner target dimensions than the average luthier does. It may have been self-serving of me to not mention a specific thickness for tops and keep that information to myself; but I don’t really believe that simply telling a young luthier to make his tops, say, two millimeters thick — and without mentioning the multiple other factors that have to be met correctly — is a high-quality communication. And my book does dwell at length on all the dynamic factors that I consider important.

In 2011 Australians Trevor Gore and Gerard Gilet published another ambitious two-volume book, Contemporary Acoustic Guitar: Design and Build. They do not seem to have fallen into the trap of advising a fixed target number for top thicknesses. They seem to have very intelligently advised working in an optimal range of thickness. That’s really the way to go, I think. Besides Gore’s and Gilet’s books, a number of other volumes on guitar making have also appeared, each of which suggests certain target numbers for top thickness.

Finally, I want to call one other book to your attention: Don Brosnac’s An Introduction to Scientific Guitar Design, published in 1978. It didn’t offer specific measurements for anything, but I want to mention it because it was the first book that looked beyond the how-to-do-it and who-did-it-first level to explore the guitar’s wider accessibility from a discipline other than that of basic woodworking. Up until then, everything else written had been (and would for years to come) be mechanical-level-instructional, archival, historical, and otherwise full of declarative sentences. But Brosnac’s was the first book to take a step back and address the more general topic of what else besides woodworking the guitar might be about— which made it interesting to me personally. That publication has since been followed by a fleet of books, articles, and essays that have examined the guitar as art, science, physics, wood technology, disciplined efficiency in production, engineering, acoustics, a collectible object, a genre/cultural icon, zen, an artifact of musical and/or economic history, etc. With the entry of many talented Born-Again-Christians into the field, I expect that there will sooner or later be a book about The Modern Christian Guitar too. Mr. Brosnac did pioneering work and the field is still wide open to new ways of understanding, and approaches to, this interesting instrument.

PUBLISHED RULES-OF-THUMB FOR TOP THICKNESSES

Anyway, getting back to top thicknesses: according to the published instructions that I’ve cited in the three decades between 1957 to 1987, top-measurement for classic guitars are:

1/10” (.100”) to 7/64” (.110”),
or 2.5 mm to 2.8 mm;

3/32” (.094”), or 2.34 mm;

1/16” (.0625”), or 1.59 mm;

0.050” to 0.075”, or 1.34 mm to 1.9 mm
(i.e., the thicknesses of a dime and a nickel)

. . . . . and for steel string guitars they are:

3/32” (0.094” or 2.38 mm) to 7/64” (0.109”
or 2.77 mm);

and from 1/8” (.125” or 3.17 mm ) to a fat 1/8” (.130” or 3.30 mm),

Does this get us anywhere? Well, sort of. It tells us that, at least in the classic guitar, one can go as thin as 1/16” (about 1.50 mm) and still have the instrument hold together. That’s useful to know — as is the fact that Overholtzer is in a minority in promoting such thinness; he and contemporary luthier Greg Smallman go remarkably thin, but very few others follow suit. As for steel string guitars, we have no published accounts of whether there is a top-thickness limit that’s below 3/32”; if anyone one (other than me) has tried to push that envelope they haven’t written about it, to my knowledge.

You should know two things. First, that stiffness/thickness numbers are just that: they are not very meaningful in the absence of information about doming and brace layout/treatment. And second, that Tatay’s previously mentioned top-shaping approach is the traditional one used by Spanish classical and flamenco guitar makers: the top is made to a target dimension in the middle but it is thinned in the outermost inch and a half or two of the lower bout, from the waist down, to another target dimension. We know this because work of this type is found in the instruments of established classical guitar makers whose guitars have been studied and carefully measured. Experts can even date certain classic guitars through specific variations in their measurements, which will have been documented from the various periods of their makers’ careers.

Flamenco guitars lack the social and academic respectability of their rosewood-built sisters and have not received such formal attention; they get played a lot but are not studied or otherwise paid serious attention to. Ditto steel string guitars. And speaking of these, Sloane’s and Overholtzer’s recommendations of uniformly-thicknessed classic-guitar-top measurements, previously cited, actually come out of the steel string guitar making tradition in which the top is the same thickness throughout, without any selective tapering or thinning. This itself follows from an efficient manufacturing methodology of putting the wood through a sanding machine and then using the wood that comes out the other end, without any further refinement– as opposed to the pre-Industrial European traditions of using hand tools in tapering, controlling, and achieving variable dimensions of the parts. Go team.

Internet Lutherie Discussion Forums

November 12, 2018

Someone asked about why I don’t post photos of current builds, comments, updates, etc. on the lutherie discussion forums. Well, there are several reasons. Mostly, I just don’t have the time.

I think that the Acoustic Guitar Forum is mostly a good thing; it gives individuals a chance to show off their latest work and get comments and information and support. I particularly am impressed by the postings such as one that I saw by JESSUPE (Jessupe Goldastini). What a painstakingly original and unique piece of work he’s accomplished! I have myselfposted my thoughts on various internet sites in the past. I did quite a bit of this some years ago on the ANZLF (Autralia/ New Zealand Luthier’s Forum), as well as on this one, and on a third one the name of which I’ve forgotten. These were mostly good experiences. But spending time on internet forums at this point in my life is not really for me; they can really soak one’s time up. And, frankly, not everyone behaves well.

Aside from all that, I have put everything I know and think about how guitars function, into my two books. My information is all there. Really: I’ve kept very little back except the specific thicknesses of my guitar woods. This is largely because there is no specific target thickness: each guitar top is a bit different in thickness. This is itself because I’m going for a specific stiffnessevery time, not a thickness. Each piece of wood is a little bit different, and it’s meaningless to give one number that would include tops for Jumbo guitars, and OM guitars, and OO guitars, and everything in between . . . that would furthermore include no information at all about bracing, string gauge, scale length, voicing procedures, doming, selective thinning within the same top, and the specifics of wood selection. PLUS: there are by now fully two dozen HOW-TO books that will give one or another specific number for top thickness. So the best I could do is to give an average thickness.

GOOD VS. BAD TEACHING

I produced a DVD a few years ago of a lecture that I gave in which I listed and explained the factors that are responsible for a guitar’s sound: voicing work, bracing, materials stiffness, and vibrating modes of guitar tops. I laid out everything that I’ve discovered and use that I consider important. I even brought some guitar bodies that had been voiced to different degrees of completion, and tapped on their tops to illustrate the progression of tap tones in my voicing work. Such tap tones audibly reveal how a guitar top “opens up”, and I find them indispensable as guides.

At the end, when the audience was asking questions, someone asked if they could see the final shapes of my bracing (that was producing those tones that had reflected my voicing efforts). I responded that he’d have to take my voicing class to see that level of the work. That may have been a mistake, and I got some blowback from it as the word spread that I was stingy and secretive with my work. I regret having sounded so flip and glib. I wish I’d had the presence of mind to have said the following — or something like it:

“I’ve described every principle and consideration that I find important in dealing with guitar sound: wood stiffness in guitars, optimal bracing, top vibrational motions, torque and string pull, an evenness of the vibrating gradient, the Cube Rule of stiffness, guitars as projectors and as diffusers, and top doming. [NOTE: this stuff is all in my books.] I’ve told you what I think, and why I think it, and I used visual aids and diagrams. I’ve talked about how I came to discover these important things, and even what mistakes I made along the way. And, mainly, these are precisely the factors that I work with as I make guitars the sounds of which everyone likes. Now, if I just show you the shapes and profiles of my bracing . . . youwillimmediatelyforgeteverythingIsaidandgohomeand copywhatyou’veseenmedo. And that, in my opinion, is really bad teaching”.

I said above that it may have been a mistake for me to refuse to show my final configuration of voiced bracing to the audience member who asked to see it. That’s half of it. The other half is: Are you kidding me?; you expect me to show you what it’s taken me four decades to figure out, just for the asking — and then criticize me when I say no? Pal, I just told you ALL the things that I think about in order to do the work that I do. I owe you that because I promised to speak about these things. But I draw the line there; that SPECIFIC stuff is entirely proprietary. I do not owe you to show you the specific fruits of forty-plus years of my learning curve just because you’ve bought a $10 ticket to a presentation I’m making.

I wish to be a cheering section for the honing of one’s own thinking skills. Also, I know something important that a lot of younger people don’t: things acquired without effort or equitable exchange — sort of like sex on demand — have no significance. You can stop reading now, by the way; I will post further postings on this matter but they are merely additional commentary.

Some [More] Thoughts About the Environment, Sex, and Hillary Clinton

May 20, 2018

Hi again. I want to repeat that you don’t have to read all this stuff. Or, if you do, try to pace yourself. And if you find this material interesting it’s perfectly all right with me if you share it, or part of it, with your friends. Or not.

I’ve been rambling on about maleness and femaleness. I think that ideas of maleness and femaleness are as deeply hardwired into our language as they are hardwired into our minds. As I suggested, it seems that the very word “environment” reeks of maleness. At least, that’s how it seems to have started out; these days there’s a bit of an ecological spin to it.

Ditto “patriotism”, which word is much on the political forefront these days, if only in the negative. The thing about both “patriotism” and “environment” is that they are such fundamental ideas that it never occurs to anyone to question them or see how they fit into the scheme of things. Instead, people consider that the scheme of things fits into them: they are that basic. Yet both are man-created concepts, and both of them seemingly trace back to maleness. “Patriotism” comes from the root-word “pater”, meaning “father”. Patriotism = loyalty to the fatherland. That root also gives us a whole slew of other words that begin with “pater” or “patr”. Many of them are pretty arcane, but we still use “patriot”, “patrician”, “patrimony”, “patriarchal”, and “paternity test” in everyday discourse. We also “patronize” people.

In view of that root, what’s the deal with naming a woman “Patricia”? Also, Athena was the Patron Goddess of Athens and the Patroness of the Arts. Read up on Athena; those words are used. But aren’t these all examples of those . . . uh . . . oxygenated moron things?

Given the discouragement that people feel with both the world and with government in general, I’d offer a gentler alternative to the forced, self-serving, ugly, and debauched version of Patriotism that people are rabidly claiming for themselves and/or hysterically accusing others of lacking or betraying. Become a Matriot. Believe in the gentler, healthier, and more nourishing principles. “Matriot”, of course, comes from the word “mater”, or “mother”.

Which brings me to Hillary Clinton, the most hated female of our generation. It’s true. People HATE her. I was listening to an interview with author Amy Chozick, who has just released a book about Ms. Clinton. Ms. Chozick has put a lot of research and work into her book and ran plentifully into people’s attitude that, well, a woman might be a good president . . . but not that one. Anyone but her! A lot of people, women included, have a visceral hatred of Hillary Clinton. Perhaps you are one such person.

Interestingly, and disturbingly, many people can give no reason for their hatred when asked; they just are adamant in their kneejerk revulsion of her. Pointing out that such irrationally held opinions are not based in anything real, or documented, or even dispassionately looked at does not seem to help. Fact-checking is lost on them. Hillary is literally the most investigated and accused-of-malfeasance person of our generation and no one has ever found anything to charge her with nor found her to be culpable of except being stiff and unspontaneous. Well, Trump did once comment (on national television) that Hillary urinates, and he labeled her as being disgusting for doing so. So there’s that. The fact that Trump has such feelings about bathroom breaks is the surest proof that neither Melania nor Ivanka ever urinate. He couldn’t stand it if they did. But it’s very odd that he didn’t comment on those Russian prostitutes . . .

. . . well, you know . . . when in Moscow . . . arrgkh . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . uh . . . . . . . . . sorry. I lose a bunch of brain cells every time I think of that sort of thing. But no one censured Mr. Frump for his narrow-minded stupidity nor his lack of grace. And people do HATE Hillary. There is something seriously wrong here.

I’ve had some conversations of my own with people about these matters, and while I haven’t come away with any greater clarity I do sense that these are still hot topics a year after the election. People are very frustrated with both Hillary and the Democratic establishment. Interestingly, to me, almost all the conversations I’ve had were ones in which I was told whom to blame for the mishandlings of Hillary’s presidential campaign. Or commenting on Hillary’s various failings as Secretary of State. As though the whole thing was a massive tactical error on someone’s part . . . and without commenting on the incredible peccadillos of the opposition, the big picture, context, political history, Trump’s political track record of minus zero, etc.

Notice that I’m not saying this or that party is right or wrong; to even try to go there will inflame the situation further. I’m commenting on how polarized the matter is.

That is soooo weird and troubling.

You might ask from where do the Republicans get their ideas that Hillary is crooked, traitorous, dishonest, untrustworthy, repellent, and/or criminal? In my next newsletter, a doctor with a flashlight will show us exactly where those ideas come from.

More later.

Some Thoughts About Gender and the Environment

May 10, 2018

I learned a new word the other day: androcracy (pronounced an-DROK-ruh-see). It means a system ruled by men.

Androcracy indeed; we’re all familiar with that. “Andro” is the Greek root for “male” or “maleness”; the Latin root is “vir”, as in “virile”. I’m under the impression that the Greeks also used “vir”, however, so I’m a bit confused on this point: Socrates’ wife Xantippe was famously a sharp-tongued scold and nag, and she was referred to as a “virago”.

Well, I suspect she had reason to be. Her hubby seems to have been gone all the time, talking philosophy all day long with other men, and in general building up his resumé as a great thinker. But not being a hubby. From everything I’ve ever read, he ignored his wife; he basically fled from her. He didn’t work as far as I know, and I don’t know what he could have brought home money-wise to make his wife happy (my guess is that he owned land and lived off his rents). As far as I know there’s never been any mention of whether he had children, although he probably did. Somehow, I doubt that Xantippe started out as a virago. Well, to the best of my knowledge domesticity was not a priority of any sort in Greek society; what was a priority was the polis, or community. At least, it was so among the citizens.

Well, certainly the male citizens; slaves and foreigners (called “exenos” in Greek, from which we get the word “xenophobia”) didn’t count. On top of that, in those days, women weren’t only not part of the social or political picture, but once they married they weren’t part of any picture at all — except maybe in mythology. They became invisible. At least, that’s what historians have concluded from the remaining writings, folklore, statuary, stories, etc. about Greek daily culture. Greek daily culture, as far as any extant literature or records show, was very male-centered. As a matter of fact men loved and adored each other in ways that would be viewed as very suspicious by some moderns.

There may have been heterosexual domestic life aplenty, but that’s the kind of thing that is so ordinary that no one ever puts any of it down on paper. At some future time archaeologists may be trying to decipher the American sense of normal domesticity by referring to surviving historical documents like our Tabloids’ reports on Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s marriage, novels by the likes of Ayn Rand and Norman Mailer, media fare such as Divorce Court and Judge Judy, and things that Donald Trump and Woody Allen said.

“Virility” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as: “the period in life during which a person of the male sex is in his prime; mature or fully developed manhood or male vigor; power of procreation; male sexual potency; strength and vigor of action or thought”. Hmmmmm. I guess women must not have any of those attributes, urges, or capacities. Not if the Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t say so, and it doesn’t mention women at all as far as this kind of thing goes. So I guess there’s no doubt about it: virility is entirely a guy thing. Interestingly, I haven’t run across any female version of this word. There’s “chastity”, which is a behavior solely attached to women who aren’t fully developed in their womanhood nor frisky in the procreative department. Its male counterpart is “celibacy”, which is sort of an anti-virility stance. But there’s no female counterpart to “virility” that doesn’t border on sluttiness, at least that I know of. Women aren’t supposed to want to fuck. Surely Stormy Daniels is an aberration. Of course, perhaps she doesn’t want to be a sex object but merely does it because it pays the bills. You know, like most people’s jobs.

I’m sure that the word “virgin” — which of course means a woman who has not yet had sexual relations — connects in some way to the “vir = maleness” trope. I mean, they seem to have the same root. The Latin root for “virgin” is supposedly “virgo” or “virge”, but Virgo is also the name of a constellation; and that word is really not all that different from the Latin root for “male”. Hmmmm. “Virgo/vir” might be something like the similarity between the words “male”/“(fe)male”?

Even Spanish has this odd similarity: “hombre” and “hembra”.

How come they couldn’t come up with different words for genders that everybody since the beginning of time has agreed are not the same thing at all and perhaps not even from the same planet?

Maybe “virgin” was originally something like “vir + gen“, or “vir + gyne”, indicating that the male essence, when added to the primordial female essence, would start a process to bring some other essence into life and being. “Gen” is, after all, the root word for beginnings, growth, creating things, procreation, starting things, giving life, and of course generating things.

On another level (in medicine) we have mutagens, things that start mutations. Androgens are chemicals that stimulate maleness. Organisms in which gender is not easily identified as being either male or female are androgynous (i.e., male/female). And, more recently, there is the genome . . . the blueprint that everything starts from or begins with.

“Virtue” doesn’t exactly mean “manliness”, but it does mean something like it. VIRTue, VIRTual, VIRTuous and other words in which there is a “T” after the “VIR” come from a different root: virtus, meaning excellence, position, or link. The Oxford English Dictionary devotes almost an entire column to the many meanings and attributes of “virtue”, so it can mean lots of things. Two of them, however, are “chastity or purity on the part of a woman” and “the display of manly qualities”. So I think we’re still in the same polarized male/female ballpark here.

Getting back to plain old vir: “triumvirate” means ” the rule by/of three men”. Ergo, virology must be the study of men and maleness, no?

Well, actually, no. That word, and also virus and virulent, seem to descend from the root “virulentus”, which means “poison” or “poisonous”. It’s very suspicious to me that the roots of “man” and “poison” are so similar. Once again, couldn’t they find some other word that actually sounded different???

We’ve never had a triumgynate. We’ve never even had a gynate of any sort. We’ve only had gynecologists . . . who have virtually (there’s that pesky “T” again) all been men. Go figure. It does help to explain why the Greek Myths don’t mention the story of Gynocles and the Lion, or Androcles and the Lioness. Still, everything comes from Mothers, so my mind wants to play with the word origin (origyn makes more sense to me than origen).

Well, mothers indeed: everything does come from them and out of them. The root word for “mother” is mater . . . as in maternal, maternity, alma mater, matricide, matrimony, matrilineal, matrix, etc. I don’t think the word “mattress” comes from that root, though. “Mater” gives us the word material. “Material” is that out of which everything comes. Everything is made out of, or comes out of, material. Everything does really come out of the mother. Likewise, the matrix also has mother-like characteristics. It is that which holds and contains everything, and within which everything exists, and out from which things come.

Getting back to vir, I wonder if, somehow, the environment secretly refers to . . . all the men around us? Or all the maleness around us? How arrogant is that? Yet, there must be something to it. In ancient Greece once a woman was married the world hardly ever saw her again. Men did see prostitutes (the Greek word for which was “porne” by the way, from which we get pornography) out in the open – although certainly not in public places where The Men congregated to see and be seen, to be men of affairs, to discuss the matters of the world, do business, participate in the affairs of the community, vote, hang out and network, gossip and socialize, talk of poetry and war, hear the latest news, etc. I’m pretty sure that the agora (the open public space in the community) was an all-male environment – as was, as I mentioned, most of the remaining literature and whatever historical record that has survived from those times and that culture. (I suspect that Greek women were agoraphobic in the contemporary feminist meaning of the word.)

I mentioned that the focus of Greek socio-political thought was the polis, the community. It was the adult Greek male’s responsibility to participate in community events (for a fuller account of this, read some Edith Hamilton or H.D.F. Kitto). Polis gives us the words “political”, “policy”, and “metropolis”, and maybe even “polite” and “police”. Those citizens who kept to themselves and did not participate in the affairs of the community were called idiots. That’s where the word comes from. Idiot comes from the root idio, which means by itself or from itself. An idiot was someone who kept to themselves and didn’t participate in the community’s social, political, military, and economic affairs and culture. It’s the same root as in the words idiopathic and idiosyncratic – which describe a condition or phenomenon that is its own, that arises out of itself, and is not connected to a prior cause. Idiom, too; an idiom is some figure of speech or phrase that came about by itself by way of grammatical accident or convenience, but without being beholden or connected to, or deriving from, other words, roots, or common speech. “Idiotic”, likewise, bespeaks of: “man, you’re on your own on that one; no one else is on board with it or is even going anywhere near it. That’s all yours”.

Finally, does it not seem to you that, in a way, matrix is just as apt a word as environment is? They both refer to the . . . uh . . . vessel, membrane, or context that contains and holds everything — both literally and metaphorically. Except that it is a female/feminine counterpart to “environment”. The fact is that we exist in the Matrix of the world just as much as we exist in an Environment. Well, I think there must be some very good reason why the word patrix does not exist. Anybody out there agree with me? Do I see any raised hands? Hello? Anybody there?

More later.

My Adventures in Book Publishing

by Ervin Somogyi

My writing of The Responsive Guitar and its companion volume Making The Responsive Guitar began casually, as most things do. I’d met Stephen Rekas, of the Mel Bay Publishing Company, at the 2001 Great Midwest Guitar show in Saint Louis; we were part of that year’s group of exhibitors. Over a dinner, he asked me whether I’d be interested in writing a book for his company. Mel Bay & Co. are of course known the world over for publishing music and teaching methods. Mr. Rekas explained that the Mel Bay company was looking to expand its line of titles; they had published Jose Oribe’s book The Fine Guitar some years earlier, and they were now wanting to publish other volumes about the instruments that much of its catalogue was supplying music for. They had heard about me; I’ve published quite a few articles; I’m known as a decent writer . . . and they thought I could write a good how-to book for them. What they wanted from me was a book on making steel string guitars, and they were going to approach other luthiers to write separate books about Spanish, archtop, and electric guitar making. After a thought process that didn’t last longer than the meal we were sharing, I agreed.

I like writing. I already knew the material and didn’t think I’d need to spend any great amount of time researching. I began to organize my thoughts and started on the manuscript very soon after I got back from the guitar show.

The Mel Bay Company and I formalized the matter with a written contract within about a month, and we were off and running. The job was to write a book on steel string guitar making that was “lavishly illustrated”, period. Mel Bay & Co. is a small, family-owned business and I found myself dealing directly with Bob Bay, the president and son of the company’s founder. First off, I was not going to receive an advance; however, after some negotiations, I got Mr. Bay to O.K. a $700 dollar budget with which to pay a photographer to take the necessary pictures. Well, O.K.

Usually, very little happens fast at the start of many projects besides the initial enthusiasm. But I waded in immediately, clattering away at my keyboard every day. My attitude was that, overall, this could be a nice project that wouldn’t make unreasonable demands on my time or energies and that I could maybe make a few bucks from. This is where the old adage about “if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans” comes in. I wrote. I edited. I compiled. I kept files. The truth is that if you want to write a good quality book on something that you know anything about there are lots of details to include and many ways to organize them in writing. I kept on writing.

About ten or twelve months into this I got in touch with Mr. Bay to let him know that I hadn’t forgotten about the book project; I was busy writing it and, by the way, we really hadn’t agreed on the size or length of the project . . . so what did he think I was cranking out? Mr. Bay replied that what he envisioned was to be a minimum of 75 pages, and no more than 150, and of course lavishly illustrated! Hmmmmmm. I responded that I’d already written 350 pages (not counting space for photos) and hadn’t finished yet. Moreover, I wasn’t going to cut 200 pages out of my manuscript. Could we rethink this? During this time Stephen Rekas, my contact man, happened to get promoted and I was given a new contact person. Unfortunately, he knew nothing about my own project and was overwhelmed with several dozen others. He was, unfortunately, also difficult to get a hold of, and didn’t return calls.

Working in this kind of vacuum was frustrating. Our correspondence, such as it was, continued for a while. I was informed that I could write a book 384 pages long: the company’s binding machines maxed out at that much paper. They simply could not put a cover on a book that was fatter than that, and this established an absolute limit on the number of pages of manuscript I could turn in.

PHOTOGRAPHY

I didn’t think that Bob Bay’s desire for a ‘lavishly illustrated’ volume was going to work with a photography budget of only $700. I knew from having my own guitars photographed how expensive such work could be. But it seemed the best deal I was going to get. It also seemed probable that some portion of this cost was going to have to come out of my own pocket; on the other hand, I didn’t mind doing this for a good cause. It wasn’t going to work for me to take all the photographs: I’m not that good at it, and I wasn’t going to continually interrupt my lutherie work to take pictures. So, I made some fliers and put them up in the local photo/development centers, advertising for a photographer to shoot pictures for a guitar-making book.

Two people answered my call. The first one made it clear that he would only spend so much time working for $700; and at his hourly rate we’d eat through the budget in no time at all. The second, Bob Sondgroth, said he’d be willing to be flexible. It didn’t hurt that he’d studied with Ansel Adams. Sondgroth was at that time photographing office interiors and architectural exteriors for various corporate newsletters, catalogues, and sales brochures; this sounded to him like it could be an interesting project that he could learn something from. I want to say at the outset that meeting Bob turned out to be a total blessing; the project absolutely would not have gotten done without him and a personal friendship that I treasure has come out of it as well.

Initially, I’d thought that we could take all the necessary photos for my book in six sessions. This was predicated in bringing a number of lutherie steps, procedures, and instruments to given ready-to-photograph stages, plus a certain amount of coordination and juggling of the shop’s production schedule — and then calling the photographer over for a day. We’d have multiple camera locations in the shop, as well as dedicating a place (with backdrops, etc.) for the table-top images that we needed to have close-ups of.

Once we began photographing things in earnest the six-session plan of action flew right out the window. Would you believe that the photography sessions went on steadily, on an average of once every week or two, for more than four years? And each session went on for half a day or more. We always found more things to take pictures of: jigs, woods, tools, different designs for this or that part, action shots, location shots, promotional shots, organizational shots, work-background shots, work-series shots, wide-angle and macro shots, indoors and outdoors shots, technical shots, before-and-after shots, change-of-mind shots, shots of different exposures, angles, lighting and emphasis, table-top shots, alternative/comparative shots, detail and tool-setup shots, things we’d forgotten to shoot last time, and shots of diagrams, schematics, and drawings. We set up our tripod in every room in the shop, in guitar stores, on the street, in lumber yards, in secondary locations, and anywhere else that we needed to. Every location had different lighting, background, and assorted shooting conditions — including the time Bob, trying to frame an outdoor shot properly, actually backed into a moving car on the street and almost got run over. All in all, Bob took many thousands of photos, of which we finally selected 996 to appear in my books. Finally, when we’d shoot everything we needed to, and then some, Bob rented a scanning machine and scanned slides from dawn to dusk for three days straight (I forgot to mention that he’s from the old school: he took slides, not digital pictures) in order to have the kind of high-resolution digitized images that the modern printing industry requires. One might indeed say that my books are ‘lavishly (and s-lavishly) illustrated’.

EXIT MEL BAY

I knew at the outset that there were already about a dozen How-To books out (today, nine years after I started writing, I have fully two dozen of such in my library), and I saw no point in merely presenting another step-by-step instructional. It seemed to me that what I could best contribute, to set my book apart from all the others, was (1) my understanding of the relationship between soundbox design and the guitar’s voice and (2) my overview of how the modern guitar got to be how and what it is. This is not intended to be a tourist’s guide through guitar arcana, by the way: it is critically important to guitar design. Knowing this instrument’s developmental history helps to free one from the assumption that the guitar’s traditional (and/or contemporary) design features are cast in stone: every single one has been decided on by somebody, sometime, for some reason, and therefore can be re-thought. My intent was to include as much of the nuts-and-bolts, theoretical, and historical information as I could, and to do it in a way that the average reader could understand.

As time passed I of course kept on writing and the manuscript grew. I couldn’t stop myself from adding things: Where did that specific technique come from? How come other luthiers did this or that differently? Were some of these techniques better? And if so, in what regard? Which procedures had primarily tonal benefits, or time-saving or cosmetic-and-marketing ones? And did a particular kind of procedure benefit all guitars or only some kinds of guitars? For that matter, in what ways were the acoustic tasks of one kind of guitar the same or different from another’s?

Then, there were more practical questions: Why couldn’t one use fan bracing or ladder bracing on guitars that were normally ‘X’ braced? Or, what difference would it make if one made the braces just a little taller, or squatter, or moved them half an inch this way or that, or profiled them a bit differently? On another level, how is handmade any better than power-tool-assisted? And what are the upsides and downsides of using plastic or a space-age material, or simply a different wood? Then, on a purely technical level, how do shop working conditions (humidity, choice of glues, temperature, use of hand planes vs. sandpaper, use of premade parts, age of materials, etc.) affect the final product? And, finally, what do different authorities have to say about any of this? It was — and is — never-ending.

Eventually, I realized that my book was going to far exceed the capacity of the Mel Bay company’s binding machine: the total amount of photographs and illustrations alone was exceeding 100 pages (and ultimately came to about 150). I also knew that I wasn’t interested in cutting my manuscript down, and that they weren’t going to be interested in something as comprehensive as what I was working on. I asked to be released from my contract and they agreed.

THE SEARCH FOR A SECOND PUBLISHER

At that point I needed to find another publisher if I wasn’t going to have to pay for everything myself; I knew that Steve Klein’s very lovely book about his guitars had cost $50,000 to get into print, and mine was already twice the number of pages. The numbers scared me. So I put out feelers to a bunch of other publishers, mostly in the guitar/music/art/craft field, but some boutique publishers as well — both domestically and overseas.

My project wasn’t exactly going to be most publishers’ cup of tea, but I did find a few who showed some interest — although, in every case, not enough. One publisher was interested; but he wanted a very pared-down and dumbed-down version for sales to mass outlets such as Costco. I didn’t think that was quite my demographic. Another showed interest but would accept my manuscript only under several conditions. First, I’d have to sign away many rights to the book (including any say-so about cover design, internal design, marketing, retail and wholesale pricing, and editing. I’d also have to agree to his publishing only selected parts of the book — but not the whole — if he chose to do so). Second, I was offered five percent of the book’s wholesale price. I did the math and saw that if my book were to retail at $1000, and sold wholesale at a usual 50% discount, I’d get $25 per book sold. If I’d ever had even nickel signs — let alone dollar signs — in my eyes, this last one pretty much put those lights out.

I must say that the publishers’ blandishments were a rare treat of sorts. These included the old ‘a great way to get my name out’ routine, the promotional book-signing tour gambit, the ‘first necessary step toward a continuingly updated and expanded project’ enticement (which is a variation of ‘getting-your-foot-in-the-door’ tactic), and the ‘all the work they would put in to justify their lion’s-share of the income’ bit. The deals offered seemed to be one version or another of ‘give us the fruit of your labor, experience, and intellect; surrender most of your rights to it; and we’ll maybe pay you minimum wage in exchange’. Well, yes, these businesses need to survive too, and it’s a competitive market out there; but, obviously, one needs to be an already-well-known author in order to be well treated.

And by then my book was becoming too unwieldy to remain a single volume: simply picking the manuscript up now almost qualified as weight-training. I decided to split the work into two books and separate out the Why-Where-When-How-Much-And-Also-Their-Subtleties part of making a guitar from the basic How-To-Do-It steps. Because there was so much material, this separation would de-clutter the narrative on both ends of the discussion. But, more importantly, this was slowly shaping itself into a truly ground-breaking work: there was nothing as comprehensive as this out there. I knew this from my own library, of course, but also from the kind of feedback I was getting from friends, colleagues and former students who were kind enough to read the manuscript and make criticisms and suggestions. My motivation slowly transformed from a ‘Hey-wouldn’t-it-be-neat-to-have-my-name-in-print-and-make-a-few-bucks’ focus into an ‘This-is-a-sum-total-of-my-life’s-work-it-will-represent-me-after-I’m-dead-and-it-deserves-the-best-treatment-I-can-give-it’ undertaking. It was a significant shift.

THE NEXT CHALLENGE: FINDING GRANT FUNDING

After my book’s near-death experience with the world of publishers, I began to explore the world of grants. Various friends told me that there are lots of grants out there to help defray the costs of pretty much any project. I don’t think I could have made any headway at all with pursuing such options if I hadn’t, fortunately, met a professional grant-proposal writer, John Hammond, who also happened to be a guitar junkie. He worked for the University of California, knew the ropes and the paperwork and the lingo, and he offered to help with finding a suitable granting agency. With this resource, I got in touch with a number of grants and fellowship agencies.

Sadly, I was to have no great luck with these either. The thing is, you are no one as an individual who is not part of an organization: some weighty affiliation, backing or sponsorship is needed. Clearly, the thing to do was to seek an organization of some standing that had some connection with the purpose of the grant, to vouch for me and my bona fides. A music/musical instrument related outfit would obviously be the best choice. I asked the G.A.L. and A.S.I.A. whether either one would be interested in lending their name to my grant application. Both said no.

ACADEMIA

I then began to approach music departments at universities. I eventually made a promising contact with the ethnomusicology department at the University of California at Santa Barbara campus. There was interest there; my professional credentials and reputation were the deal makers. After some correspondence and a face-to-face meeting, we agreed that this department would sponsor (lend its name to) a grant application — for which it was understood that I would do all or most of the paperwork. (It was pointed out that, all in all, this would be a better deal than simply offering my manuscript to the University of California Press with these folks’ recommendation. Prestigious though the U. C. Press might be, this would once again put me in the world of dealing with a publisher who would take most of the pie.)

In exchange, I would of course have to do something for the ethnomusicology department. They asked that I give two lectures about the development of the modern guitar and its importance in modern music. I would do this in two subsequent semesters, each time addressing their graduate department, and this collaboration would be made official under the university’s Distinguished Lecturer program. Most universities have similar programs for bringing knowledgeable lecturers to their campuses on a short-term basis. This was the most hopeful possibility I had been able to come up with to date, and I was pretty excited. Wow! A university lecturer! Never mind that I had committed myself to organizing two separate graduate level presentations — and this with visual aids, signage, a slide show, and music segments in CD form that would illustrate my various points — in addition to everything else I was already doing. Plus, of course, the travel time.

In 2005 I traveled to the University of California at Santa Barbara to give a lecture on “The Guitar: What, How, Why, and the Tonewoods Involved”. The following year I returned there and gave a lecture on “The American Guitar: from Andalusia to St. Louis, from Segovia to Elvis, and from the Prairies to Carnegie Hall”. Both lectures quite well attended and received. They ought to have been, given how much time I spent planning and organizing them. Ray Kraut, my apprentice at the time, did yeoman’s work and spent literally an entire week in helping me get ready by taking many, many photographs, scanning them, organizing them into a power point presentation, and helping me to make and print out signage and handouts. I could not have done this without him.

To my great surprise and shock, the University dropped me like a hot potato as soon as my second lecture was over. The friendliness disappeared entirely. They had never heard about being sponsors of my grant proposal. And would I please stop bothering them as they were busy. No, I’m not making this up. I was entirely blindsided by this; I returned home without an explanation and went through an angry depression. I was, clearly, of no further use. The intermediary who had first put me in touch with the University, with whom I’d developed a cordial friendship and who had been present at my initial face-to-face meeting with the U.C. representative, was embarrassed and likewise unable to understand this unexpectedly cold behavior. Neither one of us felt that we’d misunderstood anything that the University had said or promised, nor that they had misunderstood my request for grant sponsorship. I felt had. And I never did receive an explanation for any of this. Obviously, one needs to be an already well-known academic in order to be well treated.

I was eventually able to make sense of this unhappy experience, in retrospect, by accepting that I’d managed to naively wander into one of academia’s ongoing interdepartmental war zones: I had basically volunteered to be cannon fodder in this particular department’s jockeying for position, budget, and brownie points. I had helped make someone look good. And I hadn’t understood that the way the game is played is to get your end of it in writing. Some months after this episode I sent the people involved a succinct letter consisting of a verb and a pronoun.

Well, back to the drawing board . . . except by now I was feeling that I’d pretty much run out of drawing paper. I saw that if this book were to ever see the light of day I would just have to raise the money and just pay for everything myself.

VOL. 1 AND VOL. 2: SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE

So: my original project had by now grown and divided into two volumes; one for The How-To and the other for the principles and analysis behind the Why-Where-and-How-Much. There was a further division necessary because I was writing for all friends of the guitar, and writing something that offers something to everyone is tough: you don’t want to leave material out, and you don’t want to clog the page with too much information; either way, you start to lose readers. I also wanted to keep my narrative free of the scientific formulas and jargon that would put a lot of readers off. Scientific explanations loaded with calculus, differential equations, and graphs of oscilloscope read-outs had never done all that much for me.

I decided that I needed to write a multi-tiered narrative. The main text (the subject matter of all the chapter headings) was going to be straightforward explanation, with just a bit of commentary and analysis. I wanted people to be able to go through the books one page after the other and feel that the narrative made sense and held together. But for readers who wanted all the information — actual, theoretical, comparative, and speculative, and not just The Basic Facts — I removed most this secondary material from the main text and put it into its own section in the back of the book, in the form of endnotes. Here, this corollary material is out of the way of readers who don’t want to be bothered by Too Much Immediate Information, and it is available for anyone who doesn’t mind taking the longer, more interesting, and detour-filled scenic route. The endnotes are in fact a book within a book and account for a full 1/3 of the text! They fill in gaps, provide ancillary and supplemental commentaries, more comparative analysis, exceptions, personal anecdotes, cross-references, insights, colorful guitar folklore, some of my own learning experiences that led to my making this or that discovery and, in general, contain just about as much real and thought-provoking information as the main text. The endnotes are real gems. I must tell you, though, that worthwhile though such a way of organizing a book might be, the time that put into all the necessary re-writing, correspondence, phoning, follow-up communication, cross-referencing, fact checking, indexing, editing, and keeping files on all this so as to avoid redundancies and inaccuracies, is something awesome.

DON AND TWILA BROSNAC

In 2007, as I was winding down the writing and wondering about the next step, I had a stroke of good luck. I was visited, out of the blue, by Don Brosnac and his wife Twila. Don had been one of the very early American lutherie authors, with four books to his name. I’d known him years ago but hadn’t had any contact with him for a long time; however, he was still very much tuned in to the guitar. It also turned out that the Brosnacs were now in the desktop publishing business! I described my writing project; they said they were well set up and able to do the page-layout work that my books needed — and they were interested in doing it. Page layout is just what it sounds like: arranging text in column form (based in book size), selecting type and size of font, margins, placing images and captions on the page (along with headings, call-outs, pagination, footnotes, etc.); creating accurate Corel-Draw graphs and gridded-images from line drawings, making endless suggestions that would result in a better publishing package and, not least, a lot of editing-and-clarifying-as-you-go. It’s a lot of work. But this was a match made in heaven! I hired them.

We went to work. I must say that I made life difficult for Don and Twila because I couldn’t stop myself from constantly making changes in the manuscript, which of course played havoc with their page-layout efforts. My heartfelt apologies to them for the trouble I put them to.

THE MONTREAL GUITAR SHOW

Fast-forward one year. I showed some of my guitars at the 2008 Montreal Guitar Show, which is held alongside the annual Montreal Jazz Festival. There, I had a serendipitous conversation with one of the principal organizers, Jacques-Andre Dupont. Jacques-Andre’s day job is as a successful marketing executive and he is a Friend of the Guitar the rest of the time. When I happened to casually mention that I was close to being done with writing my two-volume set of guitar books he instantly had an idea for a marketing opportunity: that my book release should become part of the following year’s Montreal Guitar Show. He proposed that I delay release of my books until then, at which time he would offer me a platform from which to do an official book-launching. He would put my book-release press conference on the official Montreal Show program; he would give me a room, equipment, and staff with which to hold an officially scheduled (and catered) event to which the media would be invited. These would report — to mostly the European media market, but also to the American one — on the publication of a significant book about the guitar as part of that year’s Festival activities. My book and I would get the benefit of this very advantageous sendoff, and the Guitar Festival would have the cachet of sponsoring the appearance of an important new work by one of today’s best known luthiers. It was a win-win, for sure. I accepted the offer: I absolutely was not going to get a better one.

A STROKE OF LUCK

If I felt frustrated by having to wait a whole year before I could release my darn-near completed book, this turned out to be an unjustified fear. It was actually a blessing in disguise.

Shortly after my conversation with Jacques-Andre (he’s very informal: everyone calls him that) I met Natalie Reid, a professional editor. In a more or less casual way I asked if she’d be willing read a chapter or two of my book — in spite of the fact that I honestly didn’t think that it needed any correcting or editing. She agreed to, and about a week later gave me her opinion. And oh, was I shocked when she told me that my material was no good; it drastically needed editing; it was full of circumlocutions, over-wordiness, lack of clarity, and superfluity! I was really not wanting to hear this. But she convinced me to listen to her; she knew what she was doing, was good at it, and to make her point rewrote a few paragraphs of what I’d shown her. I was surprised at how much more freely and easily her version read, than mine. I concluded that she was right: my manuscript would benefit from some serious pruning.

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, the above paragraph is written as I was writing then; after Ms. Reid my writing became different, as follows: it’s shorter yet contains at least as much information: “Shortly after my conversation with Mr. Dupont I had a visit from an out-of-town friend who happens to be a professional editor. I told her about my project and casually asked if she’d be willing to look over a sample chapter. I was showing off; I didn’t believe that my work actually needed any editing. A few days later she shocked me by telling me that, in her opinion, my chapter was so full of problems that she recommended that I start over again! To prove her point, she edited and re-wrote part of it for me. My shock was even greater: her version read much more smoothly than mine. I was convinced that she knew what she was doing.”

I quickly found an editor whom I could afford (Ms. Reid was financially out of my reach, and she was quite busy in any event. This new editor, Diana Young, managed to turn a somewhat clunky narrative into a much more streamlined and clear work. I am grateful that I had year’s unexpected pause in my project, which allowed me to both discover the need for someone like Diana, and also to find her before it was too late.

PRINTING AND PRINTERS

As by now it had become clear that I was going to be my own publisher, I should mention that there are a number of things that come with this besides simply paying for everything. Aside from (1) producing a completed manuscript, a self-publishers needs (2) to register as a publisher, and use a name that no one else is using. A short search will reveal this. One then needs (3) an ISBN number, (4) a Library of Congress number, (5) a book jacket designer, which also involves deciding on book size, (6) to choose between hard-cover or soft cover; in either case there are options for binding materials as well as for choosing color vs. black-and-white; (7) to find a suitable printing company; (8) to get the entire manuscript scanned onto CDs which the printer needs in order to set up his presses; (9) choosing the paper to be used, (10) receiving and correcting proofs and okaying the final go-ahead — and all the back-and-forth communication that such processes require. Then there are (11) shipping costs, and if one has been dealing with an overseas printer then there are (12) even higher shipping costs, customs duties and paperwork (one hires a customs broker), and warehousing and trucking fees. I’ve already mentioned the need for (13) a competent editor and (14) someone to do the page design and layout, image scanning, Photo-shop work, etc. Finally, (15) one has to find storage for tons of books, and (16) deal with fulfillment of orders, which involves the fielding of inquiries, receiving orders, invoicing, wholesaling/ retailing, packing, shipping, insuring and tracking of packages, stocking and warehousing, accounting, keeping income tax records, dealing with returns and damaged packages and refunds, and generally coordinating everything. etc. It’s a piece of cake.

After that, comes the advertising and marketing. Don’t get me started. It requires entirely different resources, different problems, a different mindset, and different skills.

But first things first. Through a friend who had had several books published and had had her own learning curve, I found a printer — Pro Long Publishers, of Hong Kong. I dealt with three printers myself throughout much of this process — the other two being domestic — and I struggled with whether to support the American printing industry or to be unpatriotic and go overseas. This wasn’t a slam dunk by any means. Two things tipped the scale for me. First, the folks at Pro Long really wanted my business and they always returned calls and communications on the same [business] day or the following one at the latest, and gave me whatever information I’d asked for. If it was night-time they’d fax or email me. They were great with sending things (samples of paper, binding material, photos of different treatment options, quotes, timetables, etc.) in a timely manner. It also seemed that they were hardly ever away from the office; they were almost always available. Second, they were cheaper.

I don’t have a reliable opinion about how much more rapaciously competitive Chinese business people are than anyone else is, nor how much of the world’s economy China will eventually dominate, control, and displace American interests from. For me to try to grasp the ethics of economic competition that operate in these matters on even a national level — let alone an international one — is ludicrous. It’s something like watching a sci-fi/stock-car-rally extravaganza and wondering whether I should be rooting for the Colossal Fire-Breathing Insatiable Beast to defeat the Armored Mega-Monster Truck, or vice-versa. It’s just beyond my scale of thinking; but if anyone is to blame for any of this I’d start with Richard Nixon. In any event, I have to say I have seldom seen the level of service that I received, and I am both amazed and satisfied with my experience.

A RETROSPECTIVE ASSESSMENT

A friend asked me whether, in retrospect, writing my books has been worth it. My answer is: don’t do this for the money if you have anything better to do — unless you really want to write a book for the sheer ego-experience of it, or unless you’re near the end of your career and want to leave something as a legacy. Or unless there are lots of pictures of naked people and it might thus sell well. My full costs to produce these books have been beyond reasonable ability to calculate. Authors like John Grisham and Danielle Steele can make money by writing; almost no one else ever does.

My out-of-pocket costs for this project were on the order of $65,000. This paid for editing, page layout, photography, making graphs, scanning, printing, shipping and custom’s fees, storage, ink cartridges, mailing costs, long distance phone bills, professional proofreading, and a hundred other things. More than that, though, I spent about eight thousand hours of my life being a midwife to these volumes — without even counting my very time-consuming misadventure with the University of California. Money-wise, it is a cautionary fact that I’d have made more money if I’d simply stuck to my workbench and used the time to make some guitars; or, if nothing else, I’m pretty sure I’d have made at least as much money by selling used cars.

However, since I wasn’t selling cars nor making as many guitars as I would have otherwise, I did two things to help raise money. First, I borrowed about half the money this project took, from the bank. I’m still paying it back, although I’m making headway on the balance. Second, I put out a pre-publication offering to everyone on my personal email list: ‘buy the books from me now at a discounted price and I’ll send them to you when I receive them from the printer.’ I must say that effort helped. Overall I am glad that I produced these books: they will remain with all of you after I’m gone. And it helped enormously that I didn’t know, at the outset, what it was going to take.

Go out and buy my books.

Guitars, Virtue, and Nudity: The Guitar as an Icon of Culture, Class Status, and Social Values

by Ervin Somogyi

In a recent conversation I was asked my thoughts on what, exactly, makes the guitar so alluring? What has made it so… well… so widely loved by people? I mean, it has managed to capture popular imagination so thoroughly that it is a bona fide world-recognized icon. Such things don’t happen by accident. So: how did it do it?

I don’t claim to definitely know what has made the guitar so easy to bond with; it’s neck-and-neck in acceptance with the violin — which, along with its separated-at-birth-twin the fiddle, has enormous currency in very different social-musical circles. I mean, I’m told that there are at least as many violins as guitars made annually world-wide, and somebody has to play them, right?

I more or less doubt that the reason we have perfected the designs of these instruments has to do with anything like a genetically innate sense of preferred shape; if it were, we’d have had guitars and violins 25,000 years ago. But the guitar has been said to be a stylized representation of the female form — the allure of which is certainly timeless. I do believe that there’s something to be said for the prettiness-in-simplicity of the guitar: it pleases the eye right off the bat: it consists visually of a few nicely curved lines (made by two bent strips of side wood rather than the violin’s broken-curved six) that contrast, in an uncomplicated way, with the (mostly) straight lines of the neck and frets. It’s a combination of line and curve that is so elemental that even Picasso found inspiration in it.

There are some obvious reasons for the guitar’s popularity. For one thing, it is portable and one can take it anywhere. In a word, it’s convenient. [NOTE: that word comes from the Latin con (with) and venire (come, or coming); in other words it comes with you; it’s at hand; things that are convenient don’t resist you or put up a fight.] Second, the guitar is capable of playing polyphonic music. Compared to wind, reed, percussion and bowed instruments which can play only one or two notes at a time, the guitar can play chords and melodically complex and interesting music. Third, the guitar is well suited to accompanying man’s primary musical instrument — the human voice — in all its ranges and registers. Indeed, this instrument’s first uses were mostly devoted to that; it was only gradually that the guitar developed its own voice.

Next, I believe that much of the guitar’s charm comes from the fact that it is a physically intimate instrument. As one strums or picks on it one hugs and enfolds it. One literally puts one’s arms around it, and even bends the body over it, as it rests on one’s lap. And there’s a genuine somatic pleasure in feeling it vibrate and respond . . . something a bit like the purring of a cat on one’s lap. At least, this is true of the nylon-string classic and the acoustic steel string guitar, when the player is sitting. I don’t think one should underestimate the sheer physical pleasure of playing this person-sized instrument. I mean, one also hugs one’s cello and harp in much the same way, and the bass drum hangs from one’s tummy; but these lack the guitar’s personal-size quality. Most other instruments don’t offer or require that much body-contact; hands yes, mouth yes, fingers yes, chin yes, ears yes . . . but not much else. The guitar is very much a physically user-friendly instrument.

A fifth reason for the guitar’s pleasingness, I think, is that it is made of wood. There’s something friendlier about wood than metal, ceramic, glass, or plastic can generally manage to provide; wood is warm and invites the touch and handling it has given pleasure ever since people began to use it. Other materials don’t offer quite so much of that.

And then, the guitar makes a lot of music easily accessible. Pretty much anyone can learn three chords in about ten minutes and actually play (strum) songs! And yet, this instrument can, from such a simple beginning, pull one in to an entire lifetime of learning and exploration without getting to the end of its musical, rhythmic, tonal, and expressive potential.

This potential is based in the guitar’s amazing versatility. Whereas most other instruments — whether they be plucked, bowed, percussion, or wind — can’t easily produce more than one voice, the guitar can express many. It can do this because it is capable of emitting a huge range of sheer sound depending on how and where it is played, plucked, strummed, hit, stroked, strung, thumped, or scratched. It can also play pretty much any mode of music and musical expression: fast, slow, rhythmic, syncopated, Phrygian, Myxolidian, Dorian, romantic, richly round and colored, tinny, sappy, sad, ominous, trills, contrapuntal, pop, percussive, sweet, ethnic, classical, blues, sea chanties, cantatas, country, flamenco, fiddle tunes, piano music, Hawaiian, fingerpicking, flatpicking, Klezmer, tremolo, bluegrass, folk, Celtic, gypsy, New Age, mariachi, spiritual, heavy metal, jazz, twelve-tone, mournful, happy, sharp and jangly, bossa nova, monophonic, polyphonic, waltzes, scherzos, schotisses, minuets, tangos, czardas, fado, lieder, Japanese/koto, tambor effects, chordal, choral, atonal, martial, Baroque, Indian, Arabic, Spanish, Balkan, Jewish, Mexican, Italian, ragtime, rock’n’roll, rubato, pizzicato, waltzes, minuets, fox trots, Huapango, madrigal, Andean, Chet Atkins style, Django style, campfire music, fusion, gospel, Caribbean/reggae, acid rock, dirges, tarantellas, show tunes, pop tunes, ballads, son, Bach, Afro-Cuban, klezmer, salsa, ska, New Age, electronic, skank, experimental, impressionistic, bebop, doo-wop, minimalist, Habaneras, Andean Huaynos and Cumbias, Christmas songs, lute and fiddle and piano transcriptions . . . and tons of arrangements of all the above, and every composer from every culture and period you can name, and more. This is sooooo awesome.

THE GUITAR AS SYMBOL

All these things certainly illustrate the fact that a large part of the guitar’s charm is that it is extraordinarily adaptive and user-friendly. But there’s more to the guitar’s popularity than a mere list of what music it can play and how comfy it is to hold it: the modern guitar has insinuated itself into world audiences and cultural demographics in strikingly different symbolic as well as musical ways. I don’t know if a lot of people think of the guitar as a symbol of anything, but it is. As to exactly what it symbolizes, bear with me a bit here as I lay out some context.

Symbols are proxies for, and represent clumps of, concepts. Concepts (any concept at all: “mother”, “left hand”, “river”, “love”, “Malaysia”, “protein”, “gearshift lever”, “kangaroo”, “honesty”, “blue”, “mud”, etc.) are formed by our collective sensory experiences (images, sounds, smells, touch, movement, hearing, feelings, etc.) and thoughts/ memories. Well, of course, you say: so what else is new? But the fact is that the guitar exists in a particularly rich and interesting soup of learned conscious and unconscious memories and life-associations. It involves much more of us than just our ears, fingers, and musical tastes. It’s the bedrock rolodex of what we personally know and identify with as members of any group that has any connection with the guitar. Indeed, its tremendous popularity has to be based on this being so. This personal involvement is as much an element of the guitar’s allure as are its musical adaptability and physical friendliness — particularly as one is normally not very conscious of the fine points of this personal involvement.

And, as participants a capitalist society, it is fair to say that we are discussing the guitar not from the point of view of a fan or admirer, but of a consumer (or at least citizen/member) of guitar culture.

I’ve written elsewhere and at length about the developmental, musical, commercial, technical, and cultural history of the modern acoustic guitar, but it wouldn’t hurt to quickly revisit that last one now: it’s relevant to the point I’m trying to make. In brief, the Spanish (gut or nylon string) guitar is a European invention. Originally used by the, er, disreputable and, uh, unwashed masses, Andres Segovia made it his life’s work to rescue this guitar from such ignominy and transform the [classical] guitar into a respectable instrument suitable for playing serious music in the Concert Hall. He succeeded well; the flamenco and folk guitars have had no such champion and have struggled to gain such acceptance.

The steel string guitar is an American invention that was, likewise, only a moderately accepted folk string instrument for much of its early life. It was mostly a creature of the, uh, unwashed masses. It struggled to compete with other popular string instruments such as the banjo, the fiddle, the ukulele and the mandolin — until about 1915, when the Pan-American World’s Fair brought it to people’s attention by partnering it with the then-new and gigantic Hawaiian music craze. The steel string guitar got another huge boost in popularity in the 1930s and 1940s when it became a centerpiece element in the singing cowboy movies. You know, the ones where the good guy (the one with the white hat) fought off great black-hatted odds and through sheer virtue and pluck overcame them and won. Then, at the end, he’d pull his guitar out and sing a song; and instead of riding off into the sunset with the girl he departed with his horse, his guitar, and his intact sexual virtue. I can tell you with authority that that formula really works for eleven-year olds. And it also worked for an American population that was beaten down by the Great Depression and sorely needed heroes and upbeat entertainment. An even more important source of solace and entertainment for people in these times was the radio — and the folk-and-country-music steel string guitar benefited massively by being heard over the airwaves by millions of people.

In effect, this folk guitar had begun to acquire a symbolic identity outside of and quite beyond its practical, social and musical uses.

O.K., SO . . . ???

Here, things get even more interesting. While this history has failed to give the acoustic steel string guitar anything like the cachet of sophistication that the classic guitar has managed to attain, it did something else just as remarkable: it has driven the steel string guitar deeply and indelibly into people’s minds as something associated with the honest, hard-working, always-acting-in-good-faith-against-strong-odds good guy. And this acculturation has been unquestioned and successful beyond belief. Consider: not one of you reading this has EVER seen ANY movie, stage play, or tuned in to ANY radio or TV show, or read ANY magazine or book . . . in which the bad guy plays the acoustic guitar. It just isn’t done. The bad guy plays piano, organ, or the electric guitar. There are NO exceptions to this that I know of: the American acoustic guitar is indelibly associated with Virtue, not Vice. Period. Isn’t this a totally cool yet never-consciously-spoken-of social identity? These things are also true, in a way, of the Spanish nylon-string guitar — except that it hasn’t had much of a supporting role in films, and it’s usually played in public by people wearing clean, pressed clothes. And really: who doesn’t want to think of themselves as the good guy?

But what about the electric guitar, you ask? Well, the electric guitar is also an American invention — and it is the black sheep of the guitar family. Played world-wide, it caters to a very different musical demographic. I don’t think it would be far wrong to posit that, given that Maestro Andres Segovia considered the flamenco/folk guitar to be something to get as far away from as fast and far as possible, the electric guitar would have been, by his standards, something to entertain Martians, but not people, with. I mean, no one particularly minds if the electric guitar player sweats while he plays his amped-up decibels under the stage lights, right? One can imagine what Segovia must have felt when his son, begotten rather late in the Maestro’s life, went through a teenage phase of being besotted with the electric guitar.

In any event, the pairing of the acoustic guitar with virtue has some interesting cultural corollaries which necessarily inform the lure and lore of today’s guitar. For instance, my own sense of the iconography of this instrument coincides, to some extent, with the iconography of the [more or less artistically photographed] nude female form. Let me explain what I mean.

THE GUITAR AS ICON

The guitar isn’t much of a feature in the world of historical painting as far as I know; and for good reason: much painting was done before the guitar even existed. But photography has come about within the lifetime of the modern guitar, and in the “nude art photography” books and magazines of the 1950s, 60s, 70s, especially, one can see the occasional Spanish guitar being used as a suitable accessory to highlight and contrast with the shape of the nude female form. The same is true in cheesecake pix of the same general period — except that the steel string guitar makes an appearance there. Also, in this genre, the partially clothed or perhaps hiding-behind-the-guitar model will be smiling coyly or beguilingly — and this, along with the fact that cheesecake pix are usually in color whereas “artistic” nudity is photographed in “classic” black and white — is a make-it-or-break-it factor. “Art” strives to inspire; “cheesecake” attempts to seduce. In the latter, the guitar is a prop whose job, along with the model’s coy smile and eye contact, is to suggest that there’s fun (rather than inspiration) to be had here.

The fun element I mentioned above is an ingredient that is used with some discrimination. In “real” or “serious” art photography the model does not express any emotion, much less make faces that, through any suggestion or depiction of enjoyment or pleasure, detract from the . . . cough cough . . . rarified artistic integrity of the oeuvre. The model looks off into the distance, or has her eyes closed. She’s untouchable. If she were real and you tried to approach her and chat her up she’d probably give you a withering look that would lay you out on the floor. And the props themselves (flowers, stones, and vases as well as the guitars) look equally sober. Happily, they are all usually in focus — although I suspect that this is ancillary to anything. But the point is, the Spanish guitar gives sober-looking naked people a touch of exclusivity and class that the steel string guitar doesn’t quite, and the electric guitar doesn’t at all.

To the extent that the cheesecake genre’s props are associated with fun stuff; non-electric (Spanish and steel string) guitars and smiles can go together (I mean, when is the last time you looked at a photograph of a naked babe in a negligee, in the bedroom, holding a saxophone or mandolin?) With electric guitars, on the other hand, things seem to work equally well if the player or model is enraptured, drugged, snarling, sneering, deadpan, or looking at the viewer with outright disdain. This version of the guitar is more familiarly a prop for the type of barely-clothed women who are otherwise showing off their muscles, muscle cars, Harleys, and other accessories of life in the fast lane. Finally, in contrast with its acoustic siblings, the electric guitar isn’t held against the body. At least, not in the same snug and intimate way — and especially not in action shots. There, it is usually hung on a strap and, certainly in the Rock Music version, it hangs down to the player’s crotch, There, the player plays it with largely extended arms (elbows open, definitely not in “holding” or “cradling” position) — in which position instrument’s neck suggests a certain, uh, phallic look. All in all it’s, uh, fairly lubricious. Finally, the decibel count is high. It’s definitely not the listening-to-Bert-Bacharach-in-the-background-with-a-glass-of-wine-by-the-fireplace-at-night kind of thing.

I’ve searched in vain for images of nudes (of either gender) holding trumpets or saxophones, playing pianos or drums or tambourines, plucking on the lute or Jaw harp, blowing on French horns or bagpipes, strumming a banjo or mandolin, or hammering on marimbas. There aren’t any. And one can honestly ask: why not? This must certainly mean something.

Finally, while I am hardly an expert in internet pornography, my researches have located only one image of ANY guitar whatsoever anywhere in cyperpornospace. And it was an ELECTRIC one, not an acoustic one. I think this goes with the reputation of the electric guitar as being the bad boy of the guitar family . . . but then again one suspects that adding a touch of culture and restraint is not, how should I put it, a priority in this domain. I might need to do some more research.

Parenthetically, there’s a parallel process with non-musical props. In “art” photography one will occasionally see the model with a bow and arrow; this usually suggests Diana, the Greek goddess of the hunt. It certainly suggests long-ago and classier things, albeit with a hint of danger and deadliness. There are also decorative vases and neutral outdoor scenery. On the other hand, it is exclusively in the world of contemporary pornography that one sees nudity paired not only with guitars but with rifles, pistols, knives, swords, or other implements that emphasize menace over warmth and safety. In cheesecake the non-musical accessories are generally domestic items such as fireplaces, oil paintings, beds, towels, pools and pool tables, fruit, trees and plants, wine glasses, and horses — and, I repeat, the musical props that one does see in these sets are generally not the ones you have to plug in. In that genre it somehow all works to convey a certain sense of . . . well . . . private coziness.

So, anyway, that’s it: the acoustic Spanish guitar (when it’s playing classical music, but definitely not in its flamenco or folk guise) has longstanding and amply documented associations with highbrow culchah. “Classic” and “classy” have the same root, unsurprisingly. One wonders about the pairing of “cheesecake” and “cheesy”. Insofar as the most expensive acoustic guitars are made of rosewood and spruce, the instrument echoes the formal black-white/dark-light sensibility of the average tuxedo (do you ever wonder about the significance of tuxedos and tails being pretty much only black and white? It’s a highbrow look).

The steel string guitar is currently trying to achieve greater respectability but it still has deep roots in the music of the folk — you know, people who wear brightly colored ordinary clothing, but who do not generally paint their hair nor guitars green or blue. The “rock” electric guitar, famously, doesn’t seem concerned with normal middle-class social approbation. The “country/rhythm-and-blues” electric guitar is loud and fun, but is not outrageous. Last but not least, the archtop guitar has gained a solid foothold on respectability in the rarified world of jazz . . . which was, until not long ago, exciting — but simultaneously disreputable — black people’s music: one had to go to a different part of town to hear that stuff.

In sum, I think that part of the guitar’s allure has to do with our traditional regard for its woods, design, engineering, artistry, physics, sonority, musicality, ergonomics, and historical origin. It also has to do with its phenomenal musical versatility and one’s cultural and social identification. As far as this last element goes, the guitar acts as a proxy for one’s uniform, in a way. One could say that, in addition to all the other things the guitar is and can do, it’s a sort of membership or i.d. card that helps pigeonhole one’s educational and social status. It is also an indication of people’s need for hierarchy, order, and boundaries that some versions of the guitar have been selected out for and dedicated to playing serious music, and some for playing fun music, and some for playing outrageous/outlaw music.

On a different level entirely, and without trying to be facetious, I also believe that there’s an argument to be made for a persuasive fit between the above socio-musical reality and the psychologically informed proposition that there are guitars for the ego, guitars for the superego, and guitars for the id. Not all guitar music soothes the heart of the savage beast; some stirs and stimulates it.