Ervin Somogyi

August, 2014

One reason that the bringing out of a guitar’s best voice is the main challenge for steel string guitar makers today is that there is no agreed-on standard to aim for. This is so for two reasons. First of all, most of the makers of this instrument have never heard a steel string guitar with a really great voice of its own. Therefore their idea of great sound is frequently based in hearsay instead of direct experience, combined with a lifelong experience of having conventionally overbuilt guitars as their models. It is understandable that they’d knowingly or unknowingly copy these models – which, despite the fact that their own guitars might look distinctive, they are really copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of the same essential concept/blueprint – in the belief that their job is done when such an instrument is faithfully replicated and strung up. I say these things without intending to offend anyone, but because this is the territory as I see it.

The second reason is that whereas classic guitars are all pretty much the same size and shape, steel string guitars come in a wide variety of shape, size, and depth. This complicates the acoustic part of the work. It does so in the same way that a marksman is always called on to do the same work in shooting, but his emphasis will vary slightly as his various targets are placed at different distances away. Same skills, somewhat different factors.

Classical guitar makers, in my opinion, have more of a clue as to the sounds that better guitars are capable of: they have more of an agreed-on standard for what the Holy Grail of sound is (it is largely thought of as having the power, clarity, projection, and otherwise operatic voice that one would expect from a concert guitar). They also have had access to musicians with better-trained ears and better guitars, as well as other examples of more optimally-realized modern and historical models to study, listen to, and emulate. In comparison, the most familiar and widely accepted steel string guitar is the one that you can always plug into an amp or play into a microphone.

What I said above about “getting the most out of a steel string guitar’s potential” probably sounds too simplified and vague to be very useful. But consider the matter in this way: an OM model guitar and a Dreadnought differ in a number of specific ways: woods, scale lengths, body depth, possibly stringing, etc. How is one to factor these differences in? The best thing that a luthier can do is to make a really good OM and/or a really good Dreadnought; each will have its own voice because it will have brought different things to the table, blueprint-wise and tone-wise, from the very beginning. To repeat what I said above, the guitar maker’s task is to bring those qualities fully out without overbuilding, underbuilding, or misbuilding. And in the case of guitar makers just as much as with marksmen and cooks, it takes time and experience to learn to do the work professionally and well.

August, 2014

I was recently in a conversation with a client during which he asked whether I voice my guitars differently depending on whether they are OM models, or Modified Dreadnoughts, or Jumbos, or 00s, or whether I make accommodations within a given model depending on whether it will be played in standard or open tuning. It’s not a bad question, and it’s a topic that’s come up more than once. The assumption seems to be that something has to be done differently because these guitars are different sizes and shapes and uses, and will of course have different sounds. How could one recipe voicing approach possibly work for all of them?

My short answer is no, I don’t have different voicing tricks or techniques for my various guitar models. Not really. There may be nuances and difference of emphasis here and there, of course, but the procedures are basically the same in all cases: to progressively and systematically lighten the structure so that the voice of the guitar stops being choked by too much wood, mass, and stiffness and begins to open up. This is, in fact, no more nor less than every serious guitar maker’s challenge.

Chances are high that every luthier you will ever have a conversation with will give you his own perfectly-good-sounding reasons for whatever he does to his guitars’ woods in order to tease the best sounds out of them. These accounts will undoubtedly surprise you with their variety. And some of them are certain to be on the right track. Nevertheless, I do NOT believe that the chief task of these luthiers is to apply this or that particular recipe procedure to get “this kind” of sound out of one model guitar and “that kind” of sound out of another. The various guitar models and types, together with their individual factors of size, depth, wood selection, stringing, etc. set most of the tonal possibilities for what such a soundbox will be capable of. The luthier’s task is, simply, to get any soundbox to fully release its tonal potential. Period. Just as a cook cannot make any food taste better than what it can be, a soundbox of a given size and volume cannot do better than its best. Short of that end result one simply achieves… well… something less than that.

September, 2013

Glue. All woodworkers use it. And what can one say about it that hasn’t been said already? — that is, aside from jokes like “My wife gave me a book titled The Complete History of Glue for my birthday. What was it like? Heck, once I picked it up I couldn’t put it down…”

Well, the principal function of any glue — outside of considerations of working time, adhesive strength, and materials compatibility — is simply to enable one surface to stick to another. Period. Therefore if the glue has been appropriately selected for the task at hand and applied correctly, all glues work satisfactorily: the glued parts all adhere together for a long time without bleeding, creeping, breaking down, discoloring the woods, or otherwise failing.

For woodworkers in general, hide glue and fish glue were the only glues available for a long time. More recently, synthetic and chemical glues have been developed which are more convenient to use, give extended working time, are waterproof, etc. For the general woodworker who is not committed to using epoxies and such for specialized purposes, Titebond (and the other aliphatic resin glues which are sold under a variety of names) pretty much heads the list of modern favorites. It works every time. The somewhat less convenient hide glue (made from animal hides and hooves) is still used by purists, craftsmen, and traditionalists. It works every time as well. Elmer’s White glue, that staple of school projects, is a polyvinyl glue which never gets really hard; hence most woodworkers don’t use it on serious projects.

The Titebonds and hide glues are certainly the favorite adhesives when it comes to making guitars despite the latter’s minor inconveniences of preparation and quick setting time. On the whole they give equivalent results, but with one significant difference. This is most noticeable to repairmen and restorers — those whose work requires them to take glue joints apart, or to deal with failed joints. The difference is that of destructive vs. non-destructive reversibility. What that means is that one can take a hide glue joint apart (if one knows how, and if one is willing to be patient) without removing of any actual wood. One cannot take a Titebonded joint apart without losing at least a little bit of the original wood: one undoes the joint and then needs to do some sanding or scraping to expose fresh wood. This might not seem like an important consideration in most woodworking, and it is pretty much irrelevant in factory-made guitars: there’s enough wood in these so that you can lose 1/64″ of thickness and still be all right. But in craftsman-level guitar work, which can allow for more carefully titrated and thicknessed parts, the loss of a few thousandths of an inch of wood may make a difference in sound.

There’s also a second consideration when it comes to doing repair and restoration work on a valuable collector’s instrument. In this realm, having the instrument be as fully original as possible is desirable: alterations and modifications of any kind can devalue the instrument. So, in these cases, it is preferable to find that the guitar has been held together with hide glue: the parts can be taken apart and reglued while maintaining fidelity to the original sizes, thicknesses, and specifications of the woods, not to mention the original intent and methodology of the maker. One can understand that a damaged Louis XIV chair that’s been epoxied together wouldn’t be considered authentic — and it would be priced accordingly.

I’d always assumed that Titebond was water soluble (after all, it dilutes easily with water when it’s still liquid) and that it could be removed completely, after it had hardened, if one wanted to spend enough time sponging and wiping it carefully away with warm water. It’s exactly what one can do with hide glue. But Titebond is a synthetic glue, not an organic one, and it has unexpected staying power. I should add that with both of these glues one heats a joint that is to be undone, so as to soften the glue and help it release its hold.

Titebond is only partially un-doable. This property of it impressed itself on me in an interesting and accidental way. I’d made a pencil holder a long time ago by pouring some Titebond into the bottom of a recycled plastic jar that had a rounded bottom edge and then dropping a bunch of ball bearings in for ballast — to ensure that it was heavy and stable enough to not tip over once I filled it with pencils and pens. The Titebond soon hardened and rendered the ball-bearing ballast permanent, and the jar held my pencils and pens nicely. Some years later I was able to afford a real pencil holder, so I transferred the pens and pencils and filled the old jar with hot water so as to melt the Titebond and reclaim the ball bearings. I thought it would take a few days of soaking for the Titebond to give way; the ball bearings were stainless steel and wouldn’t rust.

Well, to my surprise, the Titebond did soften but it didn’t dissolve at all; it was still there after three weeks of continual immersion in warmed water. It softened enough that I could squeeze the ball bearings back out, but what remained was a honeycombed, spongelike mass of rubbery aliphatic resin that looked like a coral reef — and that hardened up rock solid again as soon as it dried out. (See the accompanying photos.)

As it turns out, it’s not only the composition of the glue that makes the problem for repairmen and restorers. It also has to do with how the adhesive achieves its results. In the case of the newer glues such as Titebond, these grab onto the materials they come into contact with by means of penetrative adhesion: they sink into wood fibers and grab hold. And once there, they want to stay. The upshot is that undoing such a joint usually results in some splintering, tearing, or pulling up of wood fibers, and thus leaving a rough surface that will itself need to be smoothed before any regluing can occur.

In addition, whether or not there’s been pulling away of wood fibers, some of the Titebond will remain on the wood surface and, as I pointed out with my ball-bearings experience, Titebond will not simply wash away. Thus the usual way of post-Titebond surface preparation is to sand or scrape at the roughened sections (imagine trying to sand or scrape cold honey off a piece of plywood; it’s the same thing) until smooth wood is reached; then, one reglues.

Hide glue, on the other hand, achieves its results by molecular bonding. Titebond won’t hold very well onto something it cannot penetrate, such as glass. But hide glue will. In fact, it’ll hold on like a barnacle on a ship’s hull. In the old days before sand blasting, glass was decorated by covering the to-be-textured-or-highlighted area with hide glue; once this dried the hide glue was chipped off with a chisel and a hammer — and it would take some of the glass with it. The contrast between this newly chipped surface and the smooth original surface of the glass is how lettering and decoration in that medium used to be achieved! The really interesting part of this is that, molecular bonding aside, one can wash hide glue completely away without affecting the surface it has been applied to. Like campers, hikers, or guests with an ecological consciousness, hide glue can disappear without leaving any trace or litter behind it.

February, 2013

I’ve been making guitars for a long time. My approach to the selection of the topwood (which is commonly agreed on as being the soul of the guitar) relies on a favorable stiffness-to-weight ratio — more so than on the grain’s evenness, count, or color. The wood’s weight is critical to me: it’s half the formula. I’ve sorted through uncounted topwood sets in the last forty-plus years and the range of their densities has never failed to impress itself on me. The same has also been true of the many piles of spruce and cedar planks I’ve sorted through and made selections from. I’d handle planks that were so heavy that they seemed fresh-felled and still full of water; they’d be next to planks that were so light that you could sneeze and they’d practically blow off the pile. These woods were of comparable size and had been kiln-dried together, so the moisture content would have been the same. I assumed that this disparity was all normal and natural — but it was only recently that I’ve learned of one of the mechanisms by which Nature produces such variety. I came upon an article written by Ernst Zurcher (with an umlaut over the “u”), a Swiss forestry expert, that explained how wood retains different weight, durability, and working properties when it is felled in synchrony with various phases of the moon.

That article is titled “Lunar rhythms in forestry traditions: lunar-correlated phenomena in tree biology and wood properties”. Zurcher wrote it for Wood Sciences magazine, HG F.21, c/o the Department of Forest Sciences, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, ETH-Zentrum, Zurich CH-8092, Switzerland (email: ernst.zuercher@swood.bfh.ch). Zurcher, it turns out, has written extensively on this fascinating topic.

Zurcher’s article, focusing as it does on the matter of timing in tree-felling practices, gave me an insight into the variation in woods’ mass that I’d long noticed. Traditional European forestry practices depend on a mindset of selectivity that is not possible for modern commercial lumbering businesses to even consider: these clear by the acre or square mile, and certainly not only during certain phases of the moon. European woods that are purposefully felled in relation to the moon’s cycles are in fact called “full moon wood”, among other things. Somehow, I seem to want to call this material “werewood”. I’ve also discovered, since reading Zurcher’s article, that there are lots of people who know about such wood and have known about it long before I did.

Regardless of what such wood is called, Zurcher’s thesis is this: Since before the time of Christ, foresters have noticed that the woods they cut yielded different working and stabilizing properties, in direct correlation with where in the lunar cycle those woods are felled. Woods cut during the full moon, the new moon, or the waning moon, have consistently different characteristics. Therefore, a number of especially advantageous uses for timber could be correlated with specific felling dates. [NOTE: Technically, proper assessment of felling dates also includes the moon’s cycles of height-trajectory with respect to the earth’s horizon, which shift from high to low and back again during the lunar cycle. Also, besides the phases of the moon and its height-of-travel over the earth’s horizon, the practice of paying attention to the felling date of a wood has also included which sign of the Zodiac was dominant at the time. Wood-cutting practices in places as diverse as Bhutan and Mali follow these “rules”. No, I’m not making this up; read the article.]

Zurcher points out that this body of empirically collected wisdom applies to a range of practical wood uses as diverse as house construction, roof shingles, wooden chimneys (well, they had them in the old days), barrels for storing liquids, boxes for storing foodstuffs, fuel (firewood), plows, transportation of felled woods via river floatation, and even musical instrument soundboards. Furthermore, the general rules for felling woods seem to be very similar across the continents. Whether in the Alpine regions, the Near East, in Africa, India, Ceylon, Brazil, and Guyana, these traditions all seem to be based in matching and independent observations. Zurcher quite reasonably points out that in the past, people had more time and more peace and quiet in which to observe how things work; indeed, such knowledge would have been vital to them.

Interestingly, while the empirical knowledge gotten through centuries of hands-on forestry practices has necessarily resulted in a body of oral tradition, peasant wisdom, and folklore, there’s also a significant body of historical writing in which lunar rhythms (over and above the cycles of the seasons) are mentioned as having an influence on the growth, structures, characteristics, and properties of plants. For instance, the Roman statesman and writer Pliny had advice to give on tree cutting, as well advising farmers to pick fruit for the market vs. fruit for their own stores at different phases of the moon: for the former, fruit picked just before or at the full moon would weigh more; for the latter, fruit picked during the new moon would last better.

The variations in wood density that I’ve mentioned noticing make sense within the context of modern vs. traditional wood felling practices. Today, loggers will work a forest, stand, or acreage indiscriminately, until their quota is met. The job might take weeks or months. But then, leaving a denuded hillside, they’ll move on to another patch of land and do the same. Selectivity is per acreage and tonnage, set by commercial considerations and not per specific intended use of the wood harvest. This contrasts sharply with the traditional selectivity that would have been the rule in any aware, non-industrial community of foresters: you go in and select a limited amount of wood to be used for specific purposes; you don’t cut indiscriminately and ship out by the lumber-truckfull. You take what you need, until the next trip into the forest. It’s easy to understand that these different mindsets would include or exclude ancillary, contextual, environmental, meteorological, commercial, and/or scheduling concerns.

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.