I made a Conde-inspired blanca

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Andy Culpepper

Posts: 3025
Joined: Mar. 30 2009
From: NY, USA

I made a Conde-inspired blanca

I recently completed another "experimental" flamenco guitar and wanted to share the results.

This came at the request of Victor who is an active professional musician in the New Jersey area. He is a junkie for good live sound and is always striving to achieve a good, pure, natural sound at his performances which are often in noisy venues, etc. He is very successful with these gigs and attributes a large part of his success to that tireless pursuit of good tone.

Anyway, he reached out to me with a desire to have a guitar that is responsive, but with very controlled bass frequencies so that he doesn't have to put as much effort into EQ to avoid feedback and undesirable boominess. This would make life a lot easier as far as gear, setup, etc.

This represented an interesting puzzle to me, but after thinking about it for a bit, I thought of the modern Conde designs with the big beefy parallel braces going up through the lower harmonic bar. Based on the work of Alan Carruth, I had the heuristic in my mind that adding a lot of long-grain stiffness to the top would tend to limit the bass response, which makes sense as I think of the modern Conde sound being very midrange/treble driven. I think it's compensated by the fact that the 5 fan braces are parallel and wider spaced, giving the bridge and top some breathing room so it's not completely choked off.

Anyway, long story short, I came up with this design that I think worked really, really well.

The trebles on this guitar are phenomenal I think, and it has a good amount of growl without being overly bassy...anyway Victor's review speaks for itself:

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10233583450751208&set=a.2396492954827

And here's a recording he made of it, hopefully these Facebook links work:
https://www.facebook.com/reel/3723659831216234

Images are resized automatically to a maximum width of 800px

_____________________________

Andy Culpepper, luthier
http://www.andyculpepper.com

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date May 17 2024 16:38:43

ernandez R

Posts: 751
Joined: Mar. 25 2019
From: Alaska USA

RE: I made a Conde-inspired blanca (in reply to Andy Culpepper)

Nice.
The ribs look wide but could be the foto.

Where is the box volume compared to your standard flamenco?

Thinned my last two to to lower the volume/bass / holmeltz/ then stiffened up the top plate/ and double penetrating Perralel braces up through the lateral bars, some carbon bits inside the top plate a la secret sauce

Might have taken it too far but I just put the strings in the WRC toped one and stuffed in a box to take to the show. Sitting on the tarmac at Burbank/Hollywood airport now waiting for a gate to park at…

I’m really excited to get some hands on to compare my guitars with others…

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

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date May 17 2024 17:16:44