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.
Ok I’m making a guitar that looks like a Vicente Arias on the outside, specifically the 1910 Arias at at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. And on the inside it has Manuel de la Chica bracing. So kill me for making a Spanish Frankenstein monster.
The wood is Japanese Flamed Horse Chestnut and it’s more rare that a brain cell from Donald Trump.
Images are resized automatically to a maximum width of 800px
RE: Arias in spirit, constructed by ... (in reply to estebanana)
The evidence, and I dutifully accept a few demerits for adding a bit of wood to the tongue of the heel.
Also, halibut fishing from shore is a thing from March to April and I’m sure I’ll score a big fatty this year with my surf casting lure made from slicing up a potato chip bag to make a tinsel skirt.
Images are resized automatically to a maximum width of 800px
RE: Arias in spirit, constructed by ... (in reply to estebanana)
Flamed Horse Chestnut or Tochi no Ki - ( chestnut wood)
It’s lot like English Sycamore in how it feels and bends, it’s like light weight maple. Of course none of this matters because I will put 40 layers of bright traffic cone orange polyurethane on it because Sensei Ricardo wants the world to be orange.
Images are resized automatically to a maximum width of 800px
RE: Arias in spirit, constructed by ... (in reply to estebanana)
I still haven’t caught my halibut, but I have two in the bullpen.
The Arias spirit I’m working on plus a classical order. I’m building three at a time, when the #3 is finished with assembly I’ll do the binding on all three at the same time and move to fingerboard & French polish.
Curious here the Arias, right side, is a 640 scale. The # 2 classical ( spruce top - cherry back and sides) is a 630 scale and the third guitar also a classical order will be a 620 scale.
The days of short scales being the freaky outliers are over.
Images are resized automatically to a maximum width of 800px
RE: Arias in spirit, constructed by ... (in reply to Ricardo)
quote:
ORIGINAL: Ricardo
Nice. Are the two different head designs by request, or just whatever you feel?
One on the right is a copy of a typical Arias headstock, although think he occasionally made a fancier one. The one on the right is my normal personal design.
RE: Arias in spirit, constructed by ... (in reply to estebanana)
quote:
ORIGINAL: estebanana
quote:
ORIGINAL: Ricardo
Nice. Are the two different head designs by request, or just whatever you feel?
One on the right is a copy of a typical Arias headstock, although think he occasionally made a fancier one. The one on the right is my normal personal design.
That left me puzzled :-).
_____________________________
The smaller the object of your focus the bigger the result.
RE: Arias in spirit, constructed by ... (in reply to estebanana)
I put this guitar away for a month while I advanced other commissions, but back on it and trying to finish in May.
I’m trying to get a binding ‘bee sting’ into the heel like the ones I’ve been studying in photos of Arias guitars.
The look I’m going for is a steep angle that doesn’t intrude into the heel cap too much, really just the miter at the end of the binding inserts into the heel. But it’s the details that make credible models after a specific luthier.
Images are resized automatically to a maximum width of 800px
RE: Arias in spirit, constructed by ... (in reply to estebanana)
This seems to work, but I have to rethink the way the heel cap looks. I remember seeing an Arias photo with a heel cap of a taller egg shape like mine, but the photo I’m studying for the way the binding sting fits shows a round heel cap that looks like a violin button shape. Luthier talk.
Anyone have spare 120 year old Vicente Arias they can loan me for a couple months?
I’d gladly pay for any Luthieral Medium who could come hold a seance so I could speak directly with old Vicente himself about this.
Images are resized automatically to a maximum width of 800px
RE: Arias in spirit, constructed by ... (in reply to estebanana)
This is interesting to me, the work is clean and when I final scape it will be crisp and sharp. But there is an illusion that the button, heel cap whatever you want to call it, is asymmetrical. I measured it with my caliper, each side of the button is exactly 7mm from the outer edge of the center strip. The flame pattern is causing the illusion.
This is why guitar making is weird, you live in every square inch of the guitar while you build it. You look at every part in millimetric focus.
Images are resized automatically to a maximum width of 800px
RE: Arias in spirit, constructed by ... (in reply to estebanana)
I finally was able to get the coffee table book. Fantastic photos of the rosettes, but the text reads like an interview, opinions of various makers who I don’t think are so hot as historians.
Here I wished they had gone for a single author monograph with quotes from ten or twenty luthiers who’ve thoughtfully considered Arias’ work. But ok, the price of the book is worth the photos.
Images are resized automatically to a maximum width of 800px
Posts: 15745
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: Arias in spirit, constructed by ... (in reply to estebanana)
Any flamenco guitars and guitarists featured in that Arias book? The Santos book was very equally divided in that regard. The "Guitarreros" series leans more to flamenco examples.
RE: Arias in spirit, constructed by ... (in reply to Ricardo)
quote:
ORIGINAL: Ricardo
Any flamenco guitars and guitarists featured in that Arias book? The Santos book was very equally divided in that regard. The "Guitarreros" series leans more to flamenco examples.
The fellows doing the discussion aren’t flamenco dudes. The photos are beautifully done, you can really study surfaces and inlay and such work up close. Some excellent shots of the interiors. Great book overall, has good outline of the time frame for the work, some comparative comments about Torres and Arias that are helpful. But not much about flamenco.
I’ve not carefully read it cover to cover yet. But definitely worth the price of admission and shipping. I’m not as big of a Torres fan as I am of Arias, Santos, Hauser and de la Chica so this book fills is gaps in my education. Hope we get more on this maker. There’s a nice blurb from Canadian guitarist David Jacques and his Arias. I asked him about it through email several years ago and he gave me some information. He has a Torres and an Arias and seem to say as I interpret it that the Arias is more flamenco.,
Posts: 15745
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: Arias in spirit, constructed by ... (in reply to estebanana)
Let us know after you have gone through the book if there are any flamenco examples. I know Manuel Ramirez is credited for making the strong distinction between the two that we still see today, and his brother had the "Tablao" guitar which was a little different than a proper flamenco, but considering his dates (D. 1912, so generation before M. Ramirez), the statement in the Cleveland book was that he he made "many flamenco guitars, often in maple", so I was curious how they compare to the earliest M. Ramirez examples.
RE: Arias in spirit, constructed by ... (in reply to Ricardo)
quote:
ORIGINAL: Ricardo
Let us know after you have gone through the book if there are any flamenco examples. I know Manuel Ramirez is credited for making the strong distinction between the two that we still see today, and his brother had the "Tablao" guitar which was a little different than a proper flamenco, but considering his dates (D. 1912, so generation before M. Ramirez), the statement in the Cleveland book was that he he made "many flamenco guitars, often in maple", so I was curious how they compare to the earliest M. Ramirez examples.
Yeah, aside from John Ray’s page I won’t read this book. I seriously dislike the layout and formal structure of the way the information is presented. It’s a coffee table book and not a serious work of historical scholarship. Too bad it went that way, it’s like a fold out tourist map of some Spanish city. If they had just had each contributor write a ten page essay with their take on Arias based on each contributor cornering an aspect of his work it would be readable, but as is you have to collate the information as if it was a panel discussion and you’re in the audience, but you can’t ask questions.
So little is apparently known about Arias’ life that they padded the book out with ridiculous and annoying asides about to the history of tobacco and electricity in Spain, but completely missed the obvious part of social and infrastructural history about when Spain was metricated ( metric system adopted). The transition to metric system and its effect or timeline on the phase out of inches on the trades, including guitar making, would have been more useful. The European bias towards metrication has always bothered me in that they don’t really want to acknowledge the guitar was not designed using the metric system, but in today’s design and documentation practice they draw scale plans of guitar using the metric system. At some point a scholar in Spain with access to the town records and research libraries there would do well to publish a work on guitar design based on the measurement systems used during Torres’ and Arias’ lifetime.
Other than that the photos are very satisfying and revealing in particular about how his rosettes look. Which is the part I’m most interested in. The text is just various subjective opinions that are to be taken as just that.
As far as the basic outline of where Arias fits into the flamenco guitar matrix, it looks like you can group it roughly into Francisco Martinez/ Arias / Jose Ramirez as a group that culminates in the Tablao guitar ( the ‘Egg’) that didn’t evolve past Jose Ramirez’ passing, And the other basic lineage that goes Torres/Manuel Ramirez/ Santos and Domingo Esteso.
That’s just crude outline leaving out Granada and other places and makers, but traces the flamenco guitar through the crucial passage through Manuel Ramirez. As far as I can see Arias was probably in that camp where there wasn’t a distinct difference between flamenco guitars and ‘classical’ guitars, but there were three sorts of things he did. He made some eccentric guitars with extended ranges and double backs, things we’d consider esoteric, but at the time probably were used to play a variety of popular music. Then he has some very serious ‘senorito guitars’ which are highly decorated and meticulously poetic. And then a bunch of guitars that are artistic, but probably meant as working guitars and among those some Cypress guitars that are flamenco worthy.
I think, or in an Occams Razor gambit, would say the body of his work today is represented mainly by the meticulously poetic senorito guitars, serious instruments, but with inlay flourishes that are not like the Torres stuff. These have survived better than other guitars because they are also recognizable as rare art objects. Who knows how many workhorse guitars Arias made that were lost to time and relegated to hang in the storage room or bar wall until they self delapidated into low value guitar hulks that were tossed out by the bar owners wife after he died.
Posts: 15745
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: Arias in spirit, constructed by ... (in reply to estebanana)
quote:
Francisco Martinez
Gonzales you mean, but yes I get it...those examples should look similar I guess, but that is the detail I was hoping to see. I was just intrigued by this other statement (he made MANY flamenco guitars and I have yet to see ONE). You are not selling me on this book though, so I guess I will pass.
RE: Arias in spirit, constructed by ... (in reply to Ricardo)
quote:
ORIGINAL: Ricardo
quote:
Francisco Martinez
Gonzales you mean, but yes I get it...those examples should look similar I guess, but that is the detail I was hoping to see. I was just intrigued by this other statement (he made MANY flamenco guitars and I have yet to see ONE). You are not selling me on this book though, so I guess I will pass.
The photos are worth the price of admission, they are documents well done. But this is not a reference book in the way the Romannillos Life of Torres book is. It’s lacking in forensic lists of detail about dimensions ect. As a book to take in Arias’ aesthetic it’s great. It’s a book a guitar dealer should have in the sales room to get buyers all horny to wip out cash. It gets you excited about guitars from that time frame. I’m not seeing the connection to flamenco through this book, but I think that’s a reflection of the main contributors, who wouldn’t know a flamenco guitar from a Tesla truck. 🛻
It’s a bit frustrating, the guitar world hasn’t caught up to The Strad magazine that in the 1980’s was producing full size posters of an important instrument every month. The Hauser package with plan sheets, poster, CD and booklet put out by Brune’ over twenty years ago is more useful to makers. Or the Stewart Pollens book that was exclusively about Stradivari’s patterns 😆 a whole book dedicated just to patters for his instruments. I read that cover to thrice.
Still, for the photo documentation I’d buy more books from the publisher.
RE: Arias in spirit, constructed by ... (in reply to estebanana)
Can anyone indicate a standard sized (for its era) Spanish guitar made between 1870 and 1943 which is, in the judgment of a competent flamenco player who is also an honest witness, not suitable for playing flamenco due to its design?
RE: Arias in spirit, constructed by ... (in reply to estebanana)
I can't wait to see that wood pop. Nice job mate. Arias has done some nice rosettes. I thought about your Halibut then one thing led to another and the next thing I'm contemplating how to design a fish scale rosette. I wonder if Arias ever did one?
Printable Version
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