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From: Ross
Remote Name: 76.101.10.136
Date: 12 Mar 2007
Time: 07:56:18 -0500
Luthier’s Blog 3/12/07 You know, I’m either feeling much better about marketing, or much worse about human gullibility. Most of my work as a repairman is on Martin flattop guitars, some Gibson arch tops and flattops, and on Gibson and Fender electrics. A fair representation includes all the other major manufacturers and a sprinkling of boutique builders and solo luthiers. The point is that most of the instruments people bring to me are fairly decent; and yet I see among these instruments an amazing number of truly foul pieces. Instruments that, when diligent application of skill renders them playable, they don’t sound any good anyway. I’m currently working on an upper end Epiphone, supposedly from their “Golden Age”, that is so ill-conceived and executed that it’s hard to believe that anyone played it prior to purchase. And yet that company continues today, presumably resting on the glories of it’s rich heritage. In fairness to them, they have produced some very good guitars in the past, and any of their current shortcomings should be attributed to the parent company. But somebody laid down good money to acquire this turkey, so I guess if there’s a lesson to be taken away here, it’s that almost anybody can sell almost anything. Sometimes I think I’m producing unsellable instruments because of their, umm, sophisticated shape, but the truth is, it would probably be hard to think up something so ugly that NO ONE would buy it. I guess one aims toward focus marketing. Way back when, my alter ego, the robot luthier was considering body size. Recognizing size limitations imposed by the human frame, scale length, and psycho-acoustic preconditioning, he decides to build a finger style guitar body of 20”-21” long and approximately 16” wide at the widest point. Ideally, the bridge will be placed in a location to maximize the length of sound wave propagation. In other words, the greater the distance of the bridge from some restriction to plate vibration (such as the ribs or a sound hole), the greater the ratio of low frequencies to higher frequencies. The plate length is going to limit us to an absolute lowest fundamental, but since this is in keeping with the accepted profile of “finger style sound”, the builder can work with this parameter. What can be altered, he hopes, is the ratio of first and second harmonics to third, fourth, and higher register harmonics. The result is, one hopes, a guitar that sounds “big” for it’s size. The challenge is to make “bigness” register on those notes with unsupported fundamentals as full notes without softness or roundness, a crisply defined bass note being prized by the accomplished player and required by the more advanced literature of the genre. The theory our luthier is choosing to propound, then, is that this firmness of lower register can be manipulated by top shape and sound hole location. Can, in fact, be increased by locating the bridge as far as ergonomically feasible from any interruption of free plate movement. Ross Teigen 8:53 am