GJ cedar tops and "New School"?

bohemewarbler

Just curious...It looks from this video taken at Django in June 2013 that Gonzalo Bergara, Adrien Moignard, and Benoit Convert are performing on cedar tops (all the guitars have that uniform cedar-looking color). I believe two of these guitars were made by Oliver Marin who regular produces GJ guitars with cedar tops. Also wondering if this might also part of the GJ "New School"?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjA3iP1KfZM

EmmettRay

Benoit is playing a Marin with a Cedar top, Adrien is playing a 1966 Favino with a spruce top and Gonzalo is playing his brand new Holo with a cedar top. All amazing guitars, I got to play all of them. And yeah, these guys are about as new school as you can get with regards to the gypsy style.

Michael Bauer

I don't know, Favino used cedar in his tops going back at least into the '70s, and maybe earlier. Cedar produces a distinctive sound, which I'll let Bob Holo describe because a) he's used cedar on several of his guitars, and b) he's better at describing sound than I am. It's a good sound, too. Not better, but really good.

EmmettRay

Hey Michael! I'm almost certain Adrien's guitar is spruce, I played it a DIJ. It's almost 50 years older that the other 2 guitars in this video and we all know spruce gets darker with age. These guys have almost the exact same technique and sound for both rhythm and soloing. Adrien's guitar sounds brighter to me, the other 2 cedar tops, not as bright. I'm curious to see what Bob says!

Michael Bauer

Emmett, I didn't even look at the video. I was just commenting that Favino has been making cedar tops for a long time. It's not a new idea in the gypsy guitar world. Spruce would be more common. My '64 and '69 Favinos are both spruce. I have and have had quite a few gypsy jazz guitars, but I heve never had a cedar one, which is why I am so reluctant to comment on their sound. Listening to someone else play his or hers doesn't tell me as much as playing one myself and being able to compare them head-to-head.

I just looked at the video, and you are right about their technique being so close!

Craig Bumgarner

I've been using western red cedar tops (only) on my guitars for close to two years and have been very pleased with the sound. Very present and open, good volume and popping mids and highs.

That said, as long as the material has an excellent stiffness to weight ratio, an outstanding guitar can be made of any wood*. There will be minor differences is the character of this sound, but over all not that much. How the guitar is put together has much more influence in the sound. And of course the player is the main ingredient.

* Well, there are really only a few woods that have super excellent stiffness to weight ratios. Spruces, cedars & redwood primarily and even within species, there can be considerable variation. This is part of the luthier's craft, to select wood that is responsive and a large part of that for tops is the stiffness to weight. There has been experimentation with double tops, carbon fiber, very thin tops over lattice bracing, etc. All of this is striving to make top assemblies with higher stiffness to weight ratios. In many respects they have been successful. One can argue with specific tonal aspects. Smallman guitars, for instance, are reported to be incredibly loud classical guitars but tonally very bright and to some, mono-dimensional. Like many things, some people love them, others do not, but no one can argue they don't work at all.

Over in the Delcamp classic guitar forum, members, including professional players and luthiers, were challenged to pick the cedar top guitar from the spruce top by audio only. They did not do very well.

For what it is worth, I think Jose Ramirez III is generally credited with being the first to use western red cedar for a guitar top in 1964, so if you hear of a cedar top guitar dated before that, be somewhat skeptical. Some European spruces turn gray with age and can be hard to identify as spruce.

Bob Holo

It's just a different range of sound depending on how you tune them. Western Red Cedar can go from dark to very crisp with a lot of quick bite to the sound. Romanian Spruce can go from sort of transparent and ethereal / almost hollow sounding to solid and piano-like. In general, cedars tend to give more prominent mids whereas spruces tend to give more on either end... bass+treble. These are huge glaring generalizations, but that's sort of the "in a nutshell" view. A lot of the newschool guys like cedar because if you tune it right, it can help you reach out and punch hard in the frequencies you want when you're playing lead, and still get some nice reverb so that if you're playing dynamic treble lead lines you get a little sparkle & ring around the edges which really brings you up in the mix in a classy way without too much hard bright bite that a really lightly built spruce guitar that is built to punch can have. So - you can comp crunchy and pump out leads that sing and project. It makes for a very responsive, fun & I suppose perhaps "new school" kind of sound. But I'm just guessing based on what guys have told me. A few weeks ago, Clement Reboul put out a video that - when I saw it, I called my wife in and said: "Check this out!" I was really excited because Clement's on a Cedar Nouveau and Eric is on (what looks to be) a 1950's Busato Mde44 which helped inspire the Nouveau... I started there and developed it based on feedback from these new-school gents. Both of these guys rock & It was neat to hear them side by side. But is it New school vs. Old school? No, I don't think so - these guys have their own styles & tone, but they play together often and well - and they're recorded well here with similar mic positions.



But spruce is amazing too. I now build about half & half and I love spruce as much as I love cedar. Spruce, if you tune it right, can give you depth and sparkle both in abundance and perhaps a little more fundamental which comes across as treble cut. Some designs seem made for spruce - Selmer in particular. I've played Favinos of both spruce and cedar - different guitars but amazing in their own ways. Spruce has a... I forget what Fapy called it, but it's sort of a "dirty" breakup" that he described when he was playing a spruce guitar and I could hear what he was talking about very clearly...a tube-amp kind of concept. You can hear it in Eric's playing above. I've heard guys do what he did on nice cedar guitars and it comes across more as a throaty growl than grungy breakup. Words are crap - can't describe sound with words... you'll hear it in the video and I've heard Stephane do a similar thing when comparing his cedar and spruce guitars, so obviously it's something beyond my playing skills but is a tool in a good player's toolkit and different guitars respond to it in different ways.

Redwood is another very interesting wood I've been working with. All things held equal it seems to produce a cedar-like guitar with a bit broader & harder cut to the tone that sounds more Mirecourt-esque. Sitka spruce is wonderful wood too - It's no wonder that D'Angelico built so many guitars out of Sitka.

I suppose you could say cedar is new school in some ways, but about 1/3 of the newschool guys who play mine are using spruce, so it's not a hard fast line, and you're just talking about soundboards - braces count a lot too - and different brace woods yield very different results. But for an experienced builder who understands how to select and use woods, the above is reasonably accurate. And in the final analysis, it's all in the players hands. A guitar is just a tool. The "right" guitar is the one that is the thinnest barrier between the player and what he's trying to get across.

Been laid up a bit - nothing serious, but back out to the shop tomorrow and god am I ready to get off my backside... going buggy, can you tell?... haha.. Cheers.

EmmettRay

Awesome video, thanks for sharing Bob!

bohemewarbler

I didn't realize that cedar tops had become popular among the "new school" GJ players. In the U.S, it seems all GJ guitars being sold have spruce tops. The most beautiful sounding guitar (and in its playability) I ever got to sample was in Francois Charle's shop in Paris this past December. As it happens, it was a cedar top, although I cannot recall the model. But at 6000 euro, it was way out of my price range. After reading Bob Holo's post, I went to http://www.hologuitar.com/wordpress/nouveau/, but couldn't determine from the text what exactly makes the "nouveau" guitars different from the traditional. Still, I enjoyed watching the various videos (and heard and saw a lot of cedar tops being played). Anyway, thanks to everyone for your insights!

bohemewarbler

Now that I reflect further, the guitar I played at Francois Charle's shop was proabably a Hahl, not a Holo.

Bob Holo

bohemewarbler wrote:

couldn't determine from the text what exactly makes the "nouveau" guitars different from the traditional

True... it's unclear I suppose, it's partially because reducing guitars to "features" drives me up a wall because it is so disingenuous that I over-correct in the other direction. It is so odd now - understanding how guitars actually work and what's important to sound and playability and going to guitar company websites and knowing for an absolute fact that nearly everything on the site is puff designed to excite people who are used to having marketers give them checklists and upgrades and bling to accessorize. Consumerism conquering form and function. Musical anathema.

Anyway - short story made long, Nouveau / Traditional aren't really models - more like an indication of whether I was reproducing a vintage design or building my own design. With traditionals, I try to stay pretty close to the design of the original luthier, tuning things the way he did. If I can pre-cleat an area where a lot of the originals cracked or reduce the size of an overly chunky neck while retaining the mass and strength through modern materials - then I do that. There's no protecting a guitar against abuse or neglect, but if you can try to mitigate traditional structural problems or keep some guy from being tempted to take the neck in to be shaved and wind up screwing up the guitar... as sometimes happens to vintage rigs...It just makes sense. Bottom line, I try to make and tune Traditionals in a way that the original luthier would recognize their knowledge and work had been understood and put to work respectfully, but with the benefit of a little hindsight.

The nouveau... it's my style. Mostly this is what luthiers do. Hauser made what was in many ways his evolution of a Torres... Friederich makes what in many ways is his evolution of a Bouchet, Elliott makes what in many ways is his evolution of a Romanillos. A guy falls in love with a style and it inspires him to go in a direction. The Busato model 44/45 was most of the basis for the Nouveau. I don't know if I'll ever do a Nouveau interpretation of a Selmer. I think Pierre Roulout already did that so incredibly well toward the end just before the Selmer shop closed. Play a couple 500 series Selmers and then play - for instance - 862 or 872 and you can see / hear / feel that they are unquestionably related and equally brilliant - yet different in an evolutionary way that, whether intentional or not, seems to mirror some of the evolution of jazz at that time. The early ones are open and vibey and the notes bloom and shimmer with attitude - the later ones are deep but quick and focused and solid and balanced like a Swiss watch. Yet... no mistaking they're both Selmers. That characteristic voice is abundant in both.

I should put a bit more on the website, but the thought of a website full of "features" and pictures of guitars on silk pillows just makes me shudder. So instead I try to tell about the inspiration for the guitars and then point people at players because they're what's important anyway.

Yep, I've played some very good Hahls - doesn't surprise me at all that you like his work - I do to.

Cheers and off to sleep.