Welcome to one of the most active flamenco sites on the Internet. Guests can read most posts but if you want to participate click here to register.
This site is dedicated to the memory of Paco de Lucía, Ron Mitchell, Guy Williams, Linda Elvira, Philip John Lee, Craig Eros, Ben Woods, David Serva and Tom Blackshear who went ahead of us.
We receive 12,200 visitors a month from 200 countries and 1.7 million page impressions a year. To advertise on this site please contact us.
|
|
RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines
|
You are logged in as Guest
|
Users viewing this topic: none
|
|
Login | |
|
Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3431
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
|
RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to estebanana)
|
|
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: estebanana but wow, players will still write checks to baloney if the baloney is well seasoned. :) Then there's the obverse, buying a good guitar from someone who talks baloney to a greater or lesser extent. When Jose Ramirez III learned I was a mathematician/physicist/engineer by trade, he began to regale me with his mathematical theory of guitar design. From what I could make out, it was nothing but pure numerology and superstition. Still, his shop made some of the best guitars of the '60s and '70s. I bought about a dozen of them, brought them to the USA, sold them for less than Jim Sherry did, and still made a profit, accounting for the expense of the trips to Spain. I ended up never keeping one for myself. The '67 blanca was a present from my wife. I just put new strings on it, and really enjoyed playing it for a couple of hours. RNJ
|
|
|
REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Mar. 5 2018 4:15:50
|
|
Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3431
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
|
RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to estebanana)
|
|
|
One of my all time favorite scenes in a movie is in "MacArthur." Truman has called MacArthur to Honolulu to chew him out for insubordination. MacArthur shows up late, chauffeured in a brilliant red Buick convertible. They go into this big hangar to talk. After they sit down at the table MacArthur gets out his corn cob pipe and says, "Mr. President, may I smoke?" Truman replies, "Go right ahead General, I've probably had more smoke blown in my face than any other man on earth." But when I was a kid and heard the story from my Dad and his pals, Truman said, "...blown up my butt..." On the whole, I suspected Jose III of actually believing his theories. I didn't think he was intentionally BSing me, even though what he said was pretty much pure baloney. I haven't played a '60s Ramirez 1a in decades. I wonder what I would think now? I bought a cedar/cocobolo classical guitar from Arturo Huipe in Paracho at the end of 2006. I knew that some of the talk he was pitching me had to be BS, but it didn't bother me that much. There's a good deal of smoke and mirrors in that town. As my old buddy Gary R. said about the Balinese, "The truth is not in them." It was the 2nd best guitar I played that day, and I liked Arturo. He was a nice kid. But I ended up not playing the guitar very much. Last year I gave it to the Austin Classical Guitar Society. They lent it to a high school student, who used it to audition for college. In the silent video that played while the audience trickled in for the recent concert by Adam Del Monte and Mak Grgic, there was a clip of a young woman. In the subtitles she said she had passed her audition for the University of Texas Butler School of Music using a guitar ACGS had lent her, then the Society gave it to her. In the video she was holding the Huipe, so I guess it served a useful purpose. James Greenberg of Zavaleta's Casa de Guitarras sold a few Huipes several years ago. He gave me an appraisal for nearly twice what I paid for mine in 2006, so my income tax charitable deduction made up for about 3/4 of the price. The other guitar I bought in Paracho was a spruce/Brazilian from Abel Garcia, which I ordered the next day, and waited nearly two years for. Garcia and I talked about guitars in general and the one I ordered for more than an hour. I believe every word he said was the gospel truth. I had independent verification for much of it. It's one of the two classicals I play the most. I bought the Arcangel Fernandez blanca from a dealer who was giving off strong indications of going broke. I was living in the Marshall Islands and he wouldn't ship it to me on approval. Cash on the barrelhead, or no deal. I asked Richard Brune if he would appraise it. He said yes, but he had experienced issues with the dealer in the past, so things might or might not go smoothly. The dealer said Brian Cohen, the highly reputable British maker and dealer had gotten the Arcangel is a 3-guitar deal from a collector. I called up Cohen, who verified a fairly similar story. Cohen asked me whether I was satisfied with the dealer's financial condition. I said no, but I was planning to have Brune appraise the guitar. Cohen said he thought that was a good choice. I finally persuaded the dealer to ship the guitar to Brune (I paid). Brune said it was authentic, and in absolutely mint, unplayed condition. The dealer accepted about 5% less than Brune's appraisal. I had Brune pack it and ship it. When I took the guitar out of its case, tuned it up and played an E-major chord, it knocked my socks off. I have loved it ever since. The dealer did go broke fairly soon afterward. Several years later he still hadn't managed to sell the Cohen copy of Torres's ornate masterpiece FE08. I spent 43 years in a very competitive business. I don't have to trust a person I do business with if I can arrange adequate safeguards. When I do trust someone, I employ Ronald Reagan's maxim about dealing with the Soviets, "Trust, but verfify." RNJ (To be clear, I disagreed strongly with Reagan's social and fiscal policies, and I thought the Iran-Contra business was crooked as a snake's back, and conducted with astonishing amateurism, but I respected and admired Reagan's and Secretary of State George Schultz's negotiations with Gorbachev and Schevardnadze, in the face of strong and vocal opposition from Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and CIA Director James Casey, negotiations which eventually contributed to the end of the Soviet Union.) Torres FE08 (or maybe a copy):
Images are resized automatically to a maximum width of 800px
Attachment (1)
|
|
|
REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Mar. 5 2018 6:59:50
|
|
Paul Magnussen
Posts: 1805
Joined: Nov. 8 2010
From: London (living in the Bay Area)
|
RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to estebanana)
|
|
|
quote:
Someone who is consistent is just lucky and has some groove through lots of practice. I was once told (with what truth I don’t know) that in the earlier part of the 20th century, Spanish makers used to place frets by experience, rather than calculating where they should go, and that was why some guitars were off. In the early ’70s, before everyone and his dog had their own computer, I was working as a programmer for IBM. My then teacher, Julian Byzantine, passed on to me a request from José Romanillos, who had had some orders for instruments with unusual scale-lengths. He asked if it would be possible for me to work out the right fret-positions mathematically, which of course I could. So I snuck some time on the mainframe, and produced a listing of all the fret-positions, to two decimal places, for a wide variety of scale-lengths, and passed it on to José via Julian. The last time I saw José, I asked him if he remembered that. He told me he still had the listing.
|
|
|
REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Mar. 5 2018 16:01:41
|
|
RobF
Posts: 1611
Joined: Aug. 24 2017
|
RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to Paul Magnussen)
|
|
|
Considering the age many makers would have been when starting their apprenticeships, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of them never calculated anything ever. I've often wondered if some might have just been given a nice set of dividers as a rite of passage and would then use them as the starting point to set themselves up with the necessary tools for the remaining measures. Really, just use the dividers to make a set of proportional dividers to establish the first fret position using the rule of 18, then use a homemade straight edge, the smaller dividers and pencil to do the rest. I’m just speculating, of course - it’s fun. But there is a display case of some of Esteso’s tools at Felipe Conde’s shop in Madrid containing plantilla templates, neck taper templates, headplate templates, a neck angle jig that made me wonder if he sometimes built top up like Tom does, a drill powered by an old sword, some peghole reamers, and a nice set of dividers. :) Thanks for posting your interview with Gilbert, BTW, it was enjoyable reading :)
|
|
|
REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Mar. 5 2018 19:14:26
|
|
Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3431
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
|
RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to Escribano)
|
|
|
Hey, I'm the real dinosaur here. I took the only programming course the University of Texas (at Austin) offered in 1963. We started out with assembly language on a CDC1604, and went on to FORTRAN. After that I got a contract to do a solo project for the Registrar's Office on an IBM 704. I had to learn COBOL for it. The 704 had drum memory, and was the first mass produced machine with floating point arithmetic. I was working in the Registrar's Office one weekend, sharing the machine with an IBM repair tech. He was getting qualified for the higher paying job as System Programmer. He read his first punched card deck into the machine, looked at the output, and started pulling panels off the machine. I said, "Hey, what's going on?" He pointed to an obvious wrong result on the printout. I told him, " 999 times out of 1,000 the problem is in the code. You don't start taking the machine apart looking for a software bug." It took a while, but I finally convinced him. He was a sharp guy who moved up in the company. After that I worked for the Computation Center, on the procurement of the University's first super-computer, a CDC 6600, and at the Linguistics Research Center on an IBM 7044. The LRC was among the earliest organizations to tackle machine translation of natural language. A friend of ours, a fellow Math grad student, asked my good buddy Dave S. what was the state of the art. Dave responded, "If you had a machine with infinite memory, and which could do everything at once, nobody would know how to program it to translate languages." There's been a good deal of progress on that in the last 50 years, having abandoned attempts to implement Chomsky's generative grammar approach, instead using more or less brute force methods. Some time in the late 1990s a woman I knew at Kwajalein complained that her employer was changing from Apple computers to Windows machines, and it was a pain to learn the new system. She was a mature, intelligent, hard working person, the Boss's Administrative Assistant. I told her that over the years I had learned 11 computer operating systems, all but two of them command line types like VMS and Unix. In that context, Mac and Windows were the same thing....and I was just an engineer, not a computer guy. RNJ
|
|
|
REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Mar. 5 2018 21:41:21
|
|
Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3431
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
|
RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to RobF)
|
|
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: RobF Once again, I agree with Estabananaman. It seems impossible to go anywhere in my city without being aurally assualted at ridiculous volumes by someone else’s idea of what you should be listening to. How about nothing? Lol. The one thing I could not accustom myself to when we went to the Universal Studios amusement park in Orlando was the noise. They probably called it music, but it wasn't. It was noise. Played at high volume over a very low quality but totally pervasive sound system, it came out as unintelligibly distorted garbage. The bump-bump-bump-bump bass beat was the only thing that always came through. Standing in line you would see a few people mindlessly twitching more or less in time to it, seeming to be totally unaware of what they were doing. Complaining to Larisa, I suggested that the proprietors had probably done studies to see which noises most stimulated the desired responses in the mob. But since they had only the bluntest of measurement tools, the lowest expectation of the victims' responses, and the least informed musical taste, they produced only the crudest of noises, in mind numbing monotony. In case you hadn't noticed, I didn't like it. RNJ
|
|
|
REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Mar. 6 2018 2:14:56
|
|
estebanana
Posts: 9367
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
|
RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to estebanana)
|
|
|
Get your eras around his Valse CD which he recorded with many different guitars. His complete recordings of Sor are amazing too. You'll enjoy this comrade, or else! https://www.guitarsalon.com/store/p3655-valseana-by-marc-teicholz-and-gsi.html ______________________________________________________________________________________________ We have a noise filled environment today- it's still quieter here in Japan, the rural areas are still not polluted. You hear the trains thundering on its track right after 7pm and most cars are off the road. But noise and the competition guitar makers give it and the big auditorium phenomena is a non starter for me. Eventually the madness will abate and guitar makers will realize making LOUD guitars is dumb and not needed. First the 'classical' guitar world will have to join the human race and drop its purity for purities sake aesthetic of not using the best tool we have called a microphone. Eventually guitar makers will be able to just make guitars again instead of speaker cones housed in guitar shaped precious wood cabinets. When classical guitarists finally enter the 20th century and take to electricity, hot food, automobiles, super sonic aircraft, deep sea submersibles, computers, cameras, telescopes, electron microscopy, the polio vaccine and a host of other modern ideas and things that developed concurrently with the modern electric microphone, that every other kind of musician uses, we'll be in better shape and won't have to build LOUD for LOUD sake. Opera singers realized that screaming and singing are different activities; after the bel canto singing style had been left behind in order to blow up the voice into a LOUD making machine lot's of singers trashed out their voices. There's been a return to older wisdom in the opera world that bigger is not better, and focus is more important. That discussion is can of worms, because there's a lot of subjectivity on what constitutes good sound and projection, but a direction away from manufacturing big voices has certainly been taken up in recent years as a remedy to the way some singers over cast their voices. I see some correlation in guitar making, but as I said earlier the guitar is not human tissue and it does not have vocal folds or musculature around its larynx and voice producing tissues. So the guitar can be ground into the dirt without any harm coming to the tissue that a human wold recoil from, or would lead to degradation of the voice. Guitars are just things made of wood, but if they were sentient and could talk back I'm pretty sure they would say stop with the aural lie of making us have blown up voices. It hurts. If guitars had nervous systems and larynxes I'm certian they would be saying F-you to half the makers who birth them. Like Saruman breeding orcs.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
|
|
|
REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Mar. 6 2018 3:01:40
|
|
New Messages |
No New Messages |
Hot Topic w/ New Messages |
Hot Topic w/o New Messages |
Locked w/ New Messages |
Locked w/o New Messages |
|
Post New Thread
Reply to Message
Post New Poll
Submit Vote
Delete My Own Post
Delete My Own Thread
Rate Posts
|
|
|
Forum Software powered by ASP Playground Advanced Edition 2.0.5
Copyright © 2000 - 2003 ASPPlayground.NET |
0.078125 secs.
|