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flamenco body styles and bracing-where to start
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Andy Culpepper
Posts: 3023
Joined: Mar. 30 2009
From: NY, USA
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 RE: flamenco body styles and bracing... (in reply to darylcrisp)
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I like to think of the guitar as an air pump.
The wood doesn't make the sound. Vibrating air does. Just like in a flute, a drum, or a stringles. The sound of the guitar depends on the way it pushes and pulls air, some of which radiates directly off the top, and some of which is excited inside the guitar chamber. The bracing pattern affects how the top moves and and pushes air, but so does the thickness of the top, the weight/stiffness of the bridge, the way the back couples with the top, and other factors.
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Andy Culpepper, luthier
http://www.andyculpepper.com
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Date Jun. 25 2011 23:35:31
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: flamenco body styles and bracing... (in reply to darylcrisp)
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quote:
A guitar body is a means of radiating the string vibrations by providing an increased surface area rather than by creating a vibrating air column.
I agree. Lots of people make the basic mistake of conceptualizing the guitar, or any string instrument for that matter, as a box with strings on it. It's diametrically opposed to that concept. It's first a string, then a string with a box attached it it.
I'm no scientist, but if you really get into it you may find the air movement is about supporting the fundamental, and or driven by the the fundamentals and the thing that supports the fundamental and gives it complexity and richness are overtones. Overtones don't "pump" air.
It's the sonic details that count, not the tormentita. However I could be full of hot air, which for a luthier is not an uncommon state of being.
When you hear a house being built and you are ten feet from the guy swinging a hammer you feel the impact of the hammer to the nail head in a visceral way. You can palpably feel air moving, vibration moving through you, yet you are not experiencing the whole envelope of sound that the hammer makes. You get the "windy" part of the blow and the fundamental aspect of the sound.
If you walk a block away from the building site and listen again you hear the core sound of the nail being driven, you hear the "ping" of the overtones, the high partials of the envelope of sound. The blow and vibration and air movement has decayed and dropped out of the sound at one block away, but the sound of the nail being driven is somehow still very potent. And this is a very important and beautiful thing to understand. As the nail gets shorter the partials it produces change! The correlation to this action on the guitar is when fretting higher on the fret board you shortening the vibrating string length. What happens when you play higher notes? You move less air than when you play low bass notes. then why to upper partials carry so far through the environment? It's not because they are driven by moving air produced by the guitar.
This is what good guitars are about. Having and hearing near and far at the same time. You get some air pumping and you get airy basses and that wooly "chest" sound, but you also get the clarity of the block distant framing nail being driven with that "pinging" sound squeezing up between the fuzzy scratchy chest sounds.
That clarity from overtone support is not about how much air is being moved, but how effortlessly it's being moved. Some guitars don't have a lot of that support which makes them lackluster and one dimensional. Other guitars have too much upper partial activity and they are strange, tight and unpleasant, but often project like mad. ( And when they do project they can be quite pleasant far out front. )
So the deal is to make the guitar that agrees with itself and speaks easily under the hands. It has near and far at the same time, not always in perfect balance, but that is what makes them super interesting and personal. One of the things I think about when guitar making is how to produce that "near and far" envelope of sound re: the carpenter and framing nail blow metaphor/comparison.
I advocate learning to listen through "surface" sound and hear the core sounds and see if the complexity and beauty come out because the guitar surprises you with how it peppers the sound with a back and forth of airy/wooly chest sound and "pinging" upper partial sounds. I also ascribe that wooly chest sound as one of the things that gives flamenco guitars the dry husky voice. Flamencos seem to err on the side of being more airy and furry sounding, but good ones almost always have the underlying presence of blooming overtones.
Does that all sound like a load of bull? It should, but much of it is fundamentally true. 
The problem with guitar making vis a vis this air moving question is that nobody wants to address the 900 pound soprano in the room. How does she project that high pitched melody line to the back of the house and keep it crystal clear and audible? Yet it's not fuzzy and difficult to hear, but rounded and full of warmth? Could it be something about her skull ? Or is it her lungs? A great soprano once told me that the lines in the Queen of the Night aria of Mozart can be sung with minimal taking of breaths if you do it right. She said done well, it's effortless. Maybe it's true and maybe it's not, but it's a neat thing to contemplate. She sang at La Scala in her youth so I tend to side with her opinions. 
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https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Jun. 26 2011 0:51:32
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Maybe "pump" isn't exactly the right word but "air mover" doesn't quite sound right either. My basic point remains that the top bracing is one factor in sound production and the placement of braces does not have as linear or profound an effect as some people think. 