All Dressed Up and Ready to Go Out

No one is actually going out but this guitar is ready to!

This classical guitar is one of the most dressed up instruments I’ve done in a while and it includes a new eighteen hole bridge; which is a first for me. It is an interesting change that makes the top of the tie block a completely decorative element. Usually, the block is bordered in bone to keep the strings from damaging it but with no strings wrapped over the top we were free to adorn it as we saw fit. With the added holes, a veneer of bone was glued to the back of the block for added strength. I also did a more traditional bridge shape so I’m not completely sure if the new tieblock adds any weight. I think it may be a gram heavier than if I had done a standard tieblock.

The back and sides are Macassar Ebony and the top is a torrefied Western Red Cedar. There is a rope / wheat purfling motif carried around the body, rosette, headstock and tie block. It has its customer specific neck dimensions which include a wider than standard nut and a 660 mm scale length on an elevated fingerboard. The longer scale paired with the other design choices make for a stiffer action and a good amount of headroom. I feel like I can really drive the top hard and the sound doesn’t break up. The frets are done in the EVO Gold fretwire up to the 20th fret and then the 21st fret (yes, we went there on a classical) is made of black buffalo horn that just fits on the end of the fretboard! To top that all off we put a gorgeous set of Scheller Tuning Machines with Baker style plates and Black Mother of Pearl buttons on it. I’m going to mail it out real soon so I’ll be excited to get the client’s reaction.

Recent Completed Instruments

Here are two non-classical guitar builds I recently completed. I got to make a new mold for a triple 0 size guitar and made my first eight-string ukulele. Both turned out great and I think were exactly what the clients were wanting.

This triple O size guitar is a great fingerstyle instrument. It was lightly built using a fairly scalloped X bracing, giving it a traditional voice, rich with lots of overtones and color and meant to be strung up with lighter gauged strings. EVO Gold frets and matching gold hardware go with the simple or “spartan” style binding scheme. The flamed maple gets to be the star. It is a short scale but the fret board dimensions and string spacing are custom to fit the client’s playing style. A K&K Pure Pickup was also a good fit. I really love the way this guitar turned out. It’s a simple but, I hope, well executed guitar that is a real player.

The eight string ukulele was also a really fun project. It makes a really full sound; like two ukuleles playing at once. It is a full sound that is really great for voice accompaniment. I really loved the showcase of North American materials. The Walnut was highly figured and the hand cut inlays add so much to the overall look. We had decided on using this specific set of tuning machines with vintage looking bronze plates and then decided to carry that motif into the inlays that went into the fingerboard, headstock, and the back of the neck. It is a fairly traditional shape and we carried that motif throughout. The walnut really shines.

July 2019

It’s always a joy to string up a new guitar. What is it going to sound like? The anticipation of those first few notes starts to build while your fretting it and cutting the nut and saddle. I was just on some short trips to Montana and California and this guitar was waiting for me and thus in the back of my mind the whole time I was supposed to be on vacation. I’m excited to get it shipped out to the customer for their feedback and response.

This Spartan guitar is by many standards a plain guitar. It has a matte finish on the back and sides with nothing really fancy going on but I like that unassuming quality. It hides the fact that this guitar is everything a concert guitar should be in terms of sound and playability. This guitar has a unique looking Western Red Cedar top and East Indian Rosewood back and sides with a simple ebony binding and Honduran Rosewood accents. The customer opted for some Gilbert tuning machines, an elevated fingerboard and a sound port. This guitar is also the smaller of the two templates I use with a 640 mm scale and a 50 mm nut width.

Teaching Time

Teaching is something that I haven’t done much of lately. I used to help teach a continuing education class where students ended up with a finished tenor ukulele. It was fun but more about rudimentary and basic woodworking experience for the students. Just recently, I was contacted by another luthier, who is primarily an arch top guitar builder, wanting to get started building classicals. His range of experience building arch tops is so far from the world of classical guitar that he felt he wanted some help. He wanted to consult with me and brace a guitar top in my signature style. I was a bit apprehensive at first but eventually agreed after a few emails back and forth. He flew in and we ended up having a really great time.

Bracing a top is fun, but more important to getting a handle on building classical guitars was the time we spent tuning two finished guitar bodies and a third partially assembled one as well as evaluating some of the raw materials. Showing him how I tuned the finished guitars was informative for him but talking through the process with him really helped to crystallize it for me as well. I’m usually just “doing it” by myself. It’s another thing to talk about it an explain the “why”.

Like I said, bracing a top is fun but its just one element. The interaction of the resonances of the top, back and internal air resonance are critical to voicing the guitar in a way that produces a guitar with volume, an even response across the range and is pleasing and musical. I usually just tap the guitar to get the specific frequencies but it was fun to throw some tea leaves on the plates and break out a speaker and tone generator to more dramatically demonstrate the modes of resonance. We also got to do the measurements on a guitar with the back off to demonstrate how much the interactions change once you close the box.

We did some basic analysis of the raw materials as well, which isn’t so critical to the makers of heavily built amplified instruments but immensely important on acoustic flat top instruments and especially classicals with the lower string tensions. Calculating the density and doing a simple deflection test is usually enough for me. It mostly confirms what your hands and ears are telling you. I do these tests because I start to doubt my gut and memory and the testing just makes me feel like I can trust my ears again.

Anyway, I was honored to think that someone would see me as any kind of expert and seek out my advice. I am always just making and stopping to talk about it was a different kind of experience. I think I will remain open to the possibility of doing some teaching in the future.

PS: I didn’t take any pictures during this consult so here are a few random construction photos of some guitars I’m working on right now.

The Wave Mosaic

I have been making this simple wave mosaic for my rosettes for some years now.  I occasionally contemplate changing it to something more elaborate or making copies of historical rosettes but I find myself coming back to it enthused.  I think the reason I keep it is all the myriad of things I think about when I think about waves.

I personally think about going to the ocean and staring at the Pacific and being enamored and frightened all at once at the magnitude of the power in front of me. Living in western Oregon, I often drive to the coast where I commonly stop at these vistas many hundreds of feet above the water with a panoramic view of the Pacific where all you see are sets of waves going out to the infinity of the horizon.  It gives you the significance of being insignificant. I also think of happily running from the waves on the beach as a kid in Hawaii and then not paying attention and being knocked down and pounded by the oncoming surf. Then, I think about the footage of the tsunami that hit Fukushima. It’s just water, but there is so much of it and it’s always in perpetual motion. It is one of those basic building blocks of life and maybe the defining element of our planet.

I’m making my final wave motif in the bloodwood and blue colors from a layup I made years ago.  I think I got about forty rosettes out of that layup. I’ve been making the same wave mosaic with pearwood and green dyed maple.  I was am still toying with the ideas of some new rosette designs but I think I will make some more layups of the wave ...maybe in a few different color combinations.  

I spent a couple days putting together some more rosettes. Here are some pictures:

I was just told about some of this wonderful artwork that is public domain on the web a few days ago and thought it fits with this post perfectly. It wasn’t the original inspiration for the wave mosaic but it may be inspiration for some future rosette designs.  

https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/hamonshu-a-japanese-book-of-wave-and-ripple-designs-1903/

One page of the Hamonshu: A Japanese Book of Wave and Ripple Designs

Going Back to Cali

I’m excited to to head to the Orange County Guitar Festival this coming weekend. It’s sure to be a fun weekend of concerts, lectures and competition. I am also relieved that I have some guitars to show. I just strung up these two pictured a couple days ago and I’m doing the final setups now. If anyone in the area would like to check out my work I’ll be there at Chapman University this coming Saturday and Sunday. I’m looking forward to seeing some sunshine. Here are links to the event below.

https://www.facebook.com/orangecountyguitar/...festival...competition.../172855896053...

https://events.chapman.edu/59976

Both of these instruments are East Indian rosewood / Swiss spruce 650mm scale guitars -all french polish of shellac. One has an elevated fingerboard with nickel silver fretwire and silver gotoh machines with the faux horn buttons, a silver 7th fret dot and 20th fret. The other has a beautiful bearclaw figured top with EVO Gold wire, matte gold gotoh machines with a brass 7th fret dot. Very similar construction otherwise.

I think I’m going to make the headstock design in a matte oiled finish on these two the standard default. I’ve already been using the shape without the extra bevels on my stripped down “spartan” model. It just seems to make sense aesthetically with the details of the bridge design I’ve been using.

2018 Recap

Thinking back about 2018…

2018 was a good mix of building, repair and finishing work. The mixture of the three keeps things from being too monotonous I guess. The shows I attended this year involved travel to some new locations (Koblenz was fun) and it was a good year to spend some time thinking about changes to my building.

I don’t really think about how much my instruments have changed over the years till I see a guitar I made in the past. Right now, I have a guitar I made in 2013 in for french polishing and I look at it in astonishment. It is a testament to how we are always growing and learning and slowly changing no matter what. In regards to that, I am now starting to build the 3rd and 4th iteration of that “floating tie” type bracing. I was enamored with first two instruments I braced with those changes and so am now working on a third and fourth to start the year.

The shop has also changed a bit. This past year, I finally got rid of some wall cabinets and a workbench I had taken with me from my previous location that never really fit my current space. It was a wonderful feeling to destroy them and build a new bench. The newest addition is finally putting some better speakers on either side of the bench. As that is where I spend most my time, it is nice to have a good stereo image for music listening. I got a par of ELAC Speakers on sale and they are a big upgrade to what was previously downstairs in the shop.

Here are some random photos from this week showcasing the mess on and around my bench, the new speakers, a vihuela rebuild and a cool Framus Fret Jet circa 1965 that came in for a refret and some other minor work. Yes, the speakers are upside down so that I have the tweeters at ear level.