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From: Ross
Remote Name: 76.101.10.136
Date: 21 Feb 2007
Time: 09:17:02 -0500
Luthiers Weblog 2/21/07 Nothing to unclamp this morning. I didn’t think ahead yesterday at the end of the work day. Must make note to self. One thing I’m noticing about writing this daily diary thing is that afterward, turning on talk radio, as is my habit, does not hold so much appeal. What I end up doing is either no audio input, or quiet instrumental music while reflecting on what I just wrote while I go about my work. Which is funny because, in this case, music is not intrusive, whereas usually music sucks too much attention from my brain and I end up thinking about it’s construction instead of the work at hand. Talk radio, of course, requires minimal attention as the level of discourse is generally just slightly above flat brainwave. Writing seems to require a period of digestion. Presumably, bad writing gives indigestion. I hope that’s so, because then I should have a good built-in barometer as to the quality and truth as to what I just wrote. Of course, I can eat several hot dogs without ill effect, so my digestion atrocity alarm may be set for too high a threshold. Resuming examination of my robot luthier’s guitar design, I see that he is looking at the relationship of the neck to the body. The scale length is determined to be long, let’s say 25.5” as is popular for finger style playing. But how far should the neck extend from the body? A glance at the current finger style idiom shows that players are increasingly using notes higher on the fingerboard. Well, the neck could be joined to the body at the last fret (20th? 22nd? 24th? More?). But that moves the bridge, and the picking “sweet spot” to the player’s left, stretching out his left hand uncomfortably at the lower positions. To say nothing of making the design neck heavy. The 12th fret, our luthier decided, does not give enough access to facilitate regular use of the upper frets. The critical factor is bridge placement. On an acoustic instrument, It should be located at maximum distance from the instruments ribs to maximize lower frequencies. Since the 25.5 scale is a constant, the scale ( and neck) should be moved back and forth on the provisional body shape to achieve this most desirable position. Before I go any further, I suppose it should be said that all opinions expressed here are just that: opinion, and that the previous and the following may contain the most outrageous examples of bad science and wrong-headedness extant, but they’re my opinions, arrived at after decades of bungling and groping around in the dark, and I’ll hang on to ‘em until another scheme seems more reasonable and God save the Queen. Disagree if you want, but I’m trying my hardest. Any corrections or alternate theories on any of this stuff will not only be warmly regarded, but welcomed with a burning eagerness. Caveat Emptor and all that. Getting back to neck placement, the body in the upper bout could be shortened, of course, to allow higher fret access (I’m thinking here of a banjo-shaped guitar with the bridge in the center). With our chosen scale length and, say, an arbitrarily chosen 20 frets, the diameter of the body (head) would be roughly 16-17 inches. Wide enough for good sound propagation, but losing out to a more conventional design that may have a body length of 20 inches. Probably hard to balance on the leg in sitting position. Definitely neck heavy. Our robot luthier decides to join the neck to the body at the 14th fret, depending for guidance not on tradition, but on the not inconsiderable influence of the accumulated muscle memory of ten million finger style guitarists who can tell by feel upper fret note location without looking. Further access to the upper frets then dictates a deep cutaway on the treble body side. A final body shape may not have been arrived at, but progress has been made. Hooray for small victories! Ross Teigen 9:03 A.M.