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I have seen one with alternating blanca and negra strips here in Washington, DC. My own opinion, with no evidence other than a certain intuition, is that such guitars are made with no concern for sound at all. I think they are just made as curiosities and conversation pieces.
Cheers,
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
The top is what is important for sound. (Please don't make me discuss torres paper mache guitar). I have played a couple guitars called "cebra" like zebra striped. They just sound like normal negras usually, and weigh like a negra.
Is it appearance or is it really tone and does it affect sustain? I for one prefer very little sustain.
All things equal (and I mean ALL things, make model quality set up strings etc), the negra tends to be bassier, which gives the impression of more sustain and volume. In your room acoustically. Blancas appear to have more mid range so you can drive em harder so it feels like you have more dynamic range.
Once you mic it up and eq, there is not much difference. You can make a blanca sound warm and bassy, or thin out a negra as you want with eq. Hard to tell which is which in a blind test w/out some pre info or a video.
Posts: 3460
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
RE: Blanca/Negra Hybrid????? (in reply to Ricardo)
Back to my original post on this topic, I don't think "zebra" guitars are built with sound in mind at all. (I agree with Ricardo here.) I think they are just built as novelties and conversation pieces.
Cheers,
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
Posts: 3433
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
RE: Blanca/Negra Hybrid????? (in reply to Ricardo)
I think it's really hard to generalize about the sound of cypress, maple, rosewood, etc. for back and sides. As it turns out, all the cypress blancas I have ever played or owned happened to be flamencas, all the rosewood guitars I have owned have been classicals. The good blancas had flamenco qualities.
But people have made excellent classicals with cypress back and sides. I heard that at his class last year Romanillos was showing a cypress classical he had made. People said it was an outstanding classical, and that Jose was quite pleased with it.
Depends on the maker. I tend to prefer blancas but I have played some great guitars for flamenco of all kinds of wood. Robert Ruck gave a guitar to Gerardo that was fantastic, a negra. Gerardo prefered the blanca robert built and traded for it the following year. I really prefered the negra myself.
Blancas are, in my experience, much easier to deal with when miking and equalizing live. My negra sounds best of all my guitars, in my room here, but live it is a pain because of all the rich overtones and stuff. The best guitar w/ mic is my sobrinos de esteso 1973, very midrange, very little bass, not super bright or loud, very little sustain etc.
I have a maple sanchis which happens to be fantastic. It has a lot of bass, I dont' consider it a "blanca" even though it looks like one. It is very dry and mics up very well, but I have to cut all the bass. I don't care for the trebles as much as the condes and such, but it was a cheaper guitar of course! I played a Conde Maple and it did not have a rich sound like my Sanchis, or conde negra, yet was not so percussive like my blancas. So the make sure makes more difference then the type of wood.
That is why to give an opinion of what makes it a difference I need ALL things considered equal.
The reason those cebra guitars are built is because the maker usually runs out of enough usable material of a certain wood (such as Brazilian rosewood) but doesn't want to let what he has go to waste. So blending them makes for an interesting aesthetic appearance, but in terms of sound it doesn't necessarily blend the good characteristics of both woods.
"Zebra" guitars are so guitar makers can use strips of wood that are to narrow to make a two or three pieced back guitar. If they had two piece back of gorgeous wood they would not saw it up to make a pieced back.
There's no inherent advantage to mixing the woods, they usually take on the density and qualities of the heavier wood being used, as other have observed. It also effects the flexibility of the back because many back joint strips may be used to assure the back joins are stable. They tend to be heavier overall.
This is also a very old idea going back to the days when guitars were first being conceived of in the Renaissance and Baroque eras. More often than not multi pieced backs were constructed for beauty and to utilize smaller dimension wood stocks. However the two piece back has been around just as long as you can see in the two extant Stradivari guitars.
That said I think if tastefully and carefully done they can be stunning and make fine guitars. If you look at it in the light of history and not as a current sensationalized type of construction it can be very beautiful and traditional. I, and every other guitar builder who's been saving for several years, have lots of gorgeous woods that I could make a pieced back from and the guitar would sound great. The corny thing is when the opposing light and dark woods start looking like circus zebras, but imagine tapered ebony strips setting off highly flamed maple or rosewood strips with sap wood streaks separated by golden Yew of Cypress. Now that's elegant. Nothing wrong with beauty.
I remember guitar history geeks mentioning that Torres wasn´t really meaning that B&S weren´t relevant, despite his paper maché demo. Everyone agrees on the relevance of the soundboard, but I assume the bearing of the top ( corpus with neck et al ) to an extent be contributing to how the soundboard will perform. -
Years ago, folks in the audio recording community discovered that the common microphone suspense ( with rubber strings ) mustn´t be the optimal construction. Then, a manufacturer released rigid mic holders of solid metal and users made comparisons, raving about results with the rigid specimens. As long as there be no rumble from the floor to deal with, the new holders seemed to outperform the old suspense, and appeared to sell pretty well in the end, despite the rediculous prices inquired.
The reason, as I fancy, could be that the more rigid the "shell" ( corpus ) the more immediately a membrane might respond. In the seventies a similar principle was utilized for speaker construction too. ( With today, I believe, there being attempts to replace mass through rigid housing construction.)
IOW, conversly: The more responsive the shell the more retroactive and either building-up or cancelling / dampening effect of certain frequencies there will be on the membrane.
All in all I suppose a retension feedback to capsule / membrane / soundboard to be happening. In sight of guitars my impression is that encreased mass and desnsity will result in lag of sound emission, hence bottling up; consequently deeper / velvet timbre. ( Also I recall luthiers´ explanations as another example, according to which diameter of the soundboard specially in the area around the fretboards end will influence sweetness / sharpness of trebles.)
Analog, my impression of rosewood B&S is that it will mean rather substantial ( deeply rooted ) tone, hence sweet highs and mellow basses. Whereas blancas will rather be typical for a less complex soundfield, ergo immediate / faster and dry release with less prominent overtones.
Which is why I personally deem blancas as in general best suited for flamenco. Notwithstanding the question whether because of practical characteristics like percussiveness ( as I think ), or just because of us being used to a traditional sound of a poor man´s genre that used to be widely stuffed with cheaper makes of cypress ( as some conclude ).
Posts: 14861
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: Blanca/Negra Hybrid????? (in reply to estebanana)
quote:
The corny thing is when the opposing light and dark woods start looking like circus zebras, but imagine tapered ebony strips setting off highly flamed maple or rosewood strips with sap wood streaks separated by golden Yew of Cypress. Now that's elegant. Nothing wrong with beauty.
Hey I always thought Zebras were beautiful animals. In fact, I wouldn't mind ridin one someday:
quote:
Analog, my impression of rosewood B&S is that it will mean rather substantial ( deeply rooted ) tone, hence sweet highs and mellow basses. Whereas blancas will rather be typical for a less complex soundfield, ergo immediate / faster and dry release with less prominent overtones.
Not really saying anything different then others. But again all other things equal by comparison. I have played bassy blancas with tons of sustain and overtones...yet the same maker's rosewood version will and does tend to have more bass.
When we mess with eq and lets say reduce the mids, then increase volume, the effect is more trebs and bass (as per a rosewoody sound), vs reducing bass then increasing volume, you are in effect increasing mids and trebs (as per blanca sound). Mids tend to take the edge off trebles but make for a more solid tone wiht body, vs reducing mids makes the trebles sound thin with a thumping bass undertone. Overtones and harmonics are always a problem when miking up, hence the more dry guitars tend to be easier to deal with when amplifying.
I find the better sounding blancas have strong mids not necessarily a brighter sound, yet negras tend to have thinner sounding trebles yet get that thumping bass underneath when you do hard picado say.
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