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Just curious if the results of veneered sides and back more like the INNER wood or the outer wood? Yes I know in a blind test it won’t matter.
I lined the inside with cypress in case I ever show this to Moya. He tried my guitar in 2009 in San Francisco. He put his nose in the soundhole and huffed up a snoot full of air. Then he exhaled and says “Ah canela! Maricon, you will be a great guitar maker and get $6000.00 dollars for your guitars.” Then he whiffed up more smells and played it for a while. I was dating this Peruvian bruja from Ayacucho at the time, she says to Antonio, “How long before the money comes in on these $6000.00 dollar guitars?” Then Moya turned to me and said “This is not the woman for you.”
I could have used the same material on the inside as on the outside, but I didn’t because I took Antonio seriously, because he was right and he saved me grief. You want the guitar to smell good. I loved that bruja so much, but my friends were right, she was only out to break men. It was not my shining path.
Damping is subtraction, like some relationships subtract one person from the other (thank you, Patrick O’Brian).
Lamination can increase stiffness (I won’t touch that one).
So to know the effects, all you have to do is figure out the combined damping of two disparate woods, how the resulting stiffness and mass make the back and ribs interact with the top, and therefore how much that damping really matters — and Bob’s yer uncle; easy-peasy; ipso facto.
What I want to know is what to call it. Is it a Blagra or a Nenca?
The most important thing is that the inside smells like cedary cinnamon and the ribs don’t crack if you use sections with flat grain or an area that could get rip in it.
I’m kind of burned out for the time being on explanations of why guitars work or especially listening to newbie guitar makers on social media talk about building theory. It’s like someone makes ten guitars and they have $5000.00 in lighting, cameras and an editing suite you could use for professional filmmaking and they regurgitate all the things they’ve read about acoustic engineering and sine waves with super polished production values. I’m so sick of it.
I just want a rest from explaining stuff, I’m tired, my brain is tired of the tic tok / insta universe of chatty nonsense. Gimmicks, branding and promotion of talking points is tiresome, having online dealers hawk guitars and tell viewers they will like the guitar for its ‘low body pitch’ is witchcraft hooey.
You guys are ok, I just hate the outside world beyond the Foro. I’m just here to post photos of what I’m building and tell fart jokes.
delicioso. Congratulations for making it out in one piece.
Moya and two women friends who were South American told me to get out, it couldn’t have been a coincidence. Whether consciously or unconsciously she was doing messed up stuff. She took me to parties with no gringos and the people hosting the party would get weird. Her band mates liked me, but there was this other thing she'd take me to places that didn’t want gringos and I’d say we shouldn’t be here, but she’d insist on staying. It would freak people out because they suspected I was ‘migra’ dating a Latina to collect information on people. That’s definitely not my thing. She had boundary issues that put me in poor situations. That’s just for starters 😆
I felt empathy for her as her family had been harassed by Sendero Luminoso, but sometimes it was difficult to tell if she played on that to climb up. The oddest thing was that she was newly hired to teach at a college and as an inexperienced teacher. She asked me how to do it, so every night I helped her write a syllabus for a subject that I didn’t study, but knew enough about, then showed her how to outline a semester long lesson plan and have her a handful of actual class activities to get going. The admin at the college praised her as a newbie teacher who was getting along well. Then one day an admin said to her, you always get picked up by that white guy in the construction pick up truck, you can do better than that dear. ( this didn’t phase me as I already profoundly understood that academic leftists profess that they believe in the Marxist tenet that intellectual labor is equivalent to physical labor. They teach that it’s noble to be a worker, but keep your low life laborer body off campus. It’s hilarious, conservative academics hate workers because we might organize and vote in anti capitalist Marxists, leftist a academics hate worker’s because we didn’t aspire to go to college and lift ourselves intellectually, so they consider us ignorant and lazy. I’ll take a Guatemalan guy with a strong back over those academics any day. And I could still teach a better class on Susan Sontag and art history than most of them. Glad I dropped out of that world.)
I was working as a carpenter with David Serva’s son Martin at the time. Building a house in the Berkeley hills and then helping her grade papers and teaching her how to teach at night. I admired her stepping into a challenge to teach, but she never told the administrators that I supported her, she let them bad mouth me, never knowing I was giving support to encourage.. I just looked like some white a&&hole with a truck. She’s a piece of work. That’s not even half of it 😆
Right now is the time I start crawling out of my skin as a guitar maker. I can hardly sleep sometimes at this stage-
The guitar is complete, fingerboard glued on, it’s getting so close to that day you can string it up, but the check list to get to that day has these next tasks, hammer in frets, finish carving the neck, put some shellac on the neck, glue on the bridge, make a nut & saddle and finally screw on the tuning machines. It’s not a lot left to do, I can get the frets in and leveled & polished and carve the neck in one day easy. Then the bridge gets glued on, but I let it rest at least over night before continuing because I’m semi superstitious about glue drying time on bridges.
Then the set up takes me all day because I find little things that need attending to, such as the inside wall of the tuner slot maybe needs more shellac, there’s always a detail.
The point is, the guitar is so close to being finished, I want to hear it. I can’t wait to see what happens, but you can’t rush the homestretch, if you rush to the finish line you don’t perform good set up work, there’s no rush, only the insistent voice in your guitar maker head that needs to hear what the guitar does. It’s still rather exciting, or this particular guitar is making me anxious because I’m going to keep it for myself. So I’m extra annoyed that I’m my own customer, I’m like that guy who keeps calling and saying “What’s taking you so ****ing long! Can you hurry the **** up?”
Guitar makers are their own worst clients I suppose. I’ll be glad when this one is finished.
Right now is the time I start crawling out of my skin as a guitar maker. I can hardly sleep sometimes at this stage
The guitar is complete, fingerboard glued on, it’s getting so close to that day you can string it up, but the check list to get to that day has these next tasks, hammer in frets, finish carving the neck, put some shellac on the neck, glue on the bridge, make a nut & saddle and finally screw on the tuning machines. It’s not a lot left to do, I can get the frets in and leveled & polished and carve the neck in one day easy. Then the bridge gets glued on, but I let it rest at least over night before continuing because I’m semi superstitious about glue drying time on bridges.
Then the set up takes me all day because I find little things that need attending to, such as the inside wall of the tuner slot maybe needs more shellac, there’s always a detail.
The point is, the guitar is so close to being finished, I want to hear it. I can’t wait to see what happens, but you can’t rush the homestretch, if you rush to the finish line you don’t perform good set up work, there’s no rush, only the insistent voice in your guitar maker head that needs to hear what the guitar does. It’s still rather exciting, or this particular guitar is making me anxious because I’m going to keep it for myself. So I’m extra annoyed that I’m my own customer, I’m like that guy who keeps calling and saying “What’s taking you so ****ing long! Can you hurry the **** up?”
Guitar makers are their own worst clients I suppose. I’ll be glad when this one is finished.
this sounds like a neurotic Me, when making my second guitar. Im saddened to think this self doubt, anxiety and these inward crises dont go away with experience
Right now is the time I start crawling out of my skin as a guitar maker. I can hardly sleep sometimes at this stage
The guitar is complete, fingerboard glued on, it’s getting so close to that day you can string it up, but the check list to get to that day has these next tasks, hammer in frets, finish carving the neck, put some shellac on the neck, glue on the bridge, make a nut & saddle and finally screw on the tuning machines. It’s not a lot left to do, I can get the frets in and leveled & polished and carve the neck in one day easy. Then the bridge gets glued on, but I let it rest at least over night before continuing because I’m semi superstitious about glue drying time on bridges.
Then the set up takes me all day because I find little things that need attending to, such as the inside wall of the tuner slot maybe needs more shellac, there’s always a detail.
The point is, the guitar is so close to being finished, I want to hear it. I can’t wait to see what happens, but you can’t rush the homestretch, if you rush to the finish line you don’t perform good set up work, there’s no rush, only the insistent voice in your guitar maker head that needs to hear what the guitar does. It’s still rather exciting, or this particular guitar is making me anxious because I’m going to keep it for myself. So I’m extra annoyed that I’m my own customer, I’m like that guy who keeps calling and saying “What’s taking you so ****ing long! Can you hurry the **** up?”
Guitar makers are their own worst clients I suppose. I’ll be glad when this one is finished.
this sounds like a neurotic Me, when making my second guitar. Im saddened to think this self doubt, anxiety and these inward crises dont go away with experience
The pangs of anxiety with experience give way to feelings of being dead inside and hourly cynical rants. Don’t worry. I’m just having a relapse of beginner anxiety, it will pass and I’ll be back to normal soon.
I’m kind of grouchy about guitar making because I’m trying to start my sculpture career again, which is where I was before I started making guitars. I went to art school for six years and studied art history and studio art and got a masters degree in the sculpture dept at Mills College. It’s a small liberal arts school in Oakland where a lot of famous composers taught. After I graduated in 1996 I started teaching and working in museums and I started playing guitar again and studying flamenco in 1997. I was making sculpture beginning to think about showing my work, I was busy making money working for a famous artist as his studio assistant by 1998, then I had this crazy idea that I’d build a guitar as a project to learn more woodworking skills to apply to my sculptural work. This was a point at which I did a hard 90 degree turn and became so engrossed in guitar making that I had to master it instead of just building a few and moving on. Consequently sculpture became the ‘hobby’ and guitar making became an obsession. Had I poured all the energy into sculpture by now I’d be a famous artist, but I’m not sad about not doing that because now I’m a guitar maker with all the glory and prestige and wealth of being known by two dozen guitarists.
I can draw pretty well when I put myself to it and some dept of city promotion in the town I live in got wind that I was dabbling in landscape painting as a hobby and asked me to paint some things for the city for money, and I like money. So I worked on it for about 18 months in my spare time but I never brought anything to them to use. Then about the end of June I decided I’d work on playing the Bach lute suites, because I was tired of feeling like a guitar student messing around with student pieces. This thinking also effected my relationship with the landscape pictures I was doing and I realized I was also treating myself like a student. Practicing instead of commanding the work eith heart and following that.
I deleted all the landscape pictures I was showing my artist buddies on my instagram and posted only sculpture and drawings that supported the sculpture. I just said screw it, I’m not enjoying the landscape painting and it was someone else’s idea to get into it. That was interesting, I felt a sudden freedom on one hand, but a big challenge on the other, making doing sculpture is not easy, but it’s not difficult either, it’s just disciplined work that requires heart.
Two weeks later I got a call from a guy who owns a coffee roasting business and he’s a curator also, who likes sculpture best. He said he’s putting together a visual arts and architecture festival in October/ November and if it’s not short notice can I submit work to the show.
Something in my karma got tweaked by Bach.
This is a 2022 piece titled ‘Utsuboat’ - about 80cm long, wood
Utsubo means moray eel in Japanese and it’s a bilingual word play on eel and boat, Utsubo-boat or Utsuboat
Where is this all going? I don’t know, but more guitars and sculpture will be made.
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Non rosewood is too vague. Let us know what it is just in case.
It’s Inumaki sort of like a cypress, but hard enough to hold a saddle slot and not break.
I’m thinking about the bridge as a braces and while a few kinds of rosewood make excellent bridge/ braces so do other woods. I’m riffing off a conversation with the Guitar Pope who told me about Manuel de la Chica using mahogany for bridges. After he shaped the bridge he lightly stained it darker. If it’s good enough for Manuel it’s good enough for me. Of course on customers guitars I’m using good rosewood, unless someone wants this bridge.
I’m painting a few layers of acrylic paint on it, sand, then French polish or wax & power buff finish.
* cited Pope Brunius XIV Letters to the Japoneses
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It’s a light stiff brace that’s going to fortify the center of the top. On this guitar there’s a big egg shaped area around the bridge that’s slightly thinner, the bridge is going to stiffen it up and make it even with the perimeter stiffness. I think this concept works because the bridge is light and the top is thin under it do it reacts fast, it’s easy to activate. Then the vibrations feel resistance at the edges, I’m trying to curb too much sustain because I’m interested in playing music written for the harpsichord and lute, and don’t want the sustain to get in the way of counterpoint writing.
We’re going to see how it all works. I’m not talking about radical transitions, just a subtle shift from thicker top center and thinner edges. That’s a common strategy, I’m tweaking it slightly to emphasize the center and making an ultralight bridge /brace for it.
The bone saddle and the paint will add 3 grams at the most
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I strung it up yesterday and so far I’m disappointed. It’s trebles are clear, loud not over sustaining and very much like soft edged lazer beams. The middle range is undeveloped and leads me to think unprofound. The basses are huge, cathedral like and loud but not boomy.
It feels so far like my parents put me into a hastily orchestrated arranged marriage with a big strong girl from a distant village who could break me like a branch over her knee.
I strung it up yesterday and so far I’m disappointed. It’s trebles are clear, loud not over sustaining and very much like soft edged lazer beams. The middle range is undeveloped and leads me to think unprofound. The basses are huge, cathedral like and loud but not boomy.
It feels so far like my parents put me into a hastily orchestrated arranged marriage with a big strong girl from a distant village who could break me like a branch over her knee.
I strung it up yesterday and so far I’m disappointed. It’s trebles are clear, loud not over sustaining and very much like soft edged lazer beams. The middle range is undeveloped and leads me to think unprofound. The basses are huge, cathedral like and loud but not boomy.
It feels so far like my parents put me into a hastily orchestrated arranged marriage with a big strong girl from a distant village who could break me like a branch over her knee.
:(
What are your learnings from this, Stephen?
I was articulating what several of my guitar maker friends say after initial stringing up of the guitar. Sometimes the immediate reaction is one of disappointment or dissatisfaction at the first sounds. Although I know a couple makers who claim that their guitars are flawless from the first milliseconds of tension 😂
It’s no big deal, and I usually completely ignore my first impressions because I know while the strings are stretching it’s likely you’re getting a false reading on the sound. This one I wrote down my first impressions to see how it plays out in a few weeks or months.
Right now I’m waiting for a new shipment of tap plate material and have decided I need to thin out the neck by 2mm at the first to fifth fret and feather it out into a ‘D’ profile. I left the neck flatter and thicker than usual, but I cannot adapt to it after three days. This guitar is for me so I’ve tried a few different approaches to subtle details knowing I can change them if I like. After I final up the French polish, tap plate and fret touch up crowning I’ll reevaluate it. I think it’s going to be good, as the mid range area in the middle of the neck on the A and D woke up on the second day.
There is this weird thing that I perceive that new fresh off the bench guitars do, and that’s go through a short period of time where they are slightly unruly, like rambunctious and uneven then they average out and settle down. My friends and I chat privately about it, we agree it takes about 2 weeks on average for the guitar to settle down. Maybe that’s just about perception and the guitar doesn’t change, but the human gets used to it, I don’t know. Certain aspects of guitar making screw with your head.
It turned a corner and got better. I had always wanted to see what really happens when you carve the neck, as I said I left the neck quite chunky on purpose, but I couldn’t get used to it. And the guitar sounded wild and inconsistent, too much overtone activity.
Leaving the strings on and the guitar tuned to playing tension, I refined the neck carving. Numbers 22.5 mm thick at the first fret, that’s not exactly a baseball bat, but it’s 3mm too thick for many players. I’ve carved so many necks I just eye them off a center line and freely carve by hand with a Japanese knife. After removing 2 mm in thickness and probably 2mm in ‘shoulder, off the clumsy D shape neck profile I arrived at medium ( what I’d call a medium ) thick neck with a very smart comfortable D shape. Not all D’s are alike you know.
The result was instant improvement the neck mass came off and the guitar gained refinement of tone, ease of playing, clarity/ projection and the overtone background interference dropped out to the normal level you expect with a sensitive loud guitar.
Interesting exercise, I recommend trying it. Too much neck mass = choked sound.
Not going to try the opposite experiment where you would carve it until diminishing returns occur because there’s no reason to if the neck shape and size is functional and comfortable.
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The Esteso in Brune's museum previously owned by Montoya had a ridiculous beefy neck. The guitar did not sound bad at all, but now I wonder if it would even improve if it was thinned out like a Santos or something.
Many solid body electric players attribute the sound of a guitar more to the neck, such that they might experiment by unbolting one and transfer it to another body. Malmsteen for example has this ridiculous history with the 71 era CBS neck he scalloped as a young guy, broke the head and reglued it and transferred it to at least 5 different Strat bodies. Strat enthusiasts roll their eyes with his obsession with this era of Strats with the big headstock as it is associated with Fender selling the company and quality going way down (junky products), but Malmsteen always insisted those sounded better than the old ones. When he talks like "this guitar I used for bla bla...." he actually always only meant the NECK itself, as to him the body was arbitrary.
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