esomogyi – Page 7 – Ervin Somogyi

Concerning Somogyi Knockoffs

December, 2012

It has come to my attention that there have been some guitars recently introduced into the Japanese market that are using my “carved Carp top” design. They are doing so without my permission.

I am very much concerned about these knock-offs. I want to make it clear that Somogyi Guitars is not affiliated with those instruments and, I repeat, I have not given my permission to use my particular rendition of the carp design.

I understand that the carp is a traditional Japanese icon and that I am not the originator of that specific carp image. But I am the originator of that particular and specific artistic use of it on a guitar. I believe that my adaptation of that specific carp image to a guitar, in the way that I have done, is widely known and associated with me in Japan.

I am at present asking the company involved to immediately stop manufacturing and selling their guitars using my design in such a way as to create a similarity with any of my instruments.

I hope they will understand and honor my request and take the necessary steps to correct the problems.

Using Wenge as a Guitar Wood

November 30, 2012

Brazilian rosewood, that traditional “Holy Grail” of fine guitar making woods is getting scarce, expensive, and — with legislation such as the Lacey Act coming to the fore in recent years — illegal to have unless one has the legal paperwork to show its age, provenance, and legality to be allowed to cross borders. Therefore, in view of severe restrictions in supply and use of traditional guitar making woods, suppliers to the guitar making industry are offering new, supposedly more sustainable guitar making woods that no one had heard of ten years ago, that come from countries that half of us cannot find on the map. All of these woods, of course, are marketed as being desirable and adequate substitutes (availability, good grain, figure, color, dimensional stability, price, etc.) for the traditional materials.

In my view, some are and some aren’t. As a guitar maker, my own preferences are for woods that are “live” rather than not, regardless of their grain, figure or color. What that means is that one can elicit a live and musical tone from a particular slice or chunk when one taps on it. Some woods can make sound on the order of thummmmmmmm or thimmmmmmmm (ginnnnnnnng, gonnnnnng, pinnnnnnng or ponnnnnnnng also work; I think you get the idea), with bell-like sustain; others go “thwick” or “thud”***. I mean, the reason some woods are called tonewoods is because they literally produce a musical note. And this quality, when used to make a guitar soundbox, will make a better and more acoustically active guitar than would be the case if the woods used made some kind of thud or thunk when sounded. Such woods are fine for making furniture. If they’re to be used in guitar making, though, then a perfectly reasonable course of action is to focus on the visuals instead of the acoustics. There are “live” woods that look rather plain, and there are “dead” woods that look like Raquel Welch in 3-D. The flash and beauty of the latter have an obvious appeal and many guitars get made because their looking gorgeous will be a strong selling point. As much to the point, when considerations of tone and appearance vie for customers, heated discussions about the good points of this or that combination of materials will occur and a variety of woods will be brought out as being “as good as”, “acoustically responsive”, “high quality”, “surprisingly good”, “improved by patented methods of treatment”, “a comparable alternative”, “now used by the so-and-so factory in their higher end guitars”, and so on.

My own searches have brought me to wenge (pronounced WHEN-gay). It’s a dark, purplish-brown colored African hardwood that has long been used by bowl turners and cabinet/furniture makers. For some reason, no one seems to have thought about using it for guitars yet — so it’s relatively cheap. (Once something catches the attention of the buying public its price goes up; with guitar making woods this rise can be quite dramatic.) The thing that appeals to me about wenge is that it is very live. That is, when you hold a piece of it up and tap on it — i.e., if you’re holding it in such a way that you’re not damping any of its vibrational modes — it’ll ring like a piece of glass, plate of steel, or a crystal brandy snifter. This quality is known as “vitreousness”, which literally means “glasslike-ness”. And wenge will make such a sound.

Wenge’s vitreousness is a function of the wood’s being brittle on the level of its cellular structure. In fact, it’s that very brittleness that makes the vibrational action, and the sound that this produces, possible. The brittleness that is a plus for sound has a mechanical downside, of sorts, in that the wood cracks easily if it’s mishandled (just as glass does), and it gives one splinters if one is careless with it. It can also take more patience to bend, because brittle woods resist bending easily. I repeat, however, that it is this very potential for cracking that puts wenge in the same category as that most prized of traditional guitar making woods, Brazilian rosewood. Lovely, alluring, and live though this “holy grail” wood is, it has also earned a reputation for being subject to cracking. Sound vs. fragility: it’s a tradeoff for which there are few solutions so long as one wishes to use that material — and the solutions involve (1) overbuilding so as to minimize fragility (which comes at the expense of tonal response), or (2) mindful treatment and care in the making, in the handling, and in the using. The former gives you structural stability and less sound; the latter gives you structural fragility and much more sound.

While the acoustic properties of a given wood might make it a joy for a guitar maker to work with, marketing a new wood can be tricky. No one will have heard of it, much less had experience with it; the buying public will be suspicious of, and resistant to, accepting it. It’s a bit of an uphill slog until it “catches on”. This has certainly been my experience. I’ve made five of these guitars by now and am working on my sixth. As I said: it’s wonderfully live; but most of my customers still want Brazilian rosewood. That’s fine; but wenge is a really good alternative for anyone who is willing to be open minded. And it makes the guitars less expensive.

Finally, I have to add that making guitars that sound good, using wenge for the back and sides, should not be much of an impediment to younger guitar makers who are still establishing their reputations and their styles. As I said, it’s a good wood, needing only a good advertising campaign behind it. It is the more established guitar makers such as myself who, already having reputations for using this wood or that wood, or having a certain by-now-familiar style or feature associated with their work, who meet the greatest resistance to anything new. In my case, everybody wants me to make the same things for them that I’ve been making for my other clients; the traditional woods and designs, after all, have their good track records. An example of this factor would be that I’d expect to have a hard time selling a guitar (that I made) that looked like Grit Laskin’s work, well executed though it might be; why would anyone buy a Laskin knock-off from me when they can get an original from him? And I’d expect Mr. Laskin to have an equally hard time selling a guitar that looked like my work; why would anyone buy a Somogyi knock-off when they can get an original from me? Just so with woods and other departures from our norms.

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*** These sounds are onomatopoeic. Onomatopoeia is when a word replicates something of the very sound that it’s identifying. Onomatopoeia is useful, in spite of the fact that if one overuses it one sounds like a six-year old. But in fact, many “sound” words such as boom, crack, boing, thud, tap, ding-dong, smack, roar, clink, thump, clang, whap, bam, zip, hum, buzz, gong, snap, gurgle, ka-chunk, ka-ching, scratch, whoosh, zing, pow, ting, bark, meow, hiss, pop, twang, shriek, puff, clank, beep, snip, clip, chop, thunk, boinnnng, flap, squawk, screech, puff, tick-tock, bop, creak, glug-glug, ring, whack, moo, ruffle, oink, spank, swish, growl, tinkle, rip, rumble, squash, cock-a-doodle-doo, crash, squish, ack-ack, clunk, zap, whizz, whirr, bang, murmur, cough, drip, splash, shpritz, zoom, flush, clap, slap, slam, ah-choo, snort, chortle, giggle, gulp, gasp, shuffle, bip, ring, and thud are onomatopoeic. Try reading this list out loud: it’ll remind you of someone falling down a long flight of stairs and hitting some pets along the way. As far as having a discussion about something like music goes, the nouns and onomatopoeics are fairly straightforward; it’s the adjectives for sound (smooth, liquid, smoky, complex, transparent, rough, golden, dark, even, cloying, colorful, dull, transient, fruity, present, sweet, sharp, mellow, full-bodied, dry, light, airy, impressive, etc.), that get us into the most trouble.

FAQ #8: Flat Vs. Domed Tops

September 22, 2012

Q: In your book you recomend 30′ for a top radius, if one decides to buy a commercialy made disc. On the other hand I saw that James Goodall and Robert Taylor use 50′ and 65′ radiused dishes and Jim Olson & Kevin Ryan make FLAT non-radius tops. Olson said that he feels that these produce more responsive tops. So why, exactly, do you recomend a 30′ one? Wouldn’t a 65′ one be better since it is closer to being FLAT?

A: It’s a question of balancing various factors — very similar to a cook’s gauging how much of this and/or that spice or flavoring to use in making a dinner.

In the guitar (instead of carrots, lamb, and oregano) the ingredients are the string tension, the torque from the bridge, the mass of the braced top (which is arrived at by any combination of top thickness and bracing mass), top bracing and reinforcement (that is, the pattern and layout of the braces, as well as their profiling and height), and desired target sound (the resultant mix of monopole and dipoles, as well as sustain and dynamics).

There is no “correct” way to make a guitar. If there were, they’d all sound the same — just as if there were only one recipe for making French onion soup: then all French onion soup would taste exactly the same. In the biological realm, it would be equivalent to having every wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfrend, son, daughter, etc. be clones. So let’s forget “the one best way” of doing something complex.

Jim Olsen holds that a flat top is the most responsive. Very well. But what, exactly, does that mean? Does this not have something to do with how thick and/or stiff the top is, or how it is braced? And how it responds to the mechanical pull of the strings? I suspect that it does. So if we were to imagine a VERY thin top that is made flat, it would be easy to imagine it buckling or caving in under the pull of the strings… unless the bracing were beefy enough to make up for the weakness of such a flat plate. In other words, you could make that flimsy face hold up by adding more reinforcing.

You could also/instead make that flimsy face hold up better by putting an arch or dome into it. Arched structures are stiffer and more stable than flat ones — just as a pointed or arched roof on a house will hold up to rain and snow better than a flat one. Western architecture took a mighty step forward when structural doming became possible: the materials themselves — rather than supports, trusses, beams, and buttresses — achieve the required structural integrity, Analogously, if you put a dome or arch into the guitar face, you could use less bracing and achieve the same stiffness with fewer materials (i.e. less mass).

Less mass is good; it means that the strings have to strain less to coax sound out of the top. The strings need to work harder to get sound out of a heavy top — exactly as a horse has to pull harder to make a heavily loaded wagon move. You can appreciate that different archings/domings induce different amounts of stiffness into a plate. As can different thicknesses of that plate. And so can different sizes and layouts of braces. These are, in fact, the three main ingredients of top-making, exactly as flour, water, and eggs are three main ingredients in bread making. And in both guitars and bread the ingredients can be mixed or combined in different ways to produce a successful product. In the guitar this goal is: a top that is intelligently constructed and reasonably lightweight (which goes to sound), and also able to hold up to the pull of the strings (which goes to long-term stability of the guitar).

In the guitar, ridiculously small (or small-seeming) amounts of these various ingredients can make a difference you can clearly hear. For instance, a bit more or less top thickness can offset a bit more or less doming. A bit more or less bracing can offset a bit more or less top thickness. And so on. Identifying and using only one of these factors as being “most important”, appealing though that idea is, turns out not to be realistic. If the guitar were a political construct rather than a mechanical one, then it would work best as a democracy in which every component is (not to make a pun) given its proper voice. To make one into a “leader” (in our sociopolitical sense of the word) is not what a guitar is all about.

An Amusing Experience

September 22, 2012

I want to tell you about an interesting experience I had a few years ago. A good many of you out there may well be able to relate to it.

Some of you readers may know that I play flamenco guitar. Well, in the best Shoemaker’s-Children-Have-No-Shoes tradition, I didn’t have a good flamenco guitar of my own for a long time; I was playing a borrowed cheapo. So, with friends’ benevolent prodding to motivate me (but that’s the subject of another article), I decided to make myself my own guitar. And I did. With great eagerness and anticipation.

When the moment finally came to string it up and play it, I was struck by what a magnificent bass response it had. My shop was then in a high-ceiling warehouse space, and this guitar’s bass absolutely filled that cavernous room. It made the air space resonate. It was like a Taiko-drum guitar. The bass was, in a word, simply awesome. It entirely overshadowed the treble end.

Unfortunately, a really good bass is not the sound that a good flamenco guitar needs to have. One wants something bright, zingy, penetrating, with the traditional flamenco rough edge. Where had I gone wrong? (Does this scenario sound familiar to any of you?) Technically, I’d built a guitar with a kick-ass good monopole, but not much cross- or long dipoles — although this was language I was to learn later; I was not familiar with such concepts at the time.

I spent some time pondering what to do. Shave the braces? If so, which ones, where, and by how much? Should I sand the top thinner? Again: where and how much? Should I put on higher tension strings? Or install a new fretboard with a longer scale? Or perhaps become withdrawn, eat compulsively, drop out of lutherie and realize my life’s secret ambition of becoming the first Hungarian-American sumo wrestler? Heck, I had lots of options. It also occurred to me that I could call some of my expert fellow luthiers and get some informed advice. It seemed, at least, a good way to get some consensus as to where to start. They’d know exactly what to do, surely.

I called noted authority Richard Brune; he not only makes classic and flamenco guitars, but is also a skilled flamenco guitar player. He’d certainly know how to fix this. So I described the guitar to him over the telephone, taking care to be as specific as I could be about sizes, measurements, thicknesses, etc. He took in my information and immediately told me that my braces were inadequate to the job; I needed much bigger braces. He advised me to rebrace the guitar in that way, or at least retrofit meatier braces in through the soundhole. I thanked Richard for his advice and hung up.

I’d hoped for an easier fix than to either futz blindly for hours through the soundhole; or retop the guitar; or remove the back, rebrace the innards, and then replace the back and then do refinishing. That’s a lot of work. Besides, it wasn’t as though the guitar were for an important client or anything. So I thought that I could perhaps get a second opinion — to at least force me to do this work by the sheer preponderance of advice. I called Robert Ruck, an internationally and deservedly noted Spanish guitar maker who also plays flamenco guitar. I’d known him, as I’d known Brune, from any number of G.A.L. conventions, private correspondence, phone conversations, etc. Many of you reading this will have attended their lectures, read their articles, and also met them.

Once again, I went through the process of describing my guitar to a knowledgeable expert; same guitar, same measurements, same parameters, same conversation. Robert took my information in, and just as quickly as Brune had given me his opinion, rendered his own: my braces were too big. According to him, I needed to shave the braces down drastically in order to gain a satisfactory sound. He offered to fax me a drawing — which he in fact did the next day — of a special brace-shaving tool that he’d invented for shaving hard-to-get-at braces through the soundhole; it was especially useful for shaving down the Spanish guitar’s diagonal braces — the chevrons that are farthest from the soundhole and the most impossible to get to. I thanked Robert for his input and hung up.

I’d hardly expected to get identical input from two independent luthiers; but this was ridiculous. My next idea was the obvious one: to call someone else and at least try for a consensus of two out of three. I needed more input. Whether I wanted it or not.

I happened to have a conversation with luthier Steve Klein the following week. Steve doesn’t make flamenco guitars — or conventional guitars of any kind, for that matter. Still, he’s a very smart, articulate luthier and a brilliant designer with years of guitar making experience behind him, so I mentioned the two conversations I’d already had about my guitar’s spectacular lack of tonal balance. I thought that Steve might have a useful perspective on my problem; after all, bass is bass and treble is treble and a guitar is a guitar, right?

Steve’s opinion, diplomatically rendered after I described my situation to him, was that my bridge design was faulty. In Steve’s opinion, I could improve the sound of my guitar in the desired direction by replacing the bridge with — I forget which now, since so much time has passed since this conversation happened, and I was a little shell-shocked anyway — either a lighter one or a heavier one. I thanked Steve for his input and said goodbye.

Armed with all this advice and support from some of the more prominent of my professional colleagues, I was, how shall I say it, not yet quite fully enlightened. The thought of hacking wood away from my guitar — or gluing wood on — here and there, hoping to strike gold through luck as much as skill, didn’t have much appeal for me. And, suppose I managed to destroy the bass response without improving the treble? Or even (God forbid) even improve it?! I agonized. But, I thought: I am a professional, am I not? Bottom line: I still needed to get at least some clarity on this matter. Understandably, however, I found myself a bit reluctant to ask for input from anyone else.

Right about that time I visited nearby-based luthier Randy Angella’s new workshop; Angella had been making lovely and really good sounding classic guitars for years, had then dropped out and gone into different work, and had more recently come back into lutherie. I thought I might get some ideas from him. But I wasn’t going to ask directly: I’d tried that tactic and it had been leading nowhere. I was going to sneak around and try to get a hint from whatever methods he was using.

Randy is a very nice man and is able to share freely of his knowledge and techniques. He was at the time making his guitar tops’ perimeters very thin — including the edge along the lower transverse brace, sometimes known as the harmonic bar; he was tapering the top on the bridge-side of the lower transverse brace, and leaving it full thickness past that brace. I took note of this. Unfortunately, as the wisdom I’d received to that point in time indicated that thinning the perimeter of a guitar face would loosen its “hinge” movement and help the bass, I couldn’t see that going in this direction was going to be of any help to me. I already had too much bass, and maybe I should have asked about Randy’s thinking. Bugfat.

I reviewed my options again. I could jump in and shave some braces. I could sand the top thinner. In both cases I’d simply need to figure out where and how much. I might have luck with higher tension strings; but they might make the guitar sound even more robust. Or lower tension strings: they’d give me a more delicate sound, surely. I could install a longer fretboard and scale; or a shorter one; this would be more or less the equivalent of experimenting with string gauges. I might dump the project and retop the guitar. Then, I could also leave town quietly. Yep, I still had lots of options.

I’d begun to get to know luthier Eugene Clark at about that time; he was living about fifteen minutes away from me. He and I got together at a local restaurant, after having had made on-again/off-again plans for some time. Eugene is almost legendary as a Spanish guitar maker, and, not surprisingly, the subject of my problematic guitar came up. Over coffee and dessert I described my problematic situation, and Eugene in turn explained his concept of the Spanish guitar to me: it is — in a nutshell — a thin film of lightly braced wood stretched over a spare framework of massive main braces that (1) strictly delineate its vibrating areas and simultaneously (2) sets the resonances of these areas by virtue of the level of introduced rigidity. As far as the face is concerned, Eugene’s idea of the most effective design is to have a thin, domed plate of topwood held up by a rigid perimeter and by rather substantial upper and lower transverse braces (i.e., the ones that straddle the soundhole) which are moreover fully anchored into the sides. That is, these braces aren’t scalloped at the ends — which weakens their attachment to the main structure, and hence their stiffening/load bearing capacity — but rather butted at full height against the sides, and then held in place on each end with a bracket. I showed him my guitar; Eugene immediately showed me something interesting: that by simply pressing on the guitar’s face with his thumb over the lower transverse brace, he could stiffen that brace — and the quadrant it served — sufficiently so that the tap tone became significantly altered. When he let go with his thumb, the original (and, frankly, thuddy and dull) sound came back; when he pressed down again, the top responded with a dramatically more live ping. No rebracing; no rethicknessing; but tightening the top up — even in this ad hoc and artificial way — made a difference that I could instantly hear. In dynamic terms, such a mechanical change toward brighter response would come at the expense of the monopole (which my guitar had in abundance); and it brought out more of the long and cross dipoles — which is exactly how a flamenco guitar ought to be functioning in the first place. I was very glad for this input.

In due time I went back to my workbench and reworked my guitar. I spent a day carefully removing the lower transverse brace through the soundhole. I did it carefully and cleanly. And I installed a meatier replacement. The toughest part was cutting the linings away; I had to do that to make room for a replacement brace that extended fully from side wood to side wood and whose ends I could glue brackets over. I had to cut two of my Japanese woodcarving knives’ handles way down to make the tools small enough to fit into the guitar’s body. I did a little brace shaving, but not much. Simultaneously, I did remove wood from the top selectively with sandpaper and a sanding block, so as to facilitate the dipole motions of the bridge. I reasoned that this additional operation would help further the phenomenon Eugene had showed me. Then I re-French polished the face.

It worked. I took this guitar with me to the next Healdsburg Guitar Festival — not to display, but to have and play after hours, to amuse myself musically. By then the guitar had settled in (as all guitars eventually do) and light reflecting off the face was revealing that the face was thinned to the point that one could see the “imprinting” of the braces underneath; I don’t think this had happened before; but the guitar hadn’t existed in its originally thicknessed state long enough for it to settle in, so I’ll never know.

Anyway, I signed up to do an open mic performance at one of the local coffee houses one of the evenings of the festival, and I played that guitar. To my surprise, a man came up to me after my performance and offered to buy that guitar from me on the spot. I’d never had such an experience before, and I’d certainly not expected to make a sale that weekend in such a way. But I did!

All in all, this had been a terrifically broadening experience, filled with surprises of all kinds at every turn. Lamentably, the world lost its first Hungarian-American sumo wrestler, but that couldn’t be helped. My thanks to all the people who helped me to learn something.

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This article has been previously published in American Lutherie magazine.

FAQ #7: Flat Backs and Arch Tops

September 22, 2012

Q: Recently I bought your books & DVD and I found one sentence particularly interesting: you mentioned that if a guitar with a normal flat back had an arched top, its dynamics would be unique. Can you please reveal from your experiences in which direction the sound will change, compared to that of a normal flat/domed top?

A: It’s an interesting question, and to my knowledge no one has yet made a guitar like this. Mario Beauregard of Quebec, on the other hand, has been making something truly new: nylon string guitars with arched backs and flat tops.

The arching of a plate stiffens it: it improves its stiffness-to-weight ratio. And, acoustically, it raises the plate’s pitch: its vibrational behaviors are shifted toward high-frequency signal — such as the violin has. A small highly domed plate is not likely to have a good monopole — that is, a good low end. Also, the greater the arch, the shorter the sustain is likely to be.

Cellos have a low end, and they have violin-like arched plates — but they are huge compared to a guitar. So part of what we are discussing is the SIZE of the plate, in addition to its doming vs. flatness. But it would be difficult to play a cello-sized guitar.

There’s another factor too: what wood the arched plate is made of. Traditionally, all arched-plated instruments (violins, violas, cellos, standing basses, and jazz guitars) have used spruces and maples — spruces for the tops, maples for the backs. Maple does not have much sustain compared with some of the woods used in guitars, especially Brazilian rosewood (although, in my experience of the maples, Eastern rock maple has the most, Western broadleaf maple has the least, and European maple — which is a sycamore — has some). Therefore, if we’re talking about a guitar with an arched spruce top and a flat maple back, it would likely have a sound characterized by a quick attack and a quick decay: bright, brisk, zingy, sharp, and not much sustain.

Sustain is not a factor in arched-plate and bowed instruments. They don’t need natural sustain: they will make sound as long as the player continues to scrape his bow over the strings. In the guitar on the other hand, because it is a plucked rather than a bowed instrument, the sound stops as soon as the strings do — just as happens with the banjo, lute, koto, ukulele, mandolin, dulcimer, harp, or harpsichord. [NOTE: the harp and the harpsichord are both excited by plucking action; the piano is excited by hammering action.]

It’s not likely that these traditions had such acoustic considerations behind them. The science of acoustics didn’t yet exist, and early European makers would of course have used the woods available to them — in this case the European alpine spruces and maples. They were a long way from having access to imported exotics from the New World. Also, in those days, the cost of labor was cheap and the cost of materials was high, so a thick plate of an imported exotic wood (that you’d carve down into an arched surface, and in the process wasting much of the wood) would have been quite expensive, compared to a thin plate of the same wood such as would eventually be used on guitars.

FAQ #6: Bracing, Thickness, or Both

December 18, 2011

Q: In my limited experience with classical guitars there seems to be a need to have a more flexible top on the bass side and a more stiff top on the treble side, giving the warm and low sound on the bass and more sustain on the treble, as well as preventing the percussive anvil sort of trebles . The flamencos seem to have a somewhat less flexible bass and a flexible treble side, which gives them a somewhat percussive sound with rapid decay in sound. This is at least consistent in the examples I have and have had the opportunity to play.

If one were to attempt to make a classical guitar as stated above would a change in top thickness to accommodate the additional stiffness required on the treble side be in order, or would changing or stiffening the bracing on that side be a better option than making a guitar with a top that is not of uniform thickness?

So…essentially, bracing or thickness or both?

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

A: Your question addresses the primary issue of whether it is desirable to design a plate that relies on symmetrical design, or an asymmetrical one, for optimal functioning. The matter is clouded by the fact that some remarkably good guitars of both types have been made. Also, some pretty unimpressive guitars of both designs have been made. So there’s no clear winner, and I’m not convinced that the mere fact of symmetrical or asymmetrical construction is the most important consideration. I mean, if it were, one of these designs would produce consistently better results than the other.

As I read your question, I am translating it (to myself) into language that I am most comfortable with. So my answer might put a different spin on things than you’re used to. Let’s see if this makes sense to you.

To my knowledge, flamenco guitars achieve their characteristic sound by having looser, more flexible tops in general than classic guitars. Specifically, they are so loose that the monopole (the base) is discharged quickly — thus giving those instruments the characteristic traditional “dry” sound without a lot of sustained presence; their sound is more percussive. Usually, if one believes in asymmetrical construction, the treble side is made a bit stiffer than the bass side. In any event, compared to classic guitars, flamenco guitars have a more prominent cross-dipole. They are “looser” in that mode, in which the top moves side-to-side across the centerline and the bridge teeter-totters with one wing going up as the other goes down, and back. You can get a sense of this looseness by simply pressing down on one of those tops with your thumb: you will probably feel them “give’ fairly easily. You can also test for cross-dipole compliance by lightly putting one or two fingers of one hand on one wing of the bridge and lightly tap on the other wing with your other hand. You should feel a definite and instantaneous displacement as the bridge see-saws relatively freely. Classic guitars will be built less loosely, and will accordingly have less mechanical “give”. Neither one of these designs is “good” or “bad”, by the way; they are simply different — and different for a reason.

To my knowledge, these characteristics of flexibility and movement in a guitar top are best achieved by careful BUT SYMMETRICAL calibration of the plate — and I do not try to build any mechanical or dimensional asymmetry into my own guitar tops. But I acknowledge that other makers of successful guitars use dimensionally asymmetrical faces, so I’m inclined to believe that the motions of the cross-dipole (or any other mode) apply to a variety of architectures. At that point, the issue becomes that of basic calibrating so that one is “in the ballpark” and doesn’t overbuild or underbuild. I go into several detailed discussions of this concern in various chapters of my book The Responsive Guitar. You’ll undoubtedly find some of my ideas from there worth at least thinking about.

Your question addresses the question of whether it’s appropriate to add or subtract bracing in order to accommodate to changees in top thickness — as a matter of making material stiffnesses — and hence vibrational action — be consistent. The matter of achieving a balance between stiffness and/or looseness through top thickness vs. bracing mass is central to lutherie. And in this balancing act, there are two factors that inform my thinking.

First, in the traditional approach, if one were to make part of the top thinner, one would indeed want to “compensate” for it by making the bracing a little stiffer. This is assuming that the maker’s goal is to have AN EVEN GRADIENT OF MECHANICAL AND VIBRATIONAL STIFFNESS FROM THE BRIDGE TO THE PERIMETER, IN ALL DIRECTIONS. This is certainly my goal. In purely practical terms, this is surprisingly tricky to do until you begin to understand what you’re doing and have some practice at it; after that, it’s surprisingly easy. So an experienced hand and eye are really useful to have. I should add that, incidentally and technically, the gradient that I visualize in my work is only even in the sense that there are no lumps or irregularities of localized stiffness between the center and the perimeter; but it is not the same slope on all axes, in the sense of being identical. The longitudinal gradient is stiffer than the lateral gradient.

Be all that as it may, the second factor is, I think, just as important. It’s also interesting, subtle, and elegant — and obvious. So much so that it took me years to see it. It’s the “water running downhill” principle; you know: that water will find a way to run downhill regardless of trees, rocks, or irregularities of slope or terrain — because that’s the nature of water. In fact, such downhill movement of water cannot be prevented short of putting up a barrier or obstacle that exceeds the power of gravity over water.

Interestingly, sound energy is the same, except that instead of running downhill it wants to radiate off a guitar top — with all the freedom of water running downhill. It’s the nature of sound energy to dissipate into its surrounding medium, be it air or water. If we think of sound energy as seeking its easiest path “out”, as water wants to find the easiest path “down”, then it’s a short step to seeing physical unevenness in a guitar top as being analogous to unevenness in downhill terrain. And unless any of this unevenness is significantly huge, both water and sound will continue to flow and radiate. Tweaking any of the minor irregularities of slope, terrain, or structure will by no means stop any of the flow or radiation; they’ll find a way to get from here to there.

Let’s take a look at how this might work in a guitar. Let’s assume that you have a dimensionally asymmetrical plate, as you described above. And let’s further assume that the structure — irregularities and all — is “in the ballpark” as far as not undermining the monopole, cross-dipole, and long dipole. Or, saying the same thing with different words, that the irregularities are such that they allow the capacity of the plate to engage in these modes without messing any of them up). The top will flex and bend and seesaw and vibrate just as all the theories, diagrams and Chladni patterns suggest. The question then becomes: what makes you assume that such a top and its vibrational modes have to function symmetrically around the guitar’s centerline? Or that the various vibrating quadrants and subsection of the face will map out as being active with elegant evenness, symmetry, and consistency? I mean, no one expects water to flow downhill over a natural terrain in a straight, even, consistent, and predictably regular line, do they?

Your question cites differential side-to-side construction. This is the axis of the cross-dipole, which is (in theory) a see-sawing action around the centerline. If we were to imagine two kids on a playground see-sawing up and down on a teeter-totter, that device will be pivoting on its center point as a matter of the manufacturer’s design. But, suppose one of the kids is heavier than the other one? That would introduce an irregularity into the flow of their play. The manufacturer of the teeter-totter wouldn’t care about that, of ocurse; only the kids would. And to anyone to whom the kids’ fun was important, they could compensate for this disparity in mass (in the “playing field” or “gradient”) of that teeter-totter by simply adjusting the fulcrum point to a somewhat off-center position. Then, being better balanced, the kids could see-saw happily and without strain: same mass, same energy, same frequency, easier and more harmonious oscill.ation.

This is close to my sense of how the guitar works. To repeat, using other words: if there is sufficient unevenness in the top because of any design idea of the maker, and the design variable isn’t so huge as to throw a monkey wrench into the natural functioning of the guitar, then that “uneven” top will accommodate to the needs of the energy flow of that irregular structure all by itself. It’ll adjust, within some limits (of the natural capacity for flexibility of its woods), and perhaps wind up fulcruming, say, 1/16″ off the centerline. It can do that because the guitar lacks a fixed fulcrum in the way that a teeter-totter has one. Therefore, the vibrating quadrants of the top may be a little bit lopsided or asymmetrical in actual movement, etc.. But, as far as dissipation of strings’ energy is concerned, nothing has been prevented; it’s simply found its way out via an alternate path from what “the manufacturer’s blueprint” might have suggested.

This doesn’t fully answer your question yet, but my answer required me to have sketched in this background before addressing it specifically. This background, to repeat once more, is that tonewood that has been worked to more or less optimal dimensions has a certain innate flexibility of vibratory potential. There are no fixed fulcrums or vibrational nodes. And it may not matter that you’ve made an irregular plate — as long as you have not made it so uneven that you’ve pushed the plate past some limit of being able to perform its principal vibrational tasks.

So, to sum up: my answer to you is in four parts:

First, that yes, if you make a top thinner on one wing, which necessarily weakens it, then there’s a logic to adding bracing stiffness to it to make up for that weakening. I believe that one should aim toward at least some standard of evenness of physical/mechanical/tonal gradient if one’s goal is to make better and more reliable guitars.

Second: I believe that these maneuvers work most effectively if the top and braces are “in the ballpark” as far as optimal mass and stiffness are concerned — rather than the system being overbuilt as is often the case. Or underbuilt, if you’ve gone too far in thinning. If you’re overbuilding, then the thinning and bracing work that you are considering might be nullified or overshadowed by the fact that the structure is still too stiff. Or maybe the part that you’ve thinned will work fine, but the part that y ou haven’t thinned will be inhibited. But you won’t get 100% cooperation from such a top.

Third, you will probably produce minimally uneven tops no matter what you do; guitars in the real world always have something or other that’s not optimal.

Fourth, as with the example of water cited above, and if your gradient is not too unevenly made to begin with, then what you’ve constructed or misconstructed probably won’t matter. Or at least it won’t matter very much within the context of the flexibility of vibrational potential that the top has. The top will bend itself (sorry about the pun) to work in any way it can, to release its load of sound energy. It’ll modulate itself physically and vibrationally. As I said above, the vibrationally active areas of the top may functionally be a little bit asymmetrical, things may be a bit off-center, vibrational patterns might not be quite mirror-image, etc. But this is no big deal: the top plate has the capacity to function at least a little bit like that in order for the system — as it is physically constructed, with its unevenness and irregularities — to engage in an adequate monopole, cross-dipole, and long dipole. Finally, the sound will get out, sometimes because of, and sometimes in spite of, and sometimes without being much bothered one way or the other by, the work you’ve done. And I think this is where a bit of the magic comes in.

I hope this makes some sense.

F.A.Q.#5: Soundholes and Bracing Patterns

December 18, 2011

Q: If the soundhole is not in the traditional location at the end of the fretboard, is there a better bracing pattern than the X-brace, in your experience?

A: The soundhole is where it is, as a matter of tradition rather than critical thought: it’s always been put there. One might put this in terms of history trumping dynamics. History and tradition notwithstanding, the guitar soundhole has a tonal role to play, and I devote an entire chapter of The Responsive Guitar to the mechanical and dynamic functions of the soundhole with respect to brace location.

As far as the mechanical dynamics go, the soundhole in the Spanish guitar is outside of the main vibrating area of the face; it’s isolated from it by a massive brace that acts like a dam, and the comparatively delicate fan bracing on the other side of it does its work without being affected by exactly where, above that dam, the soundhole is. In the steel string guitar, instead, the soundhole is inside the main vibrating area of the face. It represents a mechanical perforation of that plate — and it necessarily weakens it. Imagine a drum head (a vibrating diaphragm) with a great big hole in it, and you’ll be able to grasp one of the principal bad dynamic ideas in the steel string guitar.

As far as bracing placement is concerned, my opinion is that the acoustical work of the bracing is more important than the specific location of the soundhole, and that these shouldn’t be in conflict with one another; therefore, I think there’s more to be said for moving the soundhole “out of the way” than moving the bracing around. Those kinds of judgments depend, of course, on understanding the functions and possibilities of various bracing systems. You don’t just want to move stuff around randomly.

Speaking of tradition vs. critical thought, the Kasha guitars (with the innovative Kasha bracing) were the first ones to focus on the bracing layout first and the soundhole placement second — in spite of how oddball those guitars looked. I give the Kasha people credit for understanding about putting the soundhole in a place where it helps rather than hinders. The soundhole’s dynamic function is to act as a port (as per the discoveries of 18th century Dutch scientist Christian Huygens, which I go into in my book), and as such doesn’t HAVE to be in any particular location. I recommend reading my book if you haven’t already.

Whether or not one moves the soundhole, it’s useful to have an idea of what each bracing layout can do, in terms of its mechanical and vibrational possibilities. Or impossibilities. There’s a logic to each bracing pattern and each one can be tweaked and altered in many ways — some subtly, some radically. And, as I said, part of the challenge is to not put the soundhole where it’ll create a problem. Either way, we’d have to understand how these factors interact before going on to talk about “better” or “worse”… because there are many ways to spoil the efficacy of any blueprint pattern and there are many ways to “get it right”.

But, let’s get back to your question about “X” bracing and soundhole location. The virtue of “X” bracing is that it ties the face together so as to create the possibility of a dominant monopole motion. Now, it won’t work nearly optimally well if the bracing/top are overbuilt and too stiff, or if the plate isn’t properly or consistently tapered, etc., and your job is to learn to do an INFORMED balancing act. Plus, the soundhole is right in the middle of this, sort of like interrupted ceiling beams that are holding up a roof that itself has a great big hole in it.

If you can get comfortable with the idea of relocating the soundhole to somewhere else then you do have to think about what to do with its area of topwood that is newly available as vibrating diaphragm. I mean, you’re creating an empty space bigger than any other empty space on that braced top. You could close the “X” brace up a bit… but that would necessarily open up the bass and treble quadrants, and you’d have to figure out if you were comfortable with that. As I said, it’s all a balancing act. If you didn’t want to mess with the balancing act then you might think about installing one or more finger braces into that space, to tie it into the rest of the bracing. I don’t have a better specific answer for you than this.

My unspecific answer is to think of what your changes might signify in terms of the main modal movements of the top: the monopole, the cross-dipole, and the long-dipole. Mainly, “X” bracing is a recipe for bringing out the monopole; it ties everything together. Fan bracing is a recipe for facilitating cross-dipole; there’s nothing there to prevent or inhibit that mode. Ladder bracing is a recipe for emphasizing long-dipole; it destroys the monopole and the cross-dipole.

So, if you were thinking of closing in the angle of the “X”, you would be justified in suspecting that this will facilitate more cross-dipole: the legs of the “X” would be stiffening the plate in a different way, as a function of their new orientation. So, the equation might look like: (Take away soundhole) + (closing in the “X”) = (more cross dipole). A second equation might be: (remove soundhole and add a bit more topwood) + (leave “X” the same) = (maybe a bit more monopole). Another equation might be: (remove soundhole) + (enlarge the space by spreading the “X” legs out) + (make new bracing accommodations to reinforce this larger space) = (?).

My point is that if you can accept that there’s some actually useful information contained in technical jargon such as “monopole”, “cross-dipole”, and “long-dipole” (which are simply formal words for some basic concepts of top vibration, and hence sound) then I think you can begin to have really interesting ideas about how to problem-solve your next guitar project, and make it better.

Some Thoughts on Guitar Sound

November 3, 2011

The guitar is about many things: craftsmanship, commerce, history, tradition, entertainment, science, wood and gut and a few other things, physics, acoustics, skill, artistry in design and ornamentation, music, marketing and merchandising, magic, etc. Mostly, the guitar is supposed to be about sound. But that thing is the hardest of all the things on this list to pin down and get a measure of.

Sound is air molecules hitting and exciting our ear drums, pure and simple. But there’s no magic at all in this objective description. The magic in musical sound all happens subjectively, in the brain and in how it’s able (through innate ability, training, and acculturation) to processes the neural impulses being sent in from the ear. In this regard sound is very much like food and wine, where the magic happens in one’s own mouth, tongue, palate, nose, eyes, as well as in one’s brain. While many of us report that we “like” this or that sound or wine or food — the fact is that many of us hold these preferences because we’ve learned that we should have them, without ever knowing whether we have any authentic preferences that are different. So when it comes to guitar sound, I’m big on listening and really paying attention. And I recommend it to everyone.

Guitar sound is complex. Good sound is, by definition, sound that pleases the listener — whether he understands anything about the sound or not. A guitar can have any combination or quality of: bass, treble, midrange, resonance, timbre, definition, sustain, projection, dynamic range, warmth, volume, percussiveness, tonal bloom, note shape, harmonics, sweetness, clarity (or lack of it), tonal rise and decay time, cutting power, spareness, evenness of response, brittleness, directionality, separation, brilliance, dryness of tone, tinnyness, tonal darkness or lightness, and/or cleanness of tone. So, unless you have a really sophisticated and practiced ear, it won’t work to evaluate a guitar’s sound by listening to someone play a whole piece of music on it. That amount of information overwhelms the average ear within the first eight or ten bars of the song.

However, there is a way of coming to grips with sound that I stumbled on a few years ago. It is so simple that no one ever thinks of it: that is, really listening to the simplest sounds the guitar can make — and doing it in a quiet place. It’s very much like tasting food or sipping a wine; one does it slowly and without distractions, in order to get a reliable sense of their flavors, textures, sweetness, spicyness, and overall pleasingness. Let me explain what I mean, and my own method; it’ll help you next time you are shopping for a guitar to buy.

What I do (among other things) is to sit down, tune the guitar, and just play a chord. I play it slowly so that I can hear each note separately. And I listen until the sound dies away. I do this more than once. A simple chord can give one a lot of information, especially if one takes one’s time at this. It can also be useful to listen to a second guitar, to compare against. The thing is: the voice of the guitar is the voice of the guitar regardless of what’s being played. But playing a chord, or a few notes, will give you all the information that playing an entire song can give you — without your senses being clogged by any player’s flashy technique. Not that one shouldn’t play whole pieces; but I suggest playing sound-bytes first.

Here’s a checklist for what you can usefully listen for in a six-note chord. If you cannot hear each note [at least somewhat] distinctly, the solution is to keep on listening and learn how to focus your ear. In saying “focus” I mean just that: train your ear to focus on one quality of sound at a time — exactly as you focus on one person’s voice at at time at a well-attended cocktail party. Unless you’re playing a really bad guitar, I guarantee you: the information is all right there. The things to notice are whether or not, or how much, there is of any or all of the following.

A chord will emerge from the guitar either quickly or slowly;
notice whether any part of the sound dies off sooner, or lingers longer, than another. This is basic information that you won’t get if someone is playing whole songs;
listen for basic volume and presence;
a chord will emerge from the guitar either quickly or slowly;
listen for some degree of separation: that is, you may be able to hear each note. Or not: the sound may be fuzzy or cloudy and lack focus;
pay attention to the quality of sound — that is, whether it’s warm, sweet, tinny, rich, live, fundamental, shallow, breathy, open, held back, and/or has lots of overtones;
is there compliance of response? That is, do you have to push the guitar or does it respond easily to your touch;
listen to whether the sound is bass-heavy or treble heavy, or well balanced;
and whether the strength/presence of each string is even;
and whether there are any wolf tones (i.e., problematically louder or quieter notes)
and whether the guitar really plays in tune or not;
and whether the sound is good close-up, and/or from across the room (you’ll need a playing/listening partner for this);
and whether the guitar sounds different depending on whether you’re listening from in front of it or from off to the side. Some guitars will astonish you with how narrow their area of projection is;
and whether or not the guitar has good dynamic range; that is, whether can you get different quality of sound from playing very softly, softly, medium, harder, and/or really hard;
if you repeat these exercises with different chords up and down the neck you’ll get a sense of how evenly (or not) the guitar plays on the whole fingerboard;
be on the lookout for tonal bloom; that is, whether the sound comes out immediately at full volume or whether it integrates and gets louder before it begins to wane;
finally, you get to notice and decide whether and how much you like or dislike any of these qualities of tonal response in the guitar you’re playing.All the information is in the soundbox. You just need to know how to listen without having your ear get overwhelmed. And in addition to all these things, you can get a sense whether the guitar is easy or difficult to play; this has nothing to do with sound; it’s about how well the string action, scale length, string spacing, and shape of neck are adapted to your hand.

F.A.Q. #4: Thinning Out The Back?

November 3, 2011

Q: Assuming you’re looking for a back to work in tandem with the top, as opposed to a reflective back, should the back also be thinned till it “relaxes”, as you do on your guitars?

A: Ummmmm… this is a really interesting topic that very few people have done any thinking about — and most of the ones that have are classic guitar makers, not steel string guitar makers.

The matter is too complicated for me to write fully about in this format, especially as I have written about exactly this kind of thing in my book. Have you read my book’s chapter on the functions of the guitar back? If you haven’t, it’ll be useful for you to do so. Mainly, my answer is based in the proposition that the job of the guitar top is to generate an optimal mix of monopole, cross dipole, and long dipole signal… which gets converted into sound a bit further on down the line. The back has a different function — although, frankly, almost no one that I know of has ever considered making a back that might have a purposely dominant monopole, cross dipole, long dipole, or whatever.\

The back has not been studied like that. And one indicator of this circumstance is that while guitar tops have been made with all kinds of variants of “X” bracing, double-X bracing, fan bracing, lattice bracing, ladder bracing, Kasha bracing, radial bracing, and even the most oddball experimental bracing, over the years… 99.99% of all guitar backs have been made with three of four parallel braces since the back was invented. Period. So our information about the possibilities of the back is limited to one model of bracing that has been done over and over and over and over again. I show some experimental back-bracing ideas on page 91 of my book The Responsive Guitar; take a look at them.

Also, consider that it doesn’t matter how the back is constructed if it is not allowed to be active. For instance, Bluegrass guitars are played with the guitar’s back resting against the player’s body. These backs are significantly damped out. That is, they are prevented from participating in the dances of the frequencies. Would it matter to that kind of guitar that the back has been thinned to the relaxation point? Not at all. That back isn’t expected to do anything. The technique of playing the typical bluegrass guitar (standing up, strap around shoulder, guitar resting against player’s body) does not concern itself with the back’s doing anything in particular except maybe acting as a reflecting surface and otherwise keeping the dust out. And, as I say in my book, (at the risk of becoming unpopular): the use of a highly resonant and expensive wood on the back of a guitar that has no use for a functioning back is to waste the wood.

But aside from all this, to get back to your question, the short answer is “yes”. My prejudice is to make the back more flexible than other makers typically do. The reason for making both the top and the back flexible to begin with is that everything else you do to them does nothing but stiffen them up. You brace them, dome and stress them, and attach the perimeters to the guitar rims. Pretty soon, you’ve got something that you’ve (perhaps inadvertently) made really too stiff.

But too stiff for whom? For you? Maybe; or maybe not. For me? No, I don’t really care. For the strings and their work? Yes: they care.

I first got onto this idea, years ago, from an interview with David Rubio in [long-since disappeared] Guitar And Lute Magazine. Rubio recommended thinning the free (unclamped and unbraced) top until it had no tap tone of its own. If it still had an identifiable tap tone, it would be introduced into the guitar’s structure and responsiveness. But if one introduces a “tone-neutral” top (or back) into the system one could then build an appropriate tap tone back into it by bracing it, attaching it to the guitar, and bridging and stringing it. The basic equation is: if you start out with this, and then add that and something else, you wind up with this + that + something else = something greater than what you might think you have..

F.A.Q. #3: More on Flexibility

November 3, 2011

Q: Do you use the same X amount of flexibility for all your guitar tops? Is there any reason to have a different, Z, level of flexibility when you use woods of different species?

A: I certainly try to for the same level of stiffness in every guitar top I make, regardless of species of wood used, for reasons of consistency of sound and musical responsiveness.

However, it’s not quite a simple yes-no. The thing is, if you’re going to build a guitar that’s slightly bigger or smaller than the last one you made, then you’ll need to factor some accommodations into your measurements.

A bigger guitar top is weaker than a small one of the same absolute mechanical stiffness (i.e., the same mechanical stiffness is asked to cover a larger span or area), and will have to be left thicker to compensate for that weakening. And vice-versa. For example, imagine standing on a plank that serves as a bridge to cross a 5-foot wide creek, and a longer but otherwise identical plank spanning a 10-foot wide creek. The latter will sag more when you stand on it. Your weight is the same, just as the guitar’s string tensions are the same. The resistance over the span needs to be adjusted, however, if you want the sag to be the same amount.

That “sag”, in the guitar, goes to vibrating-plate motion, which has everything to do with sound. You probably don’t care how much sag there is in a simple footbridge, but in the guitar the ‘sag amount’ corresponds to how much or how little the guitar face can move and flex in order to produce sound. There’s a direct correlation, as sound is nothing but excited air molecules. Finally, we’re (you’re?) trying to build guitars that are optimally permeable and receptive to the strings’ energy level and budget. Assuming the use of standard strings of a standard scale — which goes to the energy budget — this implies the same (or at least comparable) optimal amount of structure.