The Moth takes a shellacking (Full Version)

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estebanana -> The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 20 2010 15:26:16)

I'm French polishing the guitar with the moth rosette. It's turing out really clean.



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estebanana -> RE: The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 20 2010 15:28:29)

Wow I need to make smaller pictures



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estebanana -> RE: The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 20 2010 15:30:10)

a few more



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estebanana -> RE: The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 20 2010 15:32:06)

It's kind of funny to look at them under the microscope.



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estebanana -> RE: The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 20 2010 15:36:36)

If the pictures are too big for comfort, I'll change them back to attachments.

What do you think? I bound it without purfling just like one of my favorite guitars, which is the Bellido played by Antonio Moya.



jshelton5040 -> RE: The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 20 2010 15:45:03)

quote:

ORIGINAL: estebanana
What do you think? I bound it without purfling just like one of my favorite guitars, which is the Bellido played by Antonio Moya.

Stephen,
I bound my guitars like that for several years and finally went back to using marquetry after multiple complaints. It's a nice looking guitar. Looks like Monterey cypress no?



estebanana -> RE: The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 20 2010 16:30:03)

It's Spanish cypress. I've never done one this plain. It was fun to trash convention! I think it will be a real kickin' players guitar. I want to to keep this one as my own guitar, but shoemakers and all......you know the drill.



el topo -> RE: The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 20 2010 17:15:10)

I'd like to post some pics of my guitars here but can't figure out how. Yours are very good Steven. I can post of the gsi forum and the del camp forum no problem but nothing I try here works except to link to my pics on those other forums. ????



srshea -> RE: The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 21 2010 8:40:42)

I really like how the purfling tapers away at the heel. I don't go in for a lot of fancy business with the aesthetic details on a guitar, and always prefer a simple, clean, bare-bones approach. This sort of small detail is exactly the kind of thing that adds a touch of elegance and shows the craft behind the guitar in an unostentatious way.



Andy Culpepper -> RE: The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 21 2010 9:29:21)

Muy bonita!
But where do the strings go??



Ron.M -> RE: The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 21 2010 10:42:13)

quote:

But where do the strings go??


LOL!

Does anybody remember those weird Electric Guitars that had NO headstock at all?

The fingerboard just finished at the nut.

How did you tune those things?[:-]

Maybe someone could come up with a Flamenco guitar on the same idea to challenge the "nuevo" Andelusion headstock? [:D]

Would certainly LOOK pretty stunning!


EDIT: You could probably do it by anchoring the string at the nut end and then the string goes over the saddle and in through a hole in the tie-block and back up onto a screw winder operated by an allen key...(?)[:-]

Make it a cutaway with inbuilt pickup and custom electronics and you'd sell a million!

(Each one sold with a Marlboro stuck between the strings and the body to prove the Flamenco authenticity...like the bug in the Tequilla!)


Edit: Found it!

http://www.gibson.com/products/steinberger.html
cheers,

Ron



estebanana -> RE: The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 21 2010 10:56:48)

quote:

But where do the strings go??


You must be on your way to becoming a guitar maker because only guitar makers have that kind of sarcasm for other builders.

There is an archtop builder named Bill Moll who is funny as hell who used to be on the disc forums. I asked him how he made his laminated top archtops. He said "I have a Lazyboy chair and I throw the pieces into the seat and park my butt on top it for a few hours."

I aspire to be that guy.



estebanana -> RE: The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 21 2010 11:21:06)

quote:

I really like how the purfling tapers away at the heel. I don't go in for a lot of fancy business with the aesthetic details on a guitar, and always prefer a simple, clean, bare-bones approach. This sort of small detail is exactly the kind of thing that adds a touch of elegance and shows the craft behind the guitar in an unostentatious way.




Thank you. That detail is straight up old style Ramizez, Barbero etc. It makes a lot of sense. There are Torres and other early guitars which have that same binding termination, but the ends are just squared off! No taper. I want to do that once too sometime.

When I make a guitar and someone asks for something specific I'll try to accomodate them with the appointments they desire, but given my druthers I'll go as reductive as possible to please myself. As a collaboration between builder an client I think a compromise is best. If you're a builder, at least I feel this way, it's nice if the customer grants you some creative design leeway instead of demanding everything be dialed in as if they read it off a menu of priced options. That way of working or marketing never appealed to me. There's a fellow who may commission a guitar and he and I are bouncing around the idea of text in the rosette. An interesting challenge but it could be stunning. That's clearly a one off unique thing which interests me much more than standard menu options.

Making them super reductive is fun too. The way the heel is carved, is more important to me than variations in purfling complexity. You can go to any classical guitar shop and look at a wall of guitars and see from a distance the ones that have beautiful distinctive heels. They stand out. Then if you move in closer a look at the ones with not so elegant heels they may have more purfling or other detail work, but if it's superimposed onto a guitar with a clumsy heel or some other basic design wonkyness to me it's disappointing.

This particular guitar is influenced by my opportunity to handle Moya's Bellido. That Bellido was a real turning point for me. That guitar is very simple yet refined, straight forward. It gave me the permission, if you will, to be simple.

That's the a story behind this one. We'll see how it sounds in a few days.



srshea -> RE: The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 21 2010 11:46:41)

quote:


But where do the strings go??


I just figured that it's a prototype controller for a flamenco version of Guitar Hero.....



srshea -> RE: The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 21 2010 11:54:47)

I've looked at the pics on your site and the facebook page a few times, and it seems like you have a lot of variation in the design details of your guitars, quite a bit more than most builders. You even have a number of starkly different headstocks. This set me to wondering how much of this variation stems from the client/builder collaboration, and how much comes from your own desire for experimentation and continually trying things out. Though I realize that the pics you have posted might not be wholly representative of your output, and that you might have made many more guitars with a more standardized signature look......



estebanana -> RE: The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 21 2010 12:18:03)

I've not set a head stock design in stone. I've used the Santos headstock as my default headstock. Call it fear of commitment:) I have been a bit wild about headstocks.

I did create a headstock design which a put on two of three guitars and then I decided not to use it. I'm working on another one now which will be my own original design. For the seven string guitar I felt the extra tuner and the asymmetry called for a design with no ornamentation.

I figure if you are going to use another design it may as well be derived from Santos or Barbero. Gene Clark's headstock have always been a variation on Barbero's design. With that in mind I decided to err on the side of tradition rather than feel my own design sense was not developed enough yet to make an original headstock that I felt might be uppity.

There are two ways of looking at using a headstock design derived from a master. One is to say that the person does not have enough originality to design their own. The other is to say they have reverence for who came before them and understand their place in history.

To copy Bellido or Barba seems somehow wrong to me, but to copy Santos or Barbero
seems permissible on the grounds that they are the most important historical builders and it pays homage to their place in history. If you look at it in the context of the greater instrument making traditions, it would be rather crude and egotistical to try to reinvent the violin scroll. So it stands to reason if you accept Santos and Barbero as the Strad and Guarneri of flamenco guitar.........well you see what I mean?

Only thing is you can't do it forever....or can you?



srshea -> RE: The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 21 2010 12:36:04)

Thanks for the detailed explication on all this business, Stephen. Interesting stuff!



estebanana -> RE: The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 21 2010 13:59:59)

I thought I should add one more thing to what may seem to some a picky and tedious subject.

I also got into guitar making , building flamencos specifically, with it in mind that flamenco building is a part of Spanish culture. Perhaps I'm being over reverential, but I thought this is their culture so I'm going to try to learning it their way before I try to change it. My criticism of many American builders has pissed a lot of people off. That is that Americans try to reinvent things in their own image often before they understand what it is that are trying to make better.

When I was in college I spent some time in the South Pacific doing archeology one of the things I saw was religious organizations coming in to try to make peoples lives better. Through the practice of archeology that respected the belief systems of the descendants of the the burial sites we were investigating and watching the religious organizations do what I and others considered cultural intrusions, I became at a young age sensitive to cultural imperialism in many forms. When it came to guitar making it seemed natural to copy or work "in the style of" until I figured things out.

So my selection of certain Spanish guitar makers as models has been a personal choice based on my experiences in contact with other cultures. I realize this is a super punk ass pretentious point of view and I am ready to receive a barrage of rotten tomatillos thrown at my head.



Andy Culpepper -> RE: The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 21 2010 14:27:13)

quote:

Does anybody remember those weird Electric Guitars that had NO headstock at all?

The fingerboard just finished at the nut.

How did you tune those things?


I had a "headless" Steinberger bass for a while. They're actually nice instruments and pretty collectable now. If I remember right the tuners are little wheels behind the bridge area.

Stephen, I've noticed a little bit of similarity in humor between guitarmakers and regular carpenters (which I was for about 4 years) Just a little though..

I agree with you that flamenco and classical guitars are part of Spanish culture, and thus we should look to the Spanish masters for inspiration just like we do in guitar playing. But in the aesthetics of a guitar I also think it's cool to take inspiration from the same things that THEY might have been inspired by and creating your own thing based on that. For example some moorish style architecture for the headstock or a Spanish tile design for a rosette, etc.



estebanana -> RE: The Moth takes a shellacking (Mar. 21 2010 15:25:14)

Are you saying that guitar makers are irregular carpenters? How dare you!

I actually worked as a carpenter for quite sometime. I still do now and then, but I really don't like it at this point.

I always wonder whether or not the Moorish thing as influence in guitar making is a cultural construction based on what guitar makers thought would have appealed to their audience rather than a straight up appreciation of Arab design influence.

Much like the Tut mania in the 1920's art deco design happened I suspect there's a bit of calculation there to use motifs to please the public. It's a strange argument, but one day it dawned on me that for a lot or reasons I'd rather not go into, Spain is not the most pro Arab country when you look at it in its historical connection to the Catholic Church. So I thought maybe the guitar makers just cooked up this Arab connection because it was "exotic" and tried to sell it. Then it became an expected part of guitar design.

Or maybe I just read Edward Said's "Orientalism" one too many times. :)



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