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Cypress Classical - Any Suggestions?
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ernandez R
Posts: 742
Joined: Mar. 25 2019
From: Alaska USA
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 RE: Cypress Classical - Any Suggestions? (in reply to Ricardo)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Ricardo
quote:
ORIGINAL: elias
I'm in the market for a spruce/cypress "classical." I need something that has just a little bit more sustain than a flamenco affords and this wouldn't be for playing muy flamenco but more 'flamenco inspired' material. As I understand it you can't really get both fast response and long sustain, so the so-called long sustain flamenco guitars actually use harmonics to keep the note going (?). Yet I still mostly prefer the woody, raw sound of a good blanca.
Should I look into a cypress classical guitar (maybe 655 or 660 for more punch?), or is it possible to have a blanca built with sustain pushed to the very limits, even if it means sacrificing rasgueados, while retaining as much of everything else that makes for a good typical blanca?
What you are after is a “unicorn” guitar, and since this doesn’t exist, those of us that want the same thing have 2 guitars….or 3…or 4…..or…..
After my comment above I thought to myself the same thing, OP needs two different guitars: light weight sub 1000g fast attack Blanca and a bomber brick **** house 1800g Negra!
You only live once so why compromise with one guitar?
HR
_____________________________
I prefer my flamenco guitar spicy,
doesn't have to be fast,
should have some meat on the bones,
can be raw or well done,
as long as it doesn't sound like it's turning green on an elevator floor.
www.instagram.com/threeriversguitars
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Date Mar. 14 2024 19:42:19
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ernandez R
Posts: 742
Joined: Mar. 25 2019
From: Alaska USA
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RE: Cypress Classical - Any Suggestions? (in reply to Ricardo)
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Oy, there is so much effect going on in that Tomatito recording, he could be playing a broomstick, or the horn of a unicorn, and it would have sustain.
I understand what your saying but pick a better example.
A lot a variables, about ten guitars in I started diverging my already bastard child Spanish guitars onto flamenco and classical based on sound bar bracing, top thickness and distribution, lining mass and thickness, and neck string action angles, some high tech materials here and there, and a little bit country, a little bit rock n roll.
My flamenca notes are immediate and and tonally clear, less dynamic and color for sure, round at f18, not so much dry exactly, but hit hard a finger or four from the bone the wound strings growl and the trebles bark like a bitch in heat.
My classicals sing and ring, not like f’n piano, no Spanish guitar should sound like a piano in some uptight sagovian parlor, still the notes bloom and the dynamics mix and match depending on how you glide off the strings and where.
I’m sorry Sensi Faulk, perhaps this is where we part… snatch the pebble from my hand!
Good discussion though, it’s compelling to hear the ideas of players and builders alike, to be made to think or rather rethink ideas we find have become fixed.
HR
_____________________________
I prefer my flamenco guitar spicy,
doesn't have to be fast,
should have some meat on the bones,
can be raw or well done,
as long as it doesn't sound like it's turning green on an elevator floor.
www.instagram.com/threeriversguitars
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Date Mar. 19 2024 3:04:59
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estebanana
Posts: 9353
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Cypress Classical - Any Suggestions? (in reply to Echi)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Echi
quote:
And I still wonder whether the woody and hollow sound of many flamencos is a result of this fast response/low sustain. Can a classical be built with this kind of sound? Because I often hear classicals that sound rather more elegant than woody or hollow. Is this to appeal to classical tastes or an inevitable consequence of longer sustain/more heavily built guitars?
It depends what you mean with “woody”. If you mean woody as the result of a forceful tone production, imho it cannot be, as it’s a kind of produced by the “quick distortion” of the top. That have that you are kind of driving the top to it’s limits , which is in contrast with the slow enduring wave movement required for the sustain.
A Santos kind of guitar has a very thin top and therefore is quick answering to the pluck of the strings, and yet very clear sounding, even more if made with cypress. Santos /Barbero have a less deep box frequence than a Torres/Garcia ecc.
IMHO a different option I suggest to try is a used Ramirez flamenco (given is not of those particularly dry sounding),p otherwise a cypress Granada made guitar (better if before 1979, when they started adding the Bouchet bar).
So a late Santos or a Barbero has a lowerr main air resonance than a Torres which is smaller, but also has a thin top? From the book on Santos, supposedly written in conjunction with people who’ve handled many Santos instruments, the author says Santos was fairly consistent at getting near and F# main air resonance. Why would Torres guitars be lower? And getting lower than F# is weird territory because the chances that some notes will couple with the body resonance and wreak havoc are higher. Was Torres consistently hitting F?
I believe it’s possible to make small guitars with low main air, and I’ve done it myself, but to put out a blanket assessment of Santos and Barbero to hit higher main air than Torres consistently? I would think that because Barbero’s guitars are generally airier ( bigger and thin ) they would hover in the F# region also. I haven’t seen very many abs certainly not tapped on them myself, but received wisdom from older makers who worked on them regularly in the 1960’s report Barbero as having F# ish main air.
This is why I got snotty on Del Camp until they fired me, I got tired of reading post after post about physics and modes made essentially by people who haven’t handled enough of any one makers guitars to make authoritative observations about physics and how air resonance and top modes work. It’s tiresome and annoying and unnecessary to actually make a very good guitar.
Flamenco guitars are not all the same, nor are classical guitars. Both can play classical or flamenco if set up to be optimal for each of those kinds of playing. The problem is that there’s a species of ‘classical’ guitar today that’s being built to de-emphasize the attributes that make flamenco guitars work for rasgueado sound and feel. So these kinds of classical guitars don’t work properly for flamenco, they diverged into a different direction.
If you want a cypress classical, play a bunch of cypress flamenco guitars and figure out which one would work for you you raised the saddle to give a classical action that plays very clean.
You see, because when you raise the saddle height the 2 to 3 mm it will take to put the action in classical zone, this usually changes the feel of the finger attack because raising the saddle changes the tension and changing the tension emphasizes the upper partial series in a different way. It makes the upper partials speak out more, giving the impression of more sustain.
So anyway, keep the conversation dumbed down please lol 😂
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https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Mar. 20 2024 4:03:48
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estebanana
Posts: 9353
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Cypress Classical - Any Suggestions? (in reply to Echi)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Echi
As you know there are different periods with Santos.
Some guitars he made in the shop of Manuel and in the following years are closer to Torres than his later production.
Segovia pushed Santos for better trebles than in the Torres model (it’s not a secret some Torres didn’t excellent here) and Santos followed the path of making the box more rigid.
In my opinion the main differences are in the doming of the top, in slightly thicker plates ( often with asymmetrical bracing) and thicker sides. These things have a great relevance for the main air resonance.
Sure, but nobody or very, very few people in the world have had the opportunity to compare enough Torres’, Garcia’s, Barbero’s, and Santos’ cheek by jowl to be able to say anything authoritative about the main air resonance of the boxes.
All this talk is purely anecdotal.
There is enough variation in contemporary flamenco guitars made with cypress that if someone wanted to make one into a classical guitar, they’d just have to take it to a guitar maker and change the set up. If that doesn’t work for the guitarist then maybe they need someone to make a classical guitar for them in a different format than a typical flamenco guitar.
It’s also possible, and usually the case, that guitarists with more than one guitar have instruments that have different attributes as far as how the note is released and how it decays. Talking about the air in the box is deceptive because even if the range of main air resonance is as far as F to G# the guitar can still have a wide range of ‘release & decay’ attributes.
It’s misleading to guitarists who haven’t figured this out to weight them down with anecdotally loaded preconceptions. Hands on several guitars in a shop in consultation with a good dealer and experienced other guitarist is how to seek what’s good for you.
It pisses me off that this gets turned inside out as an air in the box issue. Hands on with ears engaged is you understand what a particular guitarist needs. And here’s the thing, in the great Santos book, if we take the authors word after looking at many of that makers instruments, he states that despite the evolution through different structural ideas in his building, his air resonance remains fairly constant at F#.
So how do we rely on different structural approaches between Torres and Barbero as a meter of how to watch main air resonance change over time? Answer is we can’t rely upon different structural approaches to predict the evolution through that time period; Santos hit the F# consistently regardless of his structure.
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https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Mar. 21 2024 1:29:30
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Echi
Posts: 1132
Joined: Jan. 11 2013
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RE: Cypress Classical - Any Suggestions? (in reply to elias)
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I agree.
I couldn’t try many Torres or Santos nor make a direct comparison. Very few could.
Yet ,throughout the years, I have gathered infos which I consider solid enough to make the statement above, given I myself am able to build guitars, I know directly luthiers who restored both Torres and Santos and got some good documentations included first hand notes. I mean, there’s enough documentation about this matter to allow us to spot some differences between the average Torres - Santos guitar model.
quote:
even if the range of main air resonance is as far as F to G# the guitar can still have a wide range of ‘release & decay’ attributes.
That’s for sure.
I am the first one considering the matter of box frequence quite misleading. I think this is most the result than the cause of things.
This topic was something raised first by Julian Bream and Miles from Kent guitar classics about the Hauser made in 1940… they just observed that low pitched guitars generally share some characteristics.
The thing here is if you can play a Torres guitar as a flamenco guitar.
My answer is that this is not ideal.
Last week I was at the Roma expo guitar fair, in Italy, and tried a good number of Torres inspired guitars and basically none of them had a good enough separation of the bass strings to allow for a decent rasgueado.
The transient of the note is also slightly sweet and bass oriented for the purpose IMHO.
In my experience, what I define as a late Santos guitar, allow me a certain approximation here, while classical works well for the purpose instead.
quote:
Santos hit the F# consistently regardless of his structure.
Exactly.
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Date Mar. 21 2024 14:24:46
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Ricardo
Posts: 14822
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
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RE: Cypress Classical - Any Suggestions? (in reply to ernandez R)
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quote:
Oy, there is so much effect going on in that Tomatito recording, he could be playing a broomstick, or the horn of a unicorn, and it would have sustain.
I understand what your saying but pick a better example.
Um, I think you are NOT understanding. I chose that example because unlike whatever BS people think about Reyes having magic surprise sustain, is wrong. It probably would be due to compression pulling up the decay level of a note. No Spanish guitar has sustain. An electric guitar has sustain such that you have to learn to kill it via technique. Spanish nylon guitars are the opposite, ALL of them. You have to try to pretend a note sustains if possible, but it really doesn’t. Like a Marimba and other pitched percussion, the decay is super rapid. If bass strings are new sometimes sympathetic vibration gives the impression of sustain but it is fake. Probably Tomatito has dead strings here, but he usually sounds like this vs Vicente that tries to get reverb and compression going on his Reyes so it sounds like it has sustain…it doesn’t.
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CD's and transcriptions available here:
www.ricardomarlow.com
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Date Mar. 21 2024 15:19:17
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Ricardo
Posts: 14822
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
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RE: Cypress Classical - Any Suggestions? (in reply to Echi)
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quote:
The real peculiarity of a Hauser for a classical guitarist is how the note can be extremely expressive and yet fast.
To be honest, what you are talking about is all in the player’s fingers. Yes the subjective “feeling” of a guitar responding matters to the player, but you don’t really hear that outside. The Hauser has a lot of clarity, basically because it has more balance than typical classical guitars that have way way too much bass, and trebles only very high frequency brightness. In other words the mid range gives support to the balance of all the strings. That is what makes a melody seem to come out easy, but compression or something attempts the same so a recording is not going to reveal much unless compression is minimal. But the nice midrange is why for flamenco guys like me that guitar works vs say a Humphrey or that horrible Smallman.
The other thing about Hauser is very high bridge (when the string is high above the soundboard it vibrates more “lively”, but is not fun for right hand flamenco playing), and extra compensation, that gives sweetness to the melody above the bass (basically the notes are freaking flat as hell as you go up high). I have to counter compensate for this which feels weird to me, as I go up high. Like that guajiras high part is fast and I over did on that diminished chord (pulled the string too hard back to nut, making it sharper than I intended).
I know it is “mysterious” to a lot of players and give a sort of fake magic sweetness to the melody above the bass, but now I know what it is (auto tune lol) I don’t think it is a big deal. The last thing maybe affects sound response is that there are two finishes. Or rather, the sides are not finished the same way as the soundboard (unlike practically every guitar I have experienced). The lacquer used is normal on the sides and back, but very very thin on the top.
Also this talk about resonance, which octave are you talking about with F#??? I have never heard a guitar feeding back at that pitch. It is almost always at A3 (220 hz), practically every guitar ever when you push the mic into the soundhole. I have 3 guitars a little bit lower than that, but never lower than G. So G,G#,A are the problems…F# or Bb are on the down slopes. I have actually tuned guitars by singing into the soundhole, and it is that overblown A3 every time.
_____________________________
CD's and transcriptions available here:
www.ricardomarlow.com
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Date Mar. 21 2024 15:40:21
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