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From: Ross
Remote Name: 76.101.10.136
Date: 25 Apr 2007
Time: 11:47:24 -0400
Luthier’s Weblog 4/25/07 Reverse engineering. The term sprang unbidden to my mind somewhere this morning, so I Googled it to see if I understood the conventional meaning. I did, and it means what it sounds like. In my case, I unwittingly learned instrument construction from this process. Disassembling instruments for repair and doing what amounts to finite element analysis on an individual part of an instrument in order to improve or strengthen it results in an intuitive understanding of “Right Construction”. Or, more probably “Better Construction”. “Right” implies no possible further improvement. I probably need to reserve that possibility. The robot luthier turns his mind toward the neck construction of his imaginary finger style guitar. The scale length is predetermined, as is the neck to body point (14th fret). Wishing to make the best possible instrument based on information available to him, he decides on a width at the nut of 1.7”. He finds 1 ¾” too wide and 1 11/16” too narrow for his taste. He assumes that there may be potential buyers that share his taste, since his work has brought him into contact with a greater number and variety of finger style guitars than most players will encounter. Decision by distillation. The other end of the fingerboard he is less concerned with, but finds 2 ¼” at the last fret to be a common enough width to be unremarkable. It is worthwhile at this point to remark on the concept of “unremarkable”. The builder aims to build an instrument that is adequate for it’s intended purpose. At a time when hyperbole is the accepted mode of description, “adequate” scarcely seems to be a lofty goal, and yet my robot luthier knows that adequate is indeed difficult to achieve, if the intent is to be adequacy for all the literature in the fingerstyle canon, and every level of player proficiency. “Adequate” here means that the most technically adept player executing the most difficult piece of music will not find himself limited by the instrument. For the instrument to remain unremarkable in this framework means that the artist can focus completely on the opus, with no regard to the mundane concerns of the physical plane. An instrument that confines or limits the player in some way must be viewed as inadequate. The builder chooses to leave hyperbole to advertisers and teenagers, seeing it as meaningless. Fingerboard radius should be fairly flat, 16 to 20” at the nut being reasonable. As the fingerboard widens up the neck, radius must increase commensurately, being thus seen as a conical section. This is to facilitate the string bending technique, while allowing a lower action than would be otherwise possible with a consistent radius board. Ross Teigen 8:43 am