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estebanana -> RE: The Advantages of Laminating Guitar Sides (May 31 2014 17:16:10)
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I think the deal with laminated sides is that they help create a stiffer rim in combination with a solid liner. The movement of the top does also move the sides, the laminated sides can act as a stable, less yielding structure for the top to be attached to. The result is less energy is transferred from the top into making the sides vibrate. With a rim not effected or moved by the torsion of the flexing top the it enables the top movement to focus more energy to the bridge.
For the kind of sound you want to get for the 'archetypal flamenco guitar' you want some of the vibration to be absorbed into the ribs and for the ribs to be thin. The effect is a kind of filtering through the rib structure which saps a bit of energy from the top. The result is that dispersion of top energy to other parts of the guitar help make part of the core sound. That idea works in combination with how the top moves a lot in the cross grain direction. The tone generation builders even identify that kind of motion as the cross di-pole mode. It's the amount of stiffness and flexibility in the top between the wings of the bridge and the edges. That is a key area for setting up a "flamenco" sound. ( I call it the Goldilocks area because it can't be too soft of too hard, or too flexible or too stiff, it has t be just right. )
You can still get that "flamenco" sound with laminated ribs, but really, really stiff heavy ribs generally won't allow you to build with as much sensitivity to the rib and top and cross di-pole area. There is a lot to be said for how you couple the top to the ribs and how flexible or stiff they are. Much of that stuff is not quantifiable, a few people write books about and tell you that it is, but you can build a guitar a lot of different ways and still come out with a good instrument.
Daniel Freiderich the great French maker uses laminated ribs, quite thick in fact, in some cases I've read and seen plans with ribs up to 4mm thick! But you don't see many or any flamenco guitars by him. I also like Bogdanovich, he's got a lot of good ideas and he's not as dogmatic as it looks on the surface. I think he just talks from his own experience an as we know, guitar makers have strong opinions. His ideas to me are not answers to anything, because for me they bring up more questions than they answer. And some of the questions may not have answers I can practically find out. One big question I've always had is: Does the rib structure relax over time? We try to fit it as best we can and touch them up on the bending iron, but you know that the cypress (and some other woods) ribs are fighting back after they are glued in place. How long do they fight, weeks, months, years? Do they relax eventually and does that something to the sound?
You can speculate, or you can build five guitars and then disassemble them one by one in timed sequence,week, month three months, six months a year and see if the ribs still have memory of when they were flat. But who would do that? And what would it prove? How can you empirically test to see if relaxation of the rib structure changes the sound?
There are so many things that are unknowable; guitar making theory boils down to a few simple things in the end.
You get anecdotal diagnosis of problems and things that someone thinks works. And you get experience working the same model or a few models of guitar over and over and you learn by trial and error what works. There a few problems that have been worked out empirically by testing, but a great many things remain untestable, liners vs. glue blocks is a good one. There's no real way to test that so what you get is whole bunch of anecdotal information based on observations by different builders.
As good friend of mine likes to say: "Talking about guitar making is like kissing in a whorehouse."
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