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estebanana -> RE: I changed my model after my taste changed (Feb. 3 2025 21:14:52)
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ORIGINAL: Fawkes
That's just it: he's basically building Spanish guitars like back when they were just that, not artifacts of the Atomic Segovia Schism and the resulting mutations and separate evolution.
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ORIGINAL: Stu
classical? jeez you couldve fooled me. basses really growl. maybe just the recording and my sketchy speakers but sounds realy flamenco to me. good work either way and beautiful. thanks for sharing
I’m building guitars that are descendants mainly of Santos with a little Hauser. But just basic top down on a solera with thin top, thin back and sides, nothing fancy. I try by make them lightweight, but still balanced enough to play without a troublesome heavy neck. Then I make the whole thing a little risky with care thinning overall and more careful thinning of the top. My guitars at this point are not exactly eggshells, they are structurally sound and fairly thin. To me that’s important. I don’t like very much of what happened in guitar making after the Ramirez/Fleta/Friederich ways of using a lot of bracing and wood under the top. I like the guitars of those makers, they diverge too far from the Torres /Santos concept and I’m uncomfortable chasing after those designs, it’s not my path. The more I do this, the more I feel like I don’t have time to learn to build say a Friederich model, there is so much wood under the top I fear the first ones wouldn’t be any good.
The ideas of the Australian school, I’m not interested in at all and never have been, and never will be. I also loathe D-sized steel strings too. Get that D-45 outta my face. I believe in pumpkin pie with real whipped cream, no California rolls when eating sushi, I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, that the pyramids were not built by aliens and that 00-18 style Martins are superior to SUV’s.
If I lowered the action on this guitar to 2 mm on the treble and 2.8 on the bass it would be a great flamenco guitar. But it’s set up at 3.8 bass and 3 mm treble ( with saddle room to go up or down) because that’s what the buyer likes. He has a clean neat technique and was trained as a straight ahead classical player. If this guitar sounds growly it’s because that’s my regular guitar tone, I naturally make that sound, I have to work hard to get what’s thought of as classical sound. The new owner doesn’t growl the same way, but he does bring in the metallic timbre as a tone color, there is a lot of metallic tone in the lower midrange on the A and D strings. He was playing some Bach tonight when I handed it off. He was using the upper midrange to get some organ like full soft chords and contrasting it with metallic bass melodies that have really crisp string separation.
The way he plays with tone color is a good match for this guitar and we’re both excited as the instrument can be called on to play rich chords that sound full and there’s beautiful string separation and effortless shifting back and forth between these ideals. It also has healthy projection. It’s fairly clear and loud from 50 feet away. His regular guitar is a 2010 Antonio Marin, he also has a Bouchet copy from a Japanese maker ( I’ll remember his name) and a Humphreys from 2000. My guitar is in good company.
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