The State of the Contemporary Guitar – 4/4
PART 4 OF 4 (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
by Ervin Somogyi
In the last installment of this series I wrote about what future changes can most be expected from factory-level guitar making. These, according to the industry’s own sources, have to do with advances in tooling, mechanization and technology, as well as in use of alternative materials in response to the dwindling and increasingly expensive supplies of traditional woods. These changes go hand in hand with the fact that quality of product is defined completely differently by commercial makers than by small-scale ones.
Quality, for the factory man, is identical with the degree of speed, efficiency and consistency attained in the making and assembly of identical things. This cannot be so for individual or small-scale makers, however, for obvious reasons: a lot of them work at vastly different levels of skill and creative talent and they may have different ideas of “best”, even though these ideas typically exist in reference to the objectives of good sound, playability, and user-friendly design. Frankly, hand-making can be so absurdly labor intensive that only adherence to the emotionally felt end of Getting Something Done Right would seem to justify it. It’s been pointed out that comparing a handmade guitar to a factory made one is like comparing a painting to a toaster. While this sounds too affected and cutesy to be true at first hearing, it bears scrutiny. A painting is something which some individual somewhere took some time and effort to make, and it was likely made to please or satisfy some impulse. A painting might be good or bad or beautiful or charming or tacky, or personally meaningful. It may be original, interesting, spiritual, or well composed — or not. Some paintings can be amateurish, expressive, or static. Some speak to issues, emotions, ideals or themes. Some can be startling, even fascinating. And some paintings are timeless, significant and really great. A toaster, on the other hand, will do what it was designed and built to do, every time, or one fixes it or discards it. One does not normally think of a toaster as being a nice try, a masterpiece, original, happy, sad, thematic, childish, unintelligible, profound, clichéd, abstract, derivative or timelessly great. Toasters are not about being personally meaningful in any way. A handmaker is trying to make a useful tool for a musician, and to please himself in this effort. A factory’s main goal is to make mass produced goods to sell to a mass market. Qualitatively, these goals are about as different from one another as goals can be.
The quantitative differences are great, too. Small scale makers are competing for laughably infinitesimal niches of the market under conditions and with resources far different from those available to commercial producers. The small maker is ridiculously undercapitalized; he only rarely has an advertising budget, employees or staff; and his tooling is modest and often home-made. But, most importantly, inefficiency and expenditure of time are not his deadly enemies. In fact, to him, they’re his advantages. Whereas commercial producers have to assemble guitars quickly and efficiently, the small scale maker does not: his task is to refine and improve the product identified with him. Let me explain what I mean.
There now exists for the first time a body of steel string instrumentalists who bring wider, international sensibilities of musical voicings to their music. These musicians are also for the first time, in addition to being focused on the standard compositional and rhythmic aspects of their music, very much tuned in to the sounds and voicings they can get out of their boxes. Guitarists such as Ed Gerhard and Martin Simpson are for the first time playing steel string guitar music with pauses in it . While this is not a flashy enough development to have gotten much media attention it is, in fact, one of the most significant single developments in steel string guitar music in the past thirty years, and its threshold importance cannot be overstated. Pauses are what allow you to really hear a sound. An example of this new sensibility appears in the May-June 2000 issue of Fingerstyle Guitar in which Tim Sparks, a talented fingerpicker from North Carolina, says about a recently released recording that he “was trying to emulate the evocative sounds of crying, moaning and laughing that one hears in Klezmer violin or clarinet”. To talk about sound and expressiveness in this way is new, and it bespeaks a new need musicians have of their guitars. They will, at their own pace, seek out those makers and instruments from which they can get the warmth, dynamics, voicings and ergonomics that they want. Within my experience with my own clients these requests have included specific qualities of enhanced sustain, piano-like volume, responsivity and sensitivity to left-hand technique, brilliant and singing trebles, evenness of volume and responsiveness all the way up the neck, fidelity of intonation all the way up the fingerboard, necks comfortable to classically trained guitarists, guitars built for specific open tunings and/or designed around a player’s specific body size, superior recordability without need for equalization, great tonal expressiveness and depth, extremely specific action and intonation setups, ergonomic designs to get around a player’s physical limitations, and a wide range of dynamics and tonal colorations. The purpose of any and all of these qualities is to make someone’s music more satisfying, period. I think that such work — namely, really custom-working with a musician in a way that goes beyond merely mechanical things like fingerboard width, copying some features of the popular Brand X model, or beautifully intricate fingerboard inlays — will grow in importance for guitarmaking.
One of the forces fueling the quest for better sound is the fact that almost anyone can now record and burn their own CD albums. And many do. Since these individuals are expressing something out of themselves and largely for themselves, it’s perfectly understandable to think they’d sooner or later be on the lookout for a better guitar than they now have.
I think the demand for better guitars will have a general effect of encouraging refinement of design and more formal study of structure, acoustics, dynamics and playing technique. Small scale makers especially will want to learn the fine acoustical and ergonomic points of their craft, such as what effect ten thousandths of an inch less in the thickness of a top will have on bass response, how a bridge 2 mm higher will affect a note’s onset gradient, what difference the use of fir or redwood in braces might make, or what impact on sound the diameter of the soundhole has. Such minutiae are really — and always have been — the guts of lutherie work. As I mentioned in Part 2 of this series, classical guitar luthiers have long focused on the minutiae and subtleties of internal construction in the recognition that the relationship between structure and sound is what it’s all about. This is only beginning to be understood by steel string guitar makers, and the young ones are hungry for information. There will be increased dialogue between luthiers and musicians who are wanting guitars which are tonally ahead of them. This is not quite the same as a manufacturer agreeing to produce an individual musician’s signature-model guitar: sound doesn’t work like that, although commerce does. The process of wider learning has already begun with the establishment, in the past years, of several American lutherie schools; these are increasingly drawing students from abroad. Overseas students, especially from Japan, are also seeking and finding apprenticeship opportunities, most notably with members of the Northern California guitarmaking community. Northern California is not only becoming the Pacific Rim’s most active hotbed of lutherie activity but is also becoming a point of destination for both makers and students from all over this country.
In the end, whereas commercial makers will become more efficient at automation, mass production and marketing, custom makers will become more skilled, sophisticated, and experienced in doing the work on a small scale. The logic which drives commercial production is to eliminate delays, inefficiency and errors in production by eliminating the human factor as much as possible. The logic which informs custom making is to eliminate errors in production by increasing skill and mindfulness in the human element as much as possible. The fact that the imperatives which drive these groups are so opposite illustrates how little they have in common in spite of the fact that they are making products which look virtually identical.
I expect to see other changes too. Since small scale makers are more able to spend time on individual projects than commercial operations can, I expect to see significant advances in artistic creativity and design as applied to ornamentation and custom work. Grit Laskin, Larry Robinson and I are spearheads in this movement at this time. The fact that such work is likely to be one-of-a-kinds or limited small editions, rather than the computer-operated designs produced in large quantities by commercial operations, makes them both more interesting and valuable, in my eyes. Since small scale makers are not in a position to capitalize their businesses to the point of using space-age materials, I expect their explorations into alternative materials to be largely limited to the use of real woods, real seashell, etc. And even if superplastics should become cheaply available, the rationale for a handmaker to use them escapes me.
Carleen Hutchins has become famous in the violinmaking world for developing a family of violin instruments which vary in size in calculated and specific increments for the purpose of giving bowed instruments voices in all parts of the spectrum, from alto to tenor to baritone to contralto and everything in between. Banjos and mandolins of similarly premeditated sizes were made in the 1920s for the banjo and mandolin orchestras which were popular at the time. Guitarmakers have not yet, to my knowledge, entered the area of designing dedicated instruments around the specific problems of voicing — but as soon as a body of musicians arises whose music will be enriched by such, then small scale makers will be the first to make them.
When this happens, I think it will likely start in regard to the fact that steel string guitars (unlike classicals) are commonly played in many open tunings: it’s an important and unique part of the steel string guitar’s life. The significance of this is that open tunings not only change the sensibility and voicing of a guitar as a function of their mode, key or harmony, but they also change the guitar’s energy dynamics (bright or mellow response, etc.) as a function of how much tension the strings put on the system. The player’s whole sound is dependent on how his guitar is tuned. And, if the player has a preferred tuning, then there’ll be a mode of construction that will make his guitar sound the best at that tuning and stringing. It makes sense to explore guitar design, soundboard thickness, refinements in bracing, optimal soundhole and bridge size, etc. with respect to the problems of a variety of specific stringings and tunings, and these will serve the needs of musicians who are, in effect, specialists. I think this will be one of lutherie’s growth areas in the future, and one in which commercial operations, which are best suited to standardization of design in the service of large scale production processes, are not likely to be able to compete effectively.
I should say a few, final, words about the growth and future of the guitar culture in general. When I was young the guitar was a nice instrument which people like Joan Baez, the Kinsgston Trio, Bola Sete, the Everly Brothers, Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, Jose Feliciano, Elvis Presley, Peter, Paul and Mary, etc, etc. played on stage when Andres Segovia wasn’t in town, and about as often as not it was something that you bought a ticket to go hear. But along with the growth of both lutherie and commercial guitarmaking an entire culture of guitar life has been created, not only in this country but internationally. This culture and ferment includes a vast body of students, teachers, players, pickers, pluckers, strummers, sliders and twangers; an equally vast body of instrumental recordings and published sheet music; the creation of a staggering corps of serious musicians and musical groups of all parts of the musical spectrum; the creation of music schools and lutherie schools, guitar departments of music conservatories, music societies, music camps and festivals, and workshops of many stripes; the appearance of annual contests, competitions, and prize awards for guitar events; the establishment of a huge network of agents, venues, tourings, bookings of gigs from beer-joints to concert hall appearances to stadium-filling extravaganzas, along with all the merchandising that goes along with these; the entering of MTV and other media involvement; the appearance of publications, newsletters, trade journals, magazines and internet websites for every kind of musical idiom that the guitar participates in (bluegrass, classical, rock, blues, folk, fusion, ethnic, experimental, etc.); commercial musical merchandising events and shows such as NAMM, vintage trade expos, and handmade guitar exhibitions; the creation of an international network of retailers, importers and exporters, experts, collectors, representatives and agents, middlemen, materials suppliers, shippers and insurers, and even museum curators knowledgeable about contemporary musical instruments; and, lastly, regional instrument makers’ organizations such as the Northern California Association of Luthiers, and professional shows such as the Guild of American Luthiers’ conventions, the Guitar Foundation of America’s conferences, and the Association of String Instrument Artisans’ symposia.
As I said before, this is not bad for something that a bunch of skinny hippies had a hand in starting, and it’s taken on a life of its own. Parts of it are humble and informal, and parts of it are Big Business. And it doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
(reprinted from Fingerstyle Guitar, #43, 2001)
By the rules and logic of operating at a factory or commercial level and surviving in that competitive business one has to think, plan, implement and advertise changes and improvements of the product in terms of (1) use of advanced technologies such as computer-operated tooling, (2) use of improved-yet-cheaper, alternative, and space-age materials, including things like ultraviolet-cured finishes, (3) introduction of variety and new, heretofore unavailable, models, (4) streamlined and more efficient methods of production, (5) improvements in quality, (6) celebrity endorsements, and (7) higher per-dollar value, presented to the consumer’s attention through continually changing and increasingly sophisticated advertising. There is a truth and a logic in these things, and they will underlie much of what the guitar playing public will be exposed to, and buy, in the future. Because I see these as being very much the wave of the future for commercially made guitars, I’d like to say more about several of them.
After technological advances, the next big item in the picture of changing commercial production is the growing reliance on new materials, finishes (already mentioned), adhesives and processes. Use of plastics and synthetics is steadily on the rise, starting in the l970s with Ovation’s space-age synthetic cast-body design, Adamas’ aluminum necks, phenolic resin fingerboards, increasing use of epoxy-graphite neck reinforcements, etc, etc, and currently ending in Rainsong’s graphite instrumens and Martin’s recent release of a guitar made out of high quality formica. Bet your boxers that we’ll see more of this kind of thing in the future. New quick-curing wood glues, cyanoacrylates and epoxies are now used commonly because of their obvious savings in time. The Breedlove guitar company has committed itself to using various plentifully available and sustainable yield domestic woods as an alternative to the traditional but rapidly disappearing rosewoods and other exotics; and their guitars are being found to sound good. Amplification systems are continually evolving and improving and have resulted in the steadily growing culture of acoustic-electric instruments: to list the newest equipment alone would probably fill up at least a page of text. The larger factories such as Taylor, Collings and Larrivee have switched to the new ultraviolet-cure urethanes; these are much easier to apply than other finishes, look good, and increase both productivity and profitability. And as soon as this technology becomes more easily affordable, smaller factories can be expected to follow suit.
It’s natural and logical to ask how all these things improve the quality of the final product. Making something faster sounds postive; but one might equally ask what is the advantage of making a plastic guitar more quickly, outside of the bottom line. This doesn’t seem like an unreasonable question. One should understand that the notion of quality in manufactured products is different than the notion of quality in individually made products. According to a guitar industry spokesman at a recent trade symposium, quality, from a factory point of view, is the same as replicability of components and efficiency of assembly. That is, the factory man considers quality to be the measure of how efficiently his parts can be identically made and how fast his instruments can be assembled in a consistent and trouble free manner. I’m not making this up: this is how the language is used. Some elements of design and assembly may in fact result in improvements in structure and response in a guitar, but these are incidental to the streamlining of the production operations. In fact, all the elements of the future of commercial production which I’ve been describing have more to do with the conditions of production than with the end product. I repeat: for commercial producers Quality = Efficiency of Assembly Process. If you trouble to peruse the professional and trade literature you will find that no other criterion is ever mentioned.
A very important difference between classical and steel string guitars is that classicals are typically not miked or amplified in performance, while steel strings are. Another is that the classical guitar is very largely a solo instrument, while in general only the fingerpicking steel string guitar is. The flatpicked steel string guitar is almost always a group instrument and often accompanies singing; being a group or accompanying instrument corresponds to the classical guitar’s secondary use. A third difference is that while classical guitars are, with few exceptions, played in standard tuning, the steel string guitar (particularly the fingerpicked one) is often played in quite a number of open tunings. This has great implications for both tone and musicality. A fourth is that steel string guitars’ internal construction is so different from classicals’ (for reasons of their needing to withstand greater string tensions as well as their different tone-producing dynamics) that they can be considered to be different instruments — to the point that steel string luthiers usually cannot make a good classical guitar, and vice versa. Some years ago Spanish luthiers started to make steel string guitars: they failed, stopped it, and haven’t tried again. This subject is highly interesting and so complex that I can only mention it in passing. It really needs its own article.
It’s not hard to find similar quotes from Narciso Yepes, Julian Bream and other classical guitar luminaries, but three are enough to illuminate a very impressive spectrum of goals for the luthier to aim towards. These statements, moreover, speak loudly to the fundamental consideration of classical guitar design — that the guitar is designed to be played by a musician with a trained musicality and technique, for people who are listening without distractions. Every serious classical guitarist’s main fantasy is to play in a concert hall, on a guitar that will be equal to the task.
This is the first of a four part series on the state of contemporary American guitarmaking. I intend to sketch out the general landscape of how the guitar developed historically, what it is now, and, lastly, what shape I think it is likely to take in the future. As I am a professional luthier, I’m going to tell this story from my hands-on perspective. It’ll be a nice change from the editorial voice of commercial/music/factory industry, which already gets a lot of copy space. This is just as well, in my opinion, because the story of American lutherie is well worth knowing.
American guitarmaking has come a long way since those early days by several measurable standards. First, a generation of American musical instrument makers has preserved, refined and extended an originally European tradition of woodworking which had lain moribund with disuse in this country, and made it viable. Second, whereas thirty years ago a luthier was mostly an object of curiosity and an anachronism, handmade lutherie (whether you are making two guitars a year or forty) is now a more or less familiar and accepted part of the American landscape. Consequently it is now more possible for a luthier to make, if not a living, at least some money at it. Third, the guitars which are being produced now are, on the average, much better than the average instrument produced then. Fourth, a generation of instrument makers has evolved which is not made up so much of hardcore mavericks, but rather of established professionals and intelligent amateurs who take their work seriously and with a great deal of justifiable pride. Fifth, an entire (and continually growing) body of literature and have been created by this group, where there were none at all before. Sixth, this general growth of interest in musical instrument construction has created the conditions which have made possible the rise of two national luthiers’ organizations; furthermore, these not only provide active forums for free exchange of information to anyone who has interest in this craft, but are in fact the leading sources of information for young instrument makers overseas. And, lastly, we have created the first generation of American luthiers who are considered world class. Not bad, for a bunch of guys who started out as self-taught hippies.
Classical and flamenco guitars originated within a tradition of hand craftsmanship of stringed instruments. This is not so much because hand craftsmanship is inherently superior, as that the roots of European lutherie predate the industrial revolution and its relentless mechanization of all modes of production. Hand craftsmanship was the only option for a long time. This is not a bad thing, because the level of skill brought to lutherie was unbelievable — as a visit to any museum with a good collection of historical string instruments will show. And, because this kind of lutherie was associated with real individuals, a tradition has been created whereby modern classical guitarmakers are the inheritors of some past heroes to look up to and whose work they can emulate. These revered icons, cousins to the illustrious icons of violinmaking (Amati, Stradivarius, etc.), are people like Antonio Torres, Hermann Hauser, Luis Panormo, the Fletas, the Ramirezes, Simplicio, Santos Hernandez and other historical European makers. Modern classical luthiers like to think of themselves as walking in these pioneers’ footsteps, or at least following the path that they traveled. None of this has stopped classical guitars from being produced in great numbers in factory settings; but the basic design has changed only minimally because the acceptability of this guitar’s design is still rooted in the traditional look, and traditional expectations still attach to it. The name of the game in contemporary classic guitar lutherie is adherence to and refinement of — rather than experimentation with or departure from — traditional design. Anyone who has ever gone into a classical guitar store will have been struck by the fact that, besides differences of coloration of their woods and minor details of design, these instruments all look remarkably alike. There are exceptions to this, of course, but as a rule it is the rare classical guitar maker who can make substantive changes in traditional design, and survive. This inflexibility of design does not apply, however, to the steel string guitar: quite the opposite, actually.
The guitar is a relative newcomer to the stringed instrument scene. Before the guitar, the lute was absolutely the most popular plucked string instrument in the Western world. The lute served a very specific musical purpose, which it was no longer able to fulfill as the nature of musical tastes and entertainment changed with the rise of the European middle class. The lute became less and less a courtly chamber instrument and was more often expected to perform for the new bourgeoisie in larger halls and rooms. That was when the problems began. Lutes were really not loud enough. Instrument makers kept making lutes bigger and adding strings, but there were many problems with these approaches. The piano came into being in this period for the same reason: its sound could carry.
The fact that the guitar bridge is in the middle of the lower bout creates yet more tonal possibilities, but I’ll get back to this point later.
The average saddle is 3/32″ to 1/8″ wide. I use saddles that are 3/16″ or more wide because it makes a saddle wide enough to offer adequate intonation compensation on a steel string guitar. The rationale for intonation compensation is the subject of another talk, but I want to say one thing about the contact characteristics between the strings and the saddle. If you have two virtually identical guitars one of which has the strings resting on a single high point of the saddle, and the other with the strings resting on a significant portion of the saddle’s top, I think you’ll find this second guitar works better. There is a better and more efficient coupling of kinetic string energy to the saddle by virtue of that extended contact. I can’t prove this, but I suspect if you pay attention to it you’ll get better results. (See Figure 3)
While I believe the degree to which a guitar is successful is in direct relation to the extent that you can free the soundboard up to pump air, this is only part of the story. There are many specific ways in which the guitar top moves, vibrates and flexes in its use of string energy so as to generate a wide spectrum of tones. The lower bout, the area surrounding the bridge, is the main arena for this activity. Let’s examine some of what goes on here when the bridge moves.
Activation of the perimeter results in treble activity. This makes perfect sense, as the center of the soundboard is the most yielding part and is thus able to support high amplitude, low frequency activity. The edge, being more rigid, is the logical place for high frequency, low amplitude activity to occur. The top can move as in Figure 5, acting more or less as a unit. That’s bass. The top can also move as in Figure 6, shaking and quivering like a bowl of jello left on your washing machine during the spin cycle. That’s treble.
Historically, the bridge was placed smack-dab in the middle of the lower bout of early guitars, with a twelve-fret neck sticking out of the body. (See Figure 7) In the 1930s, in response to musicians wanting a more fully accessible fingerboard, steel string guitar makers discovered that players could have an extra two frets worth of fingerboard by making a fourteen-fret-to-the-body neck. This involved shifting the point of bridge attachment that much nearer the soundhole, but bypassed the need to install a cutaway into the instrument. It was a quick fix, and a successful one. But it also required planning the bracing around the new point of bridge attachment. If you install a bridge at the fourteen-fret neck position on a guitar previously braced for a twelve-fret neck you will have acoustic interference from the bracing, and a less than successful guitar. Bracing work involves positioning, as well as shaping.
This is a cross section of your average guitar brace. (See Figure 8) Usually it’ll be quartersawn or close to quartersawn. The possibilities for designing braces are virtually endless, ranging along a continuum from low and flat to high and thin, and complicated by whatever contour of scalloping and high points exist along their lengths. What I want to achieve when I make a guitar is done in part by picking woods that have a favorable strength to weight ratio. I want woods that are strong and lightweight. Therefore one way in which my braces are different from standard lies in my choice of materials. Secondly, I and other luthiers like myself are concerned with maximizing the strength to weight ratios of our soundboards. We want to make the guitar as strong as we can while making it as lightly constructed as we can. We don’t want to reduce the height of braces significantly, because as Mr. Hoadley points out, the cost of this to brace strength is considerable. But we want to reduce the mass. I would like to invite you to later step up here and pick up both of these sample tops and compare just how much wood is in each one. You’ll notice that one feels noticeably heavier than the other. My way to achieve this difference is to leave the height on the brace but to lessen mass by making the brace slimmer. This probably does remove some strength, but I believe that it does so in a favorable relationship to the weight that is lost. My approach is to have thin, high braces throughout my guitars. (See Figure 8)
While there are endless things to be said about bracing systems, plans, and distribution, as well as the selection of bracing woods, I want to remind you of the indicator that we got earlier from that little music box where we heard bright, shrill notes from the edge of the soundboard and heard mellower notes from the soundboard’s center. It reveals that one should pay attention to the perimeter if one wishes to manipulate the high end frequency response of the guitar, and pay attention to the area near and around the bridge if one wishes to manipulate the low end. (See Figure 9) For these reasons you will notice that the profiles of the braces in my guitar top differ from the profiles of the braces in the Martin guitar top, even though their layout is about the same in both cases: my X is lower and my perimeter bracing is higher.
(See Figure 10) This circumstance is bound to affect the response you get from a guitar. The typical factory way of capping the otherwise open X notch is to glue a little piece of muslin cloth on top. If you are concerned with strength to weight ratios and the load bearing capacity of your braces, I think it makes no sense to shoot yourself in the foot by cutting a huge notch in your braces, after all the work you’ve done, without trying to reestablish their original strength by bridging the notch cut. (See Figure 11) Bridging, or capping, the X notch will tie one part of the interrupted brace to the other part, and will prevent the opening and closing of the notch under soundboard movement.
While the X brace is ostensibly designed to have a certain strength, but the minute you cut a notch into it and leave the notch uncapped it’s much, much weaker than before.
I have, but you have to cut back quite a bit to get a flat enough gluing surface to get a cap onto. It’s more of an operation than you might think. One thing you’ll notice on my guitar top is that even though my X braces are tapered in cross-section they are rectangular in cross-section at their intersection: this makes a really tight and very efficient joint. (See Figure 12) I don’t take any wood from inside the notch, as happens when braces are rounded before they are notched together.
some of his models that had angled fan braces responded differently. It is my belief that these angled braces are dynamically and acoustically replicating the anchoring work of the X brace, which acts to inhibit bridge rocking compared with longitudinal bracing.
I became aware of it then because the light was focused on it. The face was markedly distorted and dimpled specifically at the bridge and all around it. What had started as a straight, flat piece of wood had become bent all around the bridge by the torquing action of the strings. And this had been allowed to happen because there was virtually nothing under the bridge to guard against this kind of deformation. At that point I started to install bigger bridge patches on my guitars. (See Figure 14)