Andy Culpepper -> RE: Ervin Somogyi's "Principles of Guitar Dynamics and Design" (May 10 2020 17:42:58)
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I can only speak as a consumer but I wonder if this flexing is connected in any way to one of the things I do when I am checking out a guitar. I gently flex the soundboard under my thumb at the extremities of the bridge. Most of the good guitars I have played display a stiffness that falls within a fairly narrow range. Some of the looser ones I have tried have had booming bass or lack of any quality of sound. The one guitar to buck this trend is a Felipe V Conde A26, appearing to have a thick and stiff top but somehow being rather good despite this. Rob It sounds like you found a good heuristic that works for you. To stretch the map metaphor (maybe a little too thin), let's say that you filled in one important part of the map, like the grass. You ascertained that if there's grass there, it's probably a good place to live and build a house. The fact that there's grass let's you logically infer that it rains there, giving you access to water, and that animals will come to eat the grass, giving you a potential food source. That will work out most of the time. Now the Conde comes along, and you realize there's no grass, because you're on the beach! It's a different kind of territory, and now maybe your food supply is fish, but it's still a perfectly good place to live. As guitar makers, we try to make as detailed maps as we can, or at least up to the point that it serves our purposes of making better guitars. Not just the grass, but the trees, the flora and fauna, the topography, etc, etc. The problem is we're making maps of territories that we will never see in detail, and there are a lot of tiny variables that make a place better or worse to live that are almost impossible to measure, some we don't even fully understand. And the territory changes with every guitar and every new piece of wood!
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