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Richard Jernigan -> Jose Rammirez III Interview (May 23 2020 2:27:47)
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Thanks to echi for cueing me to the January, 1983 issue of Frets magazine. I found a copy on the net. It has a fairly long interview with Jose Ramirez III, which answered a question that lingered in my mind for quite a while.
How much latitude did the individual luthier in the Ramirez workshop have in responding to the inevitably variable qualities of the soundboard materials?
In conversations with Manuel Contreras, Sr. and Felix Manzanero, both emphasized Ramirez's insistence upon strict adherence to his design and specifications.
However, Ramirez himself, also in conversation, frequently referred to his 18 years of making guitars "with my own hands," to gain experience in the "artistic aspects" of guitar building.
The interview was conducted in Spanish, an English translation is in the magazine.
"Do you adjust the stiffness of the braces in some special way to tune or voice them?
No. The braces by themselves do not cause the guitar to have good sound. The height of the sides, the quantity of air withinthe guitar, the diameter of the boca (mouth, soundhole) the length of the strings, the thickness of the woods, the way the fretboard is intonated, all of this and more is included in the whole--all must work together."
So, no tuning of the braces. At least by the '60s many "folk" players "had the braces shaved" on their Martins and Gibsons, maybe it had been going on long before. So the idea of shaving or tuning the braces was familiar to the people at Frets magazine. Tom Blackshear tells me that tuning the braces requires learning and aptitude, and can consume a lot of time on an instrument.
So could a 1960s-80s Ramirez 1a have been produced by a very accurate machine? Not so fast. Much further along in the interview:
"Do you use any machinery?"
We do the major portion of the work by hand, and use machines to do the ordinary work--none of the artistic work. For example, if a soundboard is 5mm thick, and we need it 2mm thick, it is not an artistic task to remove 3mm from the wood. For that we will use a sanding machine. But we only take 2mm off by the machine, and remove the last millimeter by hand, so that we can feel the stiffness of the wood."
I don't think this means that all Ramirez III 1a's had the same top thickness. I think it means that the final thinning of the top relied upon the skill and experience of the luthier to respond to the particular piece of wood before him.
Still, in my experience, there was variability in the output of a single master luthier, and across the master luthier's employed at any given time. Ramirez himself discussed this in person, and implies it in his book.
As Ramon Zalapa said to me in his store in Paracho 60-odd years ago, when I praised the $24 guitar I had picked out to be my first, "Pues, to'as no salen igual."
RNJ
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