I have postponed my voicing classes, for an as-yet-undefined period of time.  This will be a disappointment to a good handful of people, but I see no other alternative at this point, given other factors in my life.

For some years now my classes have been far from full.  I’ve had quite a few classes with only two or three students.  I had one with four. But I really want to have six. That is a much better arrangement from the standpoint of interactions, question-and-answer sessions, problem-solving, looking-over-the-next-person’s-shoulder as we do the hands-on exercises, and the sharing of views and opinions.

The problem has not so much been the cost as it has been the inconveniences of scheduling.  Different people can only come during certain months or times of the year, but not others. And I cannot offer the class several times a year.  But whatever the cause, the result is that the classes are a net loss for me at a time when I cannot take such efforts on.

Another part of this mix is I’ve gotten very busy with guitars to make, and am so far behind schedule that I cannot afford the time each class takes.  It requires about a week of preparation beforehand, then the class is nine days long, and then it takes me a week to recover my energies. In the meantime, my students and I take over the shop and nothing else gets done.  It really is costly in terms of time . . . not to mention the hour of weekly emailing and communication that must be dealt with between classes; over the course of a year that adds up to fifty hours at the computer. All in all, having classes that are only half full really works against me.

Good luck to you in your building efforts.  The best advice I can give at this point is that, if you have not already done so, go out and buy a set of my books and read them.  They are FULL of pertinent and useful information, and my class has been organized around the information contained in these books. You can read up on them on my website, and order from me directly or through my website; They cost $265 for the set, plus shipping, and I can autograph them for you if you wish.  See below for more information.

Sincerely, Ervin Somogyi

P.S.:    My two-volume book set has the titles The Responsive Guitar and Making the Responsive Guitar.  The first is about the Why, the How Come, the What If, and the What’s That All About.  Each of its chapters describes a part or component or function of the guitar, its dynamic importance and structural, how that aspect of the guitar works and interacts with other aspects, and how different builders work differently with these same variables, and what happens when one emphasizes one variable or function over another.  Mainly, it is about what each part of the guitar is there for, and what relationship it stands in to the other parts. The second is about how to construct the instrument itself. These books are heavily cross-referenced and are more useful a set than as single volumes. Finally, if you are not going to buy my books, then the single most useful piece of advice I can offer you is to accept that most guitars are SIGNIFICANTLY overbuilt.  If you lighten up on the construction, thickness of parts, etc. then you will make better guitars.

February, 2013

The guitar making community lost a valued member on February 11, 2010, when Japanese-American luthier Taku Sakashta was killed outside of his workshop in Rohnert Park, California. I knew Taku for 15 years and was his colleague and friend. He was a uniquely hard-working individual as well as a luthier of rare talent. Those familiar with his work know that Taku brought a very Japanese aesthetic to it, such that his guitars were imbued with a cleanness of line that echoed the sensibility of the traditional Japanese rock garden. Taku’s workmanship was imaginative, original, and faultlessly CLEAN.

Taku’s murderer was caught, tried, and sent to prison for life. In the aftermath of these events Taku’s widow Kazuko sought to put proper closure to her husband’s affairs; so she asked a number of Taku’s closest luthier friends to take on and complete a number of guitar commissions that Taku had begun. I accepted one of these, and am close to being finished with it. It’s a guitar made mostly by me, with Taku’s woods, using Taku’s molds and templates. The result is the world’s only Somogyi-Sakashta guitar. It is presently in the hands of Larry Robinson, who is doing the final inlay work; he and Taku had already discussed an inlay motif before Taku died.

I don’t want to make this narrative very long; the whole point of it is to just announce the (almost) completion of this special project. But if anyone wants to know more of the facts and details please get in touch with me and I’ll give them the longer story.

Also, if anyone wishes to send a donation to Kazuko at this date, the gesture will be appreciated as much as if it had been offered nearer Taku’s death; the help is still needed. For those wishing to send a check or money-order, it should be made out to either Kazuko Sakashita or to Taku Sakashta Guitars (NOTE: ‘Sakashita’ is pronounced ‘Sakashta’): the account is in both these names. Donations should be sent to: Wells Fargo Bank c/o account No. 7478-148203, Elmwood branch, 2959 College Avenue, Berkeley, California, 94705. For those wishing to send a wire transfer of funds, it should be sent to the same account at the same bank, under the same name, and to the wire transfer-routing ABA number 121-000-248.

For those wishing to send woods, tools, materials, or anything else that cannot be sent into a bank account, luthier Tom Ribbecke has volunteered to be a repository of such more concrete donations, until they can be sold at auction together with Taku’s tools and woods. Todd Taggart of Allied Lutherie has generously volunteered to deal with that. Shipping of these donations should be made to Sakashta Memorial Fund, c/o Ribbecke Guitars, 498-D Moore Lane, Healdsburg, California, 75448. Tom gave me permission to also pass on his work phone number for anyone who feels the need to call him in regard to these matters: it is (707) 431-0125.

Sincerely, Ervin Somogyi

December, 2012

In Japanese:   

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.

October 1, 2011

I have a DVD out; it’s a lecture I gave on the topic of Voicing the Guitar which I delivered at the Healdsburg Guitar Festival in 2009. It’s engendered both positive and negative comments. The negative ones generally have to do with the fact that I don’t reveal my specific methods for voicing the guitar — or at least not enough of them for anyone to usefully copy.

From the outset, that DVD was intended to have a dual purpose. First, I sought to give an overview of the principles of voicing the guitar — for which work I’m fairly well known — to people who are interested in the guitar but don’t yet know much about its actual ins and outs. Second, as the Healdsburg Guitar Festival happened shortly after the publication of my two-volume work The Responsive Guitar and Making The Responsive Guitar, the DVD was put out as a way of letting people know what these books are all about and how enormously informative they are. I mean, these books took me eight years to write: the one-hour lecture took a few days to plan out and prepare for.

My experience of lectures has been, on the whole, uninspiring. I’ve sat through a zillion boring ones in my life and I wanted to at least enliven mine with helpful signage, props, and visual aids. Otherwise I threw in every important thing about the workings of the guitar that I could think of short of the kitchen sink, and organized it into an hour-long presentation. These relevant concepts are:

1. the guitar as an air pump
2. monocoque engineering vs. structural engineering (i.e., the guitar as a monocoque)
3. the monopole and the cross- and long dipoles as the principal vibrating modes of the guitar
4. the Cube Rule of materials stiffness
5. stiffness-to-weight-ratios
6. the different tonal functions of steel string vs. classic guitars
7. the usefulness of tap tones as a guide to structure
8. the Acoustic Gradient of the top
9. the different strategies for organizing modal movement represented by “X”, ladder, lattice, and fan bracing
10. mechanical impedance
11. the acoustic functions of the guitar back
12. the guitar top and back as harmonic oscillators
13. structural coupling / connectedness / disconnectedness in bracing and structure
14. differential rates of energy use or discharge as a function of structure, and
15. a realistic representation, via a constructed-to-scale bracing-stiffness diorama, of ACTUAL stiffnesses of various structural members and braces.

My lecture was not intended to be an exposition of specific techniques of carving braces — which is what most people think “voicing” is. The whole point of it was to let people know that the shaping of braces is part of a package that involves a whole lot more than that.

Such considerations have not stopped others from putting out instructional DVDs that focus on the kinds of mechanical shaping and assembly operations which can be carried out serially and without reference to how the various parts combine and interact. However, Voicing work is precisely about how the different components interact dynamically. Therefore, it requires actual Thinking, Consideration, Judgment, Experience, Tracking, and Presence of Mind. It’s a bit like playing chess. Yet many people think of Voicing more as working a slot machine — and hoping that there’s a secret technique for how to pull the handle correctly to win. I don’t think there is a secret technique; instead, a specific skill set is needed. I voice each one of my guitars personally, slowly and attentively in a process that stretches out over a day and a half or two every time, and involves all the factors I listed above. It’s not any kind of quick formulaic slam-dunk.

I stopped short of showing the audience my own specific methods of profiling braces, and I erred when, in responding to an audience member’s question, I said that people would have to take my class to find out what I actually do in shaping my guitar tops’ braces. I think I blew it on that one. If I had it to do over again I would not have said that glib and flip sounding sentence — and I unfortunately didn’t think to point out that my bracing is described and illustrated at length in my books (although, if I’d had, I might have come across as being even more of a shill for them). I would have explained instead that I did not wish to do so for two reasons. First, what I do is the end result of decades of learning, experimenting, and making some really bad sounding guitars. So it’s understandable that I’d feel proprietary about the specific ways in which I’ve achieved my results: I feel they are mine to share, but I don’t do that indiscriminately in public forums. Second, to simply show what my guitars’ innards look like, mechanically, and without explaining what thinking and design variables this work entails, is bad teaching.

So, instead, I spent the hour describing the factors and variables that inform my own voicing work. While I use these principles, I don’t feel that I own them. I more or less slowly and painstakingly discovered them where Nature had left them lying around in plain sight for anyone to find. If anything, I am indebted to them for helping me to do my work successfully: they have allowed me to arrive at better methods, thinking about, and approaches to lutherie. Mainly, they are more useful than any description of any specific mechanical technique can be — in spite of the fact that today’s emphasis in teaching is to focus on specific techniques rather than on understanding how something works. My attitude is based in the fact that the principles cost me years of work and time to learn. The specific techniques, on the other hand, are easy to learn and do: glue this, cut here, profile in this way, shave that down, taper it, tuck this into that, etc.

The factors of Voicing that I outlined in my lecture lend themselves to many ways of being used and implemented to achieve a wide variety of better results in guitar making — just as different specific ingredients can be combined in many ways to make a meal. I described these factors in non-scientific everyday language because I wanted to make them accessible and easily comprehensible. I tried to give the audience a good foundation, or starter kit, toward their being able to achieve better results — instead of spoon-feeding them rote methods. All in all, I did my best to give the audience the kind of starter kit that was nowhere available when I was starting out, and as far as I know it is still not available to luthiers from any source other than my writings. There are engineering and physics texts that cover this same material, but these are generally scientific exposition written by engineers and physicists for other engineers and physicists. Get a hold of Richard Mark French’s book “Engineering the Guitar: theory and practice”, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s a fine book, but not all that easy for the layman to read.

My presentation wasn’t intended to be a strip show where I reveal everything, nor a tease in which I hold information back. I was attempting to deliver pertinent information. It’s ironic that some people feel shortchanged by my not having given them specific information about WHAT MY CURRENT BRACING LOOKS LIKE — even though my lecture includes an explanation of what every known bracing pattern does or doesn’t do. I am of the opinion that if I’d shown the audience “my secret bracing patterns”, everybody would have immediately forgotten everything I’d said and gone home and started to copy what they’d seen me do as faithfully as they could — without putting any effort at all into understanding how the things I’d discussed participate in the making of sound. I think that’s really lousy teaching; it reduces complex relationships to lowest-common-denominator factoids.

The principal subtext of my lecture is that (1) most guitars made today are waaaay overbuilt, and (2) comparatively small amounts of wood added to or taken away from certain key points of the top-as-vibrating-diaphragm make huge differences. My “secret bracing patterns” don’t look all that much different from most other guitar bracing — and various ones I’ve used are shown in my books.

I say “various ones” because my building style has always evolved and continues to evolve. What I’d be showing this year is merely what I’m doing this year. It’s different than what I was doing five years ago and different from what I’ll be doing five years from now. Same principles, different applications. I am aware that the world has changed a lot during my professional lifetime and that people want information simplified and they want it quickly. But I really can’t provide genuinely useful information in recipe form and still feel I’ve done a good job. Trust me: I’m not getting rich off DVD sales.

I’ve heard complaints that my DVD was made mostly as an adjunct toward promoting my books. Well no, not mostly — although there is some truth in it. The fact is that the books are unquestionably more informative than any one-hour presentation can ever be. Nonetheless, in both efforts I’m concerned with getting people to think and make discoveries for themselves based on a reliable map that I’d provided.

On a different track, I might say the following to someone who had approached me with these concerns: I don’t know you personally but, if I may ask: did you really not find anything useful in the DVD? Did it seem to you that I talked for an hour and said nothing important? And, for that matter, do you expect to learn anything more pertinent about any skilled hands-on and ears-on activity from watching any DVD? I’d think that the stiffness-diorama example alone is an eye-opening GENERAL concept that applies to any guitar making effort. Such dioramas are structural features in every guitar that’s ever been made and which is the strings’ job to drive and make work (or work against, in many instances); and shaving and profiling braces is meaningless outside of this context.

Finally, EVERY guitar will have it’s own slightly different and specific diorama-configuration of wood, graining, thickness, bracing, areas of greater or lesser stiffness and looseness that are necessarily part of a mechanical and tonal gradient. This is another essential concept that’s mighty useful to have regardless of how big, small, thin, thick, floppy, stiff, tapered, braced, etc., a guitar top might be; in fact, without it, any effort at shaping braces is as hit-or-miss as pulling the lever of a slot machine and hoping for a good result .