Ervin Somogyi

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.

1. A chord will emerge from the guitar either quickly or slowly;
2. 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;
3. listen for basic volume and presence;
4. a chord will emerge from the guitar either quickly or slowly;
5. 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;
6. 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;
7. is there compliance of response? That is, do you have to push the guitar or does it respond easily to your touch;
8. listen to whether the sound is bass-heavy or treble heavy, or well balanced;
9. and whether the strength/presence of each string is even;
10. and whether there are any wolf tones (i.e., problematically louder or quieter notes)
11. and whether the guitar really plays in tune or not;
12. and whether the sound is good close-up, and/or from across the room (you’ll need a playing/listening partner for this);
13. 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;
14. 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;
15. 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;
16. 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;
17. 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.

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..

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.

October 16, 2011

Q: Obviously, your method [of working tops to stiffness than to target dimension] is going to lead to different thicknesses for every piece of wood of a certain species to get the same flexibility. I am curious, though, if you find that different species have to be worked to a different degree of flexibility? For example, say you thin your steel string Sitka tops to have X amount of flexibility with a Y weight on them. Do you use the same X amount of flexibility when you are using Engelmann or Cedar, as well, or do you find that you need to develop a Z amount of flexibility for a different species? Thanks.

A: You’re correct that in theory no two pieces of topwood will wind up being exactly the same thickness if one follows my method. That is, we’re looking to achieve a consistent level of RESISTANCE, and different woods will have different proportions and densities of xylene, cellulose, and fiber with which to achieve that level of resistance.

This level of resistance isn’t some theoretical number that’s gotten by formula — although it can be gotten that way. The level of resistance is organic to the guitar: it is set by the top’s need to work with the strings’ pull, modulated by the kind of sound (character, sustain, overtones, etc.) that you might be after. And that’s all. Various gauges of strings, of various scale lengths, exert a certain amount of pull which, when excited, provide the motive force and energy budget. This is, of course, affected by things like how hard the player plays, bridge height and torque, etc. I don’t think any of this is exactly new information to anyone who’s been paying attention.

If the top is too resistant to the strings’ pull, then the mechanical response of the guitar is hampered. It is compressed into (i.e., limited to) regions of high-frequency/low amplitude activity/signal. You might or might not like that sound, but it will be a limited sound. If the top is too wimpy and flexible then it MIGHT have to rely on the bracing to restore its dynamic balance to a higher level of stiffness and hence response. The bracing will reinforce, or undermine, or overpower, what the top itself is able to do. It’s a partnership.

Steel strings on a guitar exert a pull of around 180 pounds. Nylon strings exert a pull of nearly 100 pounds. Let’s say that the strings on your guitar exert 125 pounds of pull and torque when tuned to pitch. I’m just grabbing a number here. Now consider: it really doesn’t matter whether your guitar has a Sitka spruce top, an Engelmann top, a redwood top, a European or Lutz spruce top, a cedar top, a koa top, a mahogany top, or a plywood top. That top is, in every case, going to be driven by 125 pounds of string pull/drive/torque. We’re assuming everything else being equal here: guitar size, soundhole size, bridge height, etc.

The question is: why would you put a top with any different stiffness (than that needed to deal with a 125 pound pull and torque) on your guitar? Put it another way: if string gauge were like octane in gasoline (i.e., a measure of its ‘oomph’) and top stiffness were like tire pressure (a certain ease or hardness in car maneuverability), then regardless of what octane gasoline you fill your car’s tank with, why would you change the tire pressure every time you gassed up?

Now, there are different things than mere stiffness going on. There’s also internal damping and mass. Different woods WILL behave a bit differently, at identical stiffnesses, when excited by strings, because of these other factors. Some woods will suck the strings’ energies up pretty quickly and damp their motions. Some will be vitreous and live and allow the strings to remain excited for longer. Some will be internally brittle. Some will be internally tough and ropey. Some will be very dense; others will be like Styrofoam, etc. You get the idea. So there’s a lot to be said for familiarizing one’s self with the average tonal potential of different woods, as well as which woods tend to be more consistent in qualities and which species have a wider, less consistent, range of qualities depending on which plank or log you’re working with. The main thing is to work with woods that have the least energy loss possible. You want the energy to go into the air (sound) and not into the woods and materials of the guitar.

If you’ve ever been to a lumber yard you’ll have noticed that some planks of a given wood are dense and heavy while other planks right next to them are not. Such things affect a guitar’s behaviors, and need to be factored into your calculations — if only to the extent of your using the same selections of woods on the guitars that you make. You may or may not have a clue as to what difference any characteristic that you’re aware of might make, but it’s smart to not throw uncontrolled variables into your work if you can help it.

Having said that, EVERY guitar will produce a monopole, a cross-dipole, a long-dipole, and whatever other mode of motion you think is important enough to consider. If you don’t know about these, please stop reading this right now and read up on these fundamental vibrational modes of a guitar top: they’re critical. Every guitar has SOME mix of these modes, and every guitar has a fixed energy budget with which to excite these — depending on how the maker has knowingly or ignorantly designed his system to ALLOW, FACILITATE, INHIBIT, SUPPORT or PREVENT certain movements of the top.

October 3, 2011

I’ve completed a new and unusual classic guitar: it’s got a koi fish carved into the top. You can see what this looks like in the accompanying photographs.

I like to make an extraordinarily decorated guitar from time to time, but when I do so I limit the ornamentation to the upper bout, which is acoustically not very important, or other non-acoustically critical parts of the instrument. The lower bout of the face (the area around the bridge) is acoustically critical and I won’t mess with that. I want those instruments to have as full a sound as anything else that I make.

This is a beautiful guitar. One of my witty friends took one look at it and commented that it ought to be great for playing scales. Ho ho ho.

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 .

August 8, 2011

I do as much writing for website guitar discussion forums as I can, in addition to answering questions that people email me personally. I can’t really keep up with this demand very well, especially as so many of the questions are duplicates and I wind up giving the same answers over and over again. So I thought that I could eliminate a lot of this repetition by posting some of the questions I’ve gotten, along with my answers. Here’s one such:

Q: In The Responsive Guitar book you go to great lengths to discuss importance of and your method for top “stiffness testing”. I realize you would not want to divulge the optimum number you look to achieve for your guitars. Could you give us a range of numbers that you see from you experience that a new builder could use as a starting point?

A: Yours is a good question. To my mind it’s not so much a question of there being a “right number” or “right quantity”, as finding a method that delivers that information in a way that the brain can take meaningfully. In our culture, weights and measurements and statistics are how such information is most easily taken in and digested.

In other times and other places, however, the same information was transmitted differently, using different language and different tools. But it was the same information. One alternative method that I learned (from master luthier Jose Romanillos, who is certainly a traditionalist in the school of Spanish guitar making) is the following:

Take your joined top plate and start to thin it. It doesn’t matter if you do this with a plane or with a power sander. It is only necessary that you thin evenly, and not leave the plate full of lumps and low spots. Flex it from time to time to get a sense of its stiffness along the grain. Stiffness along the grain is considered the most critical indicator of where you want to wind up, as opposed to strength across the grain or diagonally to it.

You’ll notice that the plate is stiff, of course. How stiff? Well, stiff enough so that when you are pressing your thumbs against one side while holding onto other side with your fingers, and are bending the plate by pushing it with your thumbs, you will find that the spot that your thumbs rest against will be resistant. It will be resistant to the extent that if you keep on pushing so as to bend the plate, it will crimp at the points where your thumbs are. That is, you will induce a bend at those points that is different from the bend that the wood will take between those points.

That tells you that the wood isn’t ready to bend evenly yet. Keep on removing wood. By the way, if you’ve read my chapter on the Cube Rule you’ll understand that removing seemingly small amounts of wood will make a huge difference in the wood’s measured stiffness. So don’t hack a lot of wood off too quickly: go slowly and methodically.

Keep flexing the wood and removing wood. There will come a point at which the wood will “relax” in your hands and, when you press on the long axis with your thumbs, the board will begin to make an even arc along its entire length. It’s not fighting you.

That’s your starting point. No fancy equipment other than your hands and fingers, and a bit of sense of the wood, is needed.

You can of course keep on removing wood, and you can do so until you’ve reached a threshold on the other side and rendered the wood too wimpy to be useful on a guitar. (At the extreme, you can imagine how relaxed and unresistant a paper-thin slice of wood would be, right?) Your next twenty years can be happily spent exploring the range between these two extremes — which define a range of thickness that’s probably on the order of 1/16 of an inch. It’s pretty amazing what a few thousandths of an inch can do — and that’s not even considering the possibilities of selective tapering, bracing, and thinning!

August 8, 2011

I teach an annual week-long class in Voicing The Guitar. Some of my students have told me, in retrospect, that they were not prepared for the kind of class that this actually is: a few days into the class, after we’d discussed basics such as the physical properties of woods and the main modes of vibration, they’d begun to wonder exactly when I’d get around to saying anything really important — such as the essential secret techniques I’d perfected over the years, along with the requisite correct specific measurements. It would be at about the third day, when various items of information had begun to connect, and pieces of the puzzle had begun to attain unexpected significance, that these good people began to see that I’d actually been giving them pertinent information all along. It simply hadn’t looked like any useful information they’d ever been given before and they hadn’t recognized it as such. They had, instead, all been waiting for the secrets of the remfagri to fall into their laps.

REMFAGRI is my personal shorthand for the idea of a Recipe-Method For Achieving Great Results Immediately. It’s much like the idea of, say, the perfect recipe for French onion soup: it doesn’t exist, and never has, but that hasn’t stopped people from seeking it. It’s well known that some chefs make absolutely heavenly French Onion soup — but there’s ALWAYS another recipe out there that might be even better, if one is willing to keep on buying cookbooks… even though the recipes ALL depend on the same basic ingredients and techniques.

It’s hard to know whom to blame for our collective focus on REMFAGRIs, but they are endemic and epidemic. One has only to go to the nearest bookstore and look at the How-To and/or Self-Help section. No subject is left unsimplified, and even ungodly complex projects such as wars and choosing mates are conceived out of the same here’s-how-to-get-the-job-done mindset.

I’m inclined to believe that what is missing in general is any sense of… well… scale. The kind of thing that induces some personal humility and awe. You know, something should I put it… profound… or at least greater than you… and worth approaching with respect… rather than it merely being an extra-large-pizza-sized chore or challenge to deal with before you check it off your list and go on to the next thing to conquer. If you react to a sunset, or the great outdoors, with any sense of it being special you’ll know what I mean. And my question is: did you ever pair that sensation with doing any of your work, or learning anything, or having a discussion with someone? When do we ever think, or do, or meet, or eat, anything that we consider to be special?

These are nutshell descriptions of Life-Attitudes that are so fundamental to one’s thinking (or absent from it) that one doesn’t usually have an awareness of having such an attitude. It’s of course expressed in humor, which every culture has its own spin on. American humor is no less complicated than anyone else’s, but an awful lot of it is about belittling, diminishing, or simplifying what’s in front of us — and thereby reducing its scale, importance, or specialness.

It’s understandable that this should be so, given all the pressures of our contemporary lives: it’s tempting to find projects and relationships that we can exercise our powers over so that we can feel in control. And then, most cultures and religions (including all the secular ones) DISCOURAGE questioning of their basic beliefs. Doing so makes people uncomfortable (I mean, it’s sooooo intolerable to suspect that even French onion soup might be bigger than we are, no?). But, heck, let’s face it: we can’t even really comprehend basics such as gravity, amoebas, or trees. What’s wrong with admitting to some sense of scale?

March 25, 2011

Some of you may know that I made a rosewood Andamento guitar about two years ago; it’s a wonder of design and craftsmanship if I do say so myself. The cutting, the inlaying, and the design itself took a long time to execute; and the work also included the design and making of eleven separate rosette logs. It’s the most fancily inlaid thing I’ve ever produced.

I initially thought of making something like this because I liked the design. The idea came from my dropping a spoon while having dinner at a Mexican restaurant; when I leaned over to retrieve it I noticed this same pattern in the floor tiles and was captivated by it. What a lovely pattern! I’ve since learned that this is a fairly common pattern that is used in both floor tiles and textiles. There’s even a picture of Michelle Obama, on the front page of the New York Times, wearing a dress with this print pattern on it! If the first lady is sporting the Andamento pattern, it’s got to be a winner, no?

Of course, the pattern isn’t called the Andamento; that’s a word that my associate Lewis Santer came up with after some research into inlay patterns. It turns out that inlay artists in the Renaissance gave that name to certain of their decorative patterns. Andamento refers to the movement (the going or traveling across) of a decorative pattern, through a material, or across one’s visual field. My guitar’s mosaic pattern has a lot of movement in it, so the name Andamento, invented by Italian craftsmen centuries ago, seemed to fit.

 

 

After completing the rosewood Andamento, I then embarked on a second one, in maple. I seemed to have a vague idea of making a matching pair of dark and light wood instruments.

It’s gorgeous, of course, but I learned that doing this kind of work in maple is MUCH more difficult than it is in any dark wood. You can hide mistakes in dark woods; you cannot in maple: any miscut, any splintering, any irregularity, any breakage or tear-out, any subsequent repair… all will be forever visible. If the parts don’t fit perfectly, of if there’s the slightest gap, a glue line that would have been invisible in a dark wood will stand out. White wood is simply unforgiving.

It’s ironic that, because maple is so much cheaper a wood than Brazilian rosewood is, this guitar would ordinarily command a lower value than its rosewood counterpart. But from the standpoint of sheer patient, skilled labor, there’s no comparison: the maple Andamento took significantly longer to execute and make look perfect. My helper Chris Morimoto deserves a lot of credit for this, because without his consummate attention to detail this guitar would have taken twice as long to produce.

Besides the beauty of the maple, this guitar has close to 200 mosaic tiles — of eleven different mosaic patterns — inlaid into it. The tiles are about half the size of a dime and each one is made up of 200 tiny pieces of wood. And then, of course, there are several hundred feet of (mostly) two-inch long inlaid sections of black-white-black purfling, each mitered into and butted against each other.

This needs to be a pricey guitar, for obvious reasons. It is spectacular in photographs and even more so up close. It is available now. If you’re interested, please call or email me for price information.

March 5, 2011

I remember that, when I was starting out, years ago, I spent a lot of evenings backstage at different concert halls or clubs hoping to show that evening’s guitar player an instrument that I’d made. Some evenings were a complete waste of my time, but I learned two things from those efforts. One is that there is constructive criticism and destructive criticism (partially stemming from a set of values that various guitar-playing subcultures learn to apply differently; I describe this at length in Chapter 32 of my book The Responsive Guitar). The other thing is that if you are ever asked to render an opinion of someone else’s work — and you agree to it — you should give the guy something. The guy has a right to expect a few minutes of your honest attention; he’s earned it by having put 100-plus hours into the guitar he’s showing you.

It’s easy to spot the inadequacies in someone else’s work, especially if they’re more or less new to it. The thing is, though, effective criticism — and certainly constructive criticism — requires some real experience, thought, and standards. At a minimum, it involves the learned skill of simply looking and seeing — and getting the other person to look and see equally dispassionately; it’s possible that he had been so focused on following the instructions that he didn’t notice the details. Constructive criticism is also a learned social skill that borrows heavily from the Salesman’s Handbook: a little tact and generosity go a long way. Even the worst guitar has some good things in it, and an intelligent critic will do well to find them and acknowledge them. To do otherwise is tantamount to giving the man a business card with your name on it followed by the word “asshole.”

When asked to comment on someone else’s work I find it useful to ask them what their assessment is. What do they think the pluses and minuses are? What did they learn from this or that? That will give me a good starting point for giving feedback. I mean, if they think that they are showing me an object of transcendent beauty that they can’t imagine will receive anything but high praise, and I see only an amateurish mess, I have to be a bit tactful in turning their focus to some of the things that are not yet obvious to them. Take it from me, even experienced guitar makers can be surprisingly touchy about real or perceived negative input. On the other hand, once you ask for advice, listen to it: it is your job as a maker to learn your work and get past your fantasies, blind spots, and pet beliefs about it.

Regardless of how skilled your eye and ear might be in finding the pluses and minuses of a someone else’s work there are two main things that I have found it useful to be aware of. The first of these is easily overlooked, even though it’s actually more obvious* than the specifics of a guitar’s construction. It’s the fact that the person who is showing you that instrument actually made it. Consider that there are more people on this planet who would like to make a guitar, intend to make a guitar, plan to some day make a guitar, wish they could make a guitar, have thought about making a guitar, or at one point actually started to make a guitar but didn’t finish it… than there are people who begin such a project and carry it through to completion. Period. That simple fact counts points and needs to be acknowledged. And it’s not really (only) a simple fact: it’s a complex one made up of effort, dedication, and focus — and, not least, expended time and energy. The person you are talking to has crossed a significant threshold and has paid certain dues. If ‘the expert’ whose opinion is being asked isn’t aware of this, he’s not much of an expert.

Making a guitar is a complicated process: anyone who has made a guitar or even read a book about instrument making knows this. It’s far easier if you’re building a kit, of course, but unless you’re working in a fully automated shop the work involves literally hundreds of discrete steps, substeps, procedures, operations, and multiple materials. And besides all the time and effort it takes, there’s a learning curve loaded with twists, mistakes, dead ends and switchbacks. So, for someone to comment on the end result of such a demanding and complex project, as though it were ONLY a collection of nice tries… is to devalue the work. I repeat: find a few of the hundred things that were well done in that guitar and mention them. As a bonus, if you do this, the recipient’s opinion of you will be higher because he’ll recognize how perceptive you truly are. NOTE: I’m not suggesting an ego-stroking-compliment-fest; I’m suggesting sugar-coating the pill.

The second area of critical mindset is also one that is normally unrecognized by most people; yet, it vastly enriches the conversation if one is simply aware of the fact that a handmade guitar carries information. It is a veritable repository and warehouse of embedded (but invisible) information — in a way, moreover, that a factory made guitar is not. In fact, in a handmade guitar, the invisible information at least matches the amount of visible information. Let me explain what I mean.

A handmade guitar is, in a sense, like a photograph: something that has been frozen in time. It includes not only the woods, glues, lacquers, ivory, metals, etc. that it’s made up of, but also the engineering, physics, woodworking, acoustics, art, design, and tradition that it embodies. In addition, the guitar contains the intent, energy, focus, planning, skill, knowledge, priorities, interest, hopes, judgment, and intent of the maker. The fact is that the guitar would not have gotten made without these. One might argue that these quantities might have been “insufficient” because the guitar falls short of some standard of perfection — and that assessment may be “factually true”. But this brings us to the next important fact to consider: that guitar that you’re looking at is simply what the maker has accomplished at this point in time. If it’s not the maker’s first guitar then it ALSO contains the progress that’s been made since the previous one — and the seeds of the next, better guitar as well. As I said, it’s a frozen part of a process or progression, and the fact that you might be oblivious to this doesn’t mean it’s not any different. These things are most definitely “in there” because the maker put them in there. The instrument embodies all this.

I repeat: every item and detail in that guitar (including every lack of detail) speaks to one or more of these considerations. In case you’re thinking that I’m being fanciful, there is precedent and a reality basis to this kind of thing. Archaeologists can adduce the most amazing things out of a bone or a piece of pottery. The detailing of the formation of any aspect of an object, the fracture lines, its position in the ground and its location in relation to other things, the wear patterns, the age and composition, etc. are all clues that tell some story. Archaeologists understand the usefulness of geographic, geologic, technological, developmental, historical, meteorological, chemical, dendrochronological, etc. context. They will have some idea what came before or after in that same tribe or species and/or their neighboring tribes or species. Each clue has a part of the greater story to contribute.

Why should it be any different with the details and micro-details of a handmade guitar? Why should the visible sanding scratches on an interior surface not suggest something about the care, workmanship, prioritizing, awareness, experience, technological sophistication, etc. of the maker? Why should the straightness of the neck (or lack of it) not speak to his level of skill and conscientiousness, or even to prevailing lutherie theory? Well, they do. And speaking of context, is it surprising that someone working out of, say, Podunk, North Dakota, might be making less sophisticated guitars than someone working out of Seattle? It’s fair to assume that we’re looking at an example of the best that the maker knows/knew how to do. But why might we assume that the guitar in question does not represent, along with everything else, a point on an active learning curve? It most certainly does. It contains that information along with everything else I’ve listed. I think one’s analysis of a handmade guitar is made richer by appreciating such larger context, and any luthier will appreciate your recognition of the fact that every guitar (except the last one he’ll ever make) is, in part, an expression of Hope and Aim. Seriously. And that last guitar just might be an expression of a culmination.

As they say in Joisey, it never hoits to see past the woist in something. And, I underline: this is about nothing other than giving useful information. One goes to a doctor for medicine, not friendship. Give him the pill, but don’t make it a bitter one. I mentioned that hand made guitars contain information in the way that factory made ones do not. I’ve written at length about ‘the differences between handmade and factory made guitars’ in an article on this same website. If you’re interested in further discussion of this issue, please go read that.

* (By the way, the word obvious is interesting. It’s from the Latin “ob”, which means against — in the sense of close proximity (as opposed to contrariness) — and “via”, which means road. Something that’s obvious is something that is on the road right in front of you — in other words, something that’s so in your face that you can’t miss it.)