What guitar is Django playing in the J'Attendrai clip?

Matteo

I'd love to try a guitar like that! I like most things about my D-hole (short scale, 12 fret) a little better than the oval hole guitars I've tried (not many). But there are a few things... Maybe this transitional design is the answer?

Sugar playing on my gramophone right now. Yes it's brilliant!

Tele295

I would like to play a 640mm 14 fret oval hole. Richer sound?

Steveareno

It's such a cool video clip (or should I say "short film"). Love that little octave riff Django does at the ending. Did Selmer market the guitars alongside their saxes? In the same catalogs, etc.? Were they competing against Gibson and Epiphone to produce French made "jazz" guitars for the local swing and big band market? Did they come out with Argentine strings as soon as the jazz models were available? The strings are such a great match for the guitars and in alot of ways were ahead of their times.
Swang on,

Michael Bauer

Bob Holo wrote: You just know that Django and Stephane were smiling at each other and goading each other. Too bad they lived before smart-phones. I'd love to see a backstage video of Django & Stephane jamming and having fun.

Bob, if they'd lived in the smart phone age, they wouldn't have been jamming; they would have been texting on their phones...

And Wim, Django probably had several Selmers before 503, which wasn't built until 1940. Dregni says he switched to ovals in 1937, but I suspect it was even earlier.

scot

There is a 640mm oval hole in the SE USA, it's #348 I think - it's in Charle's book. The owner got it in Paris in the early '90s and it supposedly was one of Sarrane Ferret's guitars - the story was credible, too. I played this guitar for an afternoon about 10 years ago. It had new strings and was light as a feather, probably less than three pounds. It sounded great, a fat punchy sound and no snippiness at all. It did not sound anything like the owners other two gypsy guitars - a '91 Dupont 670 oval and a Dunn of some kind. Truly an exceptional guitar IMO. The fellow also owned one of Django's nudes. Nice work if you can get it...

The guitars I am most curious about are the maple-bodied grande bouche models. Where are these guitars - did any survive? Anyone ever seen one? MB? Bob?

Michael Bauer

Scot, I wish! I have been asking about those maple ones for a couple of years, and no one I know has seen or heard of one. I even asked Mazzoleni, and he didn't know either. Jacques has always said that a large number of guitars must have been destroyed during the war. It's probably a good thing that much of Selmer's early production went to England.

That short scale Selmer would have been cool to try! I love that era of experimentation at Selmer. They were really trying things then, before they settled in on the classic oval. I tried a round hole 12-fret, and it played so beautifully and sounded so rich! Maybe too balanced to cut through in a gig back then, but I can't imagine a more satisfying guitar to play at home. Time to get out the ski mask and start holding up liquor stores!!!

By the way, they must have still made the occasional odd guitar later, because wasn't Django's Rome sessions guitar a round hole 14-fret? I know the original top was destroyed, but Maurice made a new one for it. I'm not sure if the replacement top was round- or oval-hole.

Bob Holo

Scott - I don't know about the Maple guitars - nothing that passes the laugh test. Sorry. I'd love to pull your ears about #348 though. You have first-hand experience and you shoot straight so I'm really excited to hear that you potentially know something about this guitar. A few days ago I told Ed that my guess was that it might have been one of the undocumented guitars between #380 and #420, but 348 is certainly in a reasonable serial number range to be it - and there was a small chunk of guitars in that serial range that were not documented and it's the first of that bunch. Groovy. Way Groovy.

I'm geeking out and writing a bit about scale lengths for Tele, but I have to get back to wet-sanding for now. Maybe I'll post it later. It's just so damned tough to write about scale and harmonics without writing a tome. It's really interesting stuff if you're into acoustics and I tend to get a bit excited about the topic, but if you're not into that sort of thing - then YMMV so I'll try to keep it under 300 pages if I post it at all... lol...

Michael Bauer

Post it, Bob, no matter how many pages it is. Pretty please...

Bob Holo

Lol.

Ok... I'll see if I can finish it tonight.


**edit**

Well... here it is, and don't blame me if it's long - you asked for it!.... ;-)

Tele295 wrote:

I would like to play a 640mm 14 fret oval hole. Richer sound?

Yes, in general. There are certainly rich sounding long scale and strident short scale guitars, but the longer the scale of the guitar, the more high-order harmonics you get. Harmonics happen when the string divides into portions which spontaneously self-terminate along the length of the string. In other words, the string stops moving at a place where it isn't touching a fret, and that cessation of movement acts like a node in the same way a fret or bridge or nut does. Take an electric guitar and do a 12th fret harmonic on it and then turn the amp up to where you overdrive and get feedback. Look at the string over the 12th fret and you'll find that it's dead still at the 12th fret but moving on both sides of that dead-spot. It's kind of a weird thing to see - I'm sure someone could come up with an excellent bar trick doing that and win a lot of free beer, but anyway it's a good way to physically observe harmonics. The string movement is antiphase on each side of the node, so the energy on one side of the 12th fret is (mostly) equal and opposite to the energy on the other side of the 12th fret. Inefficiencies and heat generated as the string stretches and energy lost to the end termini at the bridge and the nut eventually bring the string to a stop. But there are many harmonics on every string, and they don't just happen when you consciously pluck harmonics. They happen every time you pluck any string in any way on any fret. They are layered on top of each other so that if you were to observe the string in the dark using a timed strobe, you could pick out the different harmonics, (which is trippy and fun and I did that for a couple of weeks to help determine optimal neck relief) but in normal light or with stop action photography, it just looks like a vibrating string. The lower order harmonics where the string is separating into two or three segments, for example, are consonant because they are simple 'just' intervals and so they tend to add a musical body to the note. Higher order harmonics where the string is breaking into a lot of different segments are a different story. The intervals and the errors inherent in the Western musical scale where not all half steps are actually the same distance apart - start to compound and the harmonics start to sound more dissonant.

So with a longer scale, what happens, is that the higher order harmonics tend to make up a higher percentage of the harmonic overtone content of the notes. This isn't good or bad, it just changes the tone a bit - adds a little more zing to it. If you've never played similar short and long scale GJ guitars side by side, then think of the tonal difference between a shorter scale guitar like a Les Paul and a longer scale guitar like a Strat. That'll give you a gut feel for the type and magnitude of effect. (**edit... good eyes, Ed**-RH.)

Depending on the design of the guitar and how you build it and the strings you use & etc., you might want more or less sizzle. Even among guitars of the same apparent design, there is a lot of variability. So it's just one variable, but it's a pretty neat one.

By the way - a related concept is that if you lower the mass of a string tuned to the same frequency over the same scale, you increase the propensity of the string to break into harmonic content. That's part of why the relatively thin gypsy strings sound the way they do - and why Argie 10's sound a little snappier than Argie 11's. The metals used in the strings and the relative loads that different sized strings put on soundboards also factor in, but all else held equal, smaller gauge strings will have a little more harmonic content.

So, bottom line, Django using 10's on a short scale guitar built light & snappy helped him achieve a tone that had some warmth, but also some good definition and consonant harmonic liveliness. That's not to say that Django's tone - or Stephane's - or any other player's basic tone comes from the guitar's scale... I mean Stevie Ray Vaughn on a Tele or Strat is still going to sound like SRV... but scale length is a variable - as are strings, picks, mics, PA systems etc., etc., etc.,

Michael Bauer

Before dinner! I need some bed-time reading!

BTW, did you see the pics of the 1924 Maccaferri? I sort of buried them in another post, and another friend just smacked me in an e-mail and said I should post them on their own. I would love to get it in your hands for an inspection. So innovative and cool for its day... In fact, just pack of your equipment, and come on out to Chicago!