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Comment on the lateral tautness / liminal stiffness with regard to my BlackBird Rider (see below video).
Easy.
In the dark ages preceding El Rumbero and his Blackbird Rider, flamenco guitarists in the dark web were fighting over which of their fragile ticking wooden time bombs has nice Pulsacion and which one does have Pulsacion of a brick.
Then arrived El Rumbero with his Rider and changed flamenco history forever.
The answer was: carbon fiber. A material with almost illegal physics, with consistent mysteriously self-modulating lateral taughtness and liminal stiffness, creating an out of this world Pulsacion, which made luthiers question their entire careers and aficionados their entire guitar collections (and their feelings).
All these centuries, the total lack of organic cellular material and total lack of hand work and manual labor and total lack of feelings, was the simple answer, yet it was El Rumbero who discovered it first.
MUST NOT REPLY… 🤐
Oh **** it, years ago my nickname at the aerospace repair place was CARBONDEZ! Just for kicks I would use dated prepreg CF material to make all kinds of cool ****. Once I made a batch of fancy clipboards with it and nomex honeycomb cores, my supervisors supervisor at the time came up to me to complain about it and I before he got to far I handed him one with his name already on it. Then I laid it in thick how I was exploring the limits of the material…
My last two flamencas and two classicals have a CF cloth bridge plate.
You can think of it as a harmonic stiffener but I just call it a hummer ;)
Don’t have photos of the flamencos handy but here are a few of the classical:
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I prefer my flamenco guitar spicy, doesn't have to be fast, should have some meat on the bones, can be raw or well done, as long as it doesn't sound like it's turning green on an elevator floor.
I prefer my flamenco guitar spicy, doesn't have to be fast, should have some meat on the bones, can be raw or well done, as long as it doesn't sound like it's turning green on an elevator floor.
I prefer my flamenco guitar spicy, doesn't have to be fast, should have some meat on the bones, can be raw or well done, as long as it doesn't sound like it's turning green on an elevator floor.
Credit to Ernandez R for both his carbon fibre and his neck off construction. Although as Arash suggests, these transgressions away from the flamenco guitar 'suum perfectum’ are vellicating the purist feelings in me.
(PS Arash don't actually use this type of English vocabulary, no one will understand you. This is my attempt to amuse Stephen.)
Credit to Ernandez R for both his carbon fibre and his neck off construction. Although as Arash suggests, these transgressions away from the flamenco guitar 'suum perfectum’ are vellicating the purist feelings in me.
(PS Arash don't actually use this type of English vocabulary, no one will understand you. This is my attempt to amuse Stephen.)
E-Hern gets a season pass on purism in my book. He eats Mexican food, he’s an Alaskan bush pilot and he’s been stepped on by a moose. I think he’s had enough trauma. 😂
Yes. I enjoy his creativity. I was mocking my own purist sensibilities.
Nothing wrong with being a Mocker h/t: Ringo
I wish I had another life to build my guitars, I started too late.
The two flamencas with the CF bridge plate were strung up two years ago, one spruce and one cedar, 666mm, both dry, not quite the bass of my previous builds but I was aiming for that as before the bass was a touch too much, I reduced the box volume by pulling in the boughts a few mm and the ribs about 5mm. Both are sub 1kgm, 970-ish if I recall. With pegs they are well balanced.
The cedar one has some magic around the midrange and even the third string has it going on mid fretboard. Almost to much sustain but still dry. I like her.
I had an issue in the go bar deck glueing the sticks on the spruce top, should have shaved them off and started again, got impatient, so be it. I had some gaps and just filled them with glue-full on googan move. A lot of gaps… I’m sure this is the main difference between the two tops, the difference between liking the spruce guitar and loving the cedar.
As for the CF bridge plate, I want to make two more guitars with half the width on my next flamencas, or perhaps the same size but cut out 50% in the middle in a way the plate captures the corners of the bridge on the other size.
I have about ten more sets of the cedar from the same fitch so I might stick with it rather than the spruce. Also note the CF diamonds on the seam aft of the bridge plate, I want to use much smaller units, 15mm diamonds say on 4cm centers: I want even less mass there but perhaps more flexibility.
I might bring the rib width up half of what I took away.
Andy Culpepper posted this on the Delcamp yesterday, I feel it’s relevant I’ll post in in closing as food for thought:
I'll take a small stab at it: the more the closing struts drift up toward the bridge area, the more control they will exert over certain vibrational modes like the cross dipole. The more they stiffen the top cross-grain in more relevant vibrating areas, like near the bridge, that should have the effect of raising the cross dipole resonance. Thinking back to my days of actively using Chladni patterns, I usually noticed that good flamenco guitars generally had lower cross dipole modes than classicals, indicating less cross-grain stiffness near the bridge. So to boil it down: increasing the angle of the closing struts would make the guitar sound LESS flamenco :-P This is of course speaking VERY broadly, and at the end of a very thin limb!
HR
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I prefer my flamenco guitar spicy, doesn't have to be fast, should have some meat on the bones, can be raw or well done, as long as it doesn't sound like it's turning green on an elevator floor.
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