Richard Jernigan -> RE: Is French Polish more fragile??? (Dec. 19 2011 22:34:15)
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ORIGINAL: estebanana Are you a wide wrist movement pounder or a small circle player? Or a combo of both? How do you feel about marks on your guitars? Differently on your classicals than your flamencos? There aren't any marks at all on my Arcangel, though I've had it for 11 years. The only marks on my '67 Ramirez blanca are from handling and accidentally contacting hard objects. I've had it since it was new. It went to quite a few parties in its youth. The cedar top is pretty soft, the polyurethane lacquer thinned out considerably and got a lot stiffer as it cured over the first several years. That said, the wrist rotates considerably in some rasgueados playing flamenco. Flamenco pulgar is done from a different position than arpegio and picado. My right hand and arm movements aren't as radical as Paco's, but they do move. Playing classical I come fairly close to the "quiet right hand", with arpeggio, pulgar, tirando and apoyando played from the same position--lots of scale practice years ago. Among others, I visited Arturo Huipe in Paracho in December 2006. He had at least a couple dozen unfinished guitars hanging in a humidity controlled room, and a few finished ones. He showed me two cedar/cocobolo classicals with Fleta plantilla and bracing. One was nitrocellulose, the other french polished. They looked exactly the same. The woods, top, back and sides, could have been successive boards from the same logs. Huipe said that as far as he was concerned, the finish was the only difference. I didn't look very carefully at the nitrocellulose guitar, because after playing it for a few minutes, it didn't interest me at all. I ended up buying the french polished guitar. The french polish is fairly thick and glossy, but it is french polish, as I can tell from a little cloudiness on the back after playing it for a couple of hours in the summertime. The cloudiness goes away after the guitar is wiped down and it rests in the case overnight. I think the french polished guitar was a bargain at $1,500. I'd say it's on the borderline between a high end student guitar and a concert guitar. It's very well made, plenty loud, good intonation and setup, no serious dead spots, open right up to the 19th fret, but not as wide a tonal range as my best classicals. The nitrocellulose guitar was a couple hundred bucks less, but definitely not interesting to me. It was not nearly as loud as the french polished one, and generally seemed dead. Maybe too much lacquer--as I said, I didn't look very closely. RNJ
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