estebanana -> RE: Blanca vs Negra - is only the wood different? Or are there other differences? (Apr. 2 2023 5:29:24)
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Another reason certain guitar making questions are difficult to answer is that there are not any good simple answers. To those who don’t make guitars, but study them carefully there are a lot of traditionally or commonly held assumptions that folks arrive at. The problem is once you have built for several years or a couple decades the answers can become even more elusive. If you read the books that are written to address the engineering behind the guitar it will provide you with some sort of acoustic talking points about body air resonance information and other mathy kinds of statistics, but for flamenco guitars in particular, it’s not easy to figure out why the string tension and bridge /top/ wood combination works. There is a lot of non verbal intelligence that instrument makers develop and many top makers have said to me personally that it’s not a requirement to be able to articulate this intelligence verbally. Among them them who said this were Ervin Somogyi, Gene Clark and several others who are still around who’d probably not want to be quoted. So if someone says answering that question is like “-asking a painter how they paint the sky” then it might be that exact thing. How does a guitar player impart ‘aire’ into accompaniment? That’s a very hard question to give a definitive answer to because the seasoned guitarist has a backlog of musical non verbal information in their mind. They have a way of creating aire that might be difficult to explain, if they even understand how they themselves do it. Guitar making is a bit different because it moves slowly and has reference points to woods and dimensional information along with weights and measures, but this stuff is only a map at best and it guides the maker on the journey. You follow a map and you do your best to navigate the actual terrain. The process of building is the terrain, the map is made up of all the dimensions and shapes. It’s like sheet music, it’s up to the musician to make it come alive. Some guitar makers can build well and talk well, some can build well and understand there is stuff that’s strange to talk about because it’s difficult to verbalize without making treacherous generalizations. Then there are those that take advantage of this mystery to perpetuate their own self styled bullsh&t. It’s better to be honest and talk about what’s real instead of make up crap that sounds awesome, but is not being realistic. I guess I’m trying to say just because someone has answers for these questions doesn’t mean another guitar maker doesn’t understand it, but recognizes it’s a can of worms to open up. You learn which battles to fight because certain topics are brain drains and it’s possible the public at large doesn’t need to know the difference between how one maker sees the difference between Blanca’s and Negra’s from the terrain view. Maybe just play a lot of them and decide which ones work for you. And if anyone goes into a side sub chat about mangoes, maybe that’s to buy time to write a splendid answer to a mind bending question…lol. Marduk got a great negra because he listened to me going in about mangos. I didn’t ask him to explain his relationship with kangaroos, but had he wanted to tell me I’d have been game.
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