Well might be looking for something else

quinng

Well I'm going to tech next Saturday or Sunday to make final confirmation for me , even though I had my altimira setup before it got to me it was fine until it started getting cold here and then had another setup and it plays even better than before. So I'm hoping he can do some magic to this and if not I'm gonna return it and sit on my Altimira for a while

Gouch

👋

Fwiw, I have held, tweaked, and heard this exact guitar played very well while sitting 3 feet away. It’s a very nice instrument sonically and the build quality is excellent (as it is with every Stringphonic I’ve seen which is at least 5).

The neck geometry is well done and you COULD probably get away with up to .5mm lower action at the octave, if you don’t mind sacrificing tone and volume. There’s a BIG audible difference between 3mm and 2.5mm action on a guitar like this.

Also. Craig H said above: “Your guitar is rosewood, and rosewood guitars have more overtones. I've found that mahogany guitars tend to have a drier more fundamental sound without the overtones associated with rosewood and even maple.” That’s *definitely true* with solid wood acoustics, but most GJ guitars have 3-ply laminated backs and sides (original Selmers all are like that, ditto DuPonts, Baraults, it’s standard, it’s by-design, and Stringphonic does it too). Mayyyybeeee you can hear a difference between the outer lamination wood veneer species if you’re a bat or have otherwise absolutely amazing hearing, but I posit the typical humanoid will not. 🤷‍♂️

It’s going to sound different depending on the climate/humidity and it’s going to evolve as you play it. These guitars are sensitive and they move.

RESIST the urge to tweak the truss rod in the interest of adjusting the action.

…

As others have said, to each his own! Buy it if you like it, don’t if you don’t.

quinng

https://www.djangobooks.com/forum/discussion/comment/119160#Comment_119160

https://www.djangobooks.com/forum/discussion/comment/119149#Comment_119149

I appreciate the insight, these guitars and sound are completely new to me, I feel like I have a pretty good ear, I've been dealing with with low tuned electric guitars and designing all my amps and pedals to my playing style for 8 years as well as building for a high-end boutique company for the day so my ears well trained, but this whole new world of understanding tone woods and other elements of these instruments forces me not to go with my gut instinct as I haven't built up enough experience yet I feel to make a more educated gut feeling lol

paulmcevoy75

Not trying to start an argument at all but just from my perspective and understanding, back and side woods matter very little to the overall sound of an instrument. At least the species. While the woods definitely have different tonal characteristics in the raw (things like rosewood and ebony really ping in a spectacular way when you tap on a raw piece), in the acoustic function of an individual guitar the wood choice borders on meaningless, as far as sound quality goes.

In most gypsy guitars the somewhat heavy back braces remove much of the impact that the back can impart on the sound. In some modern guitar construction, "active" backs are used which have different bracing patterns and allow the builder to use the back to impact the overall sound of the instrument more. But this is a two way street in that the more the back impacts the sound the less volume the instrument has overall.

The back definitely impacts the overall sound of the instrument (obviously a guitar without a back would sound weird, or not sound much at all) but in general the particular wood choice is not super significant.

It can have "psycho-acoustic" effects, meaning a particular appearance or wood choice might make the player think a guitar sounds a certain way. But the choices of the builder in manipulating whatever woods he has available is way, way more important than any particular wood. My guestimate of how much the back and sides species impacts the sound is like 3%. That's just the way I think about it, obviously it is not quantifiable. Torres famously built a classical guitar with a paper back to illustrate this principal as far as I understand it.

Also in guitars with laminated backs and sides (erm...selmers for instance) the wood you are seeing on the outside is not necessarily even the predominant mass of the wood in the back and sides, so instead of talking about a Rosewood guitar you're talking about a "laminated rosewood and [whatever wood they are laminating from]" guitar. Laminating reduces any impact any particular species would have on a guitar.

Top wood is different, species is significant BUT it also has to be noted that there is massive variation between top sets even from the same tree. I have a set of Sitka spruce that is split out and one half is impressively floppy and the other half is super stiff. This is wood that grew approx .5mm next to each other. So the builder choosing any particular piece of wood and working within what wood is capable of is way more important than the particular species.

I feel pretty confident saying that neck wood and fingerboard material matter not at all.

For my mind it's something like

Design/Engineering 60%

Choice and manipulation of the top wood 30%

Setup 7%

Back wood 3%

To be clear these are my evolving thoughts and understanding about all of this, not gospel. But my limited understanding of acoustic testing seems to reflect a lot of this.

But there are the visual ideas I can't even get myself away from. I really like the look of Rosewood guitars. I have played a fair amount of crappy maple factory guitars in my time and so sometimes I have the idea that maple doesn't sound great, but that really has nothing to do with what a great luthier can do with maple. Having an instrument that's beautiful makes you want to play it more and that's a great thing. A not great thing is that we're taking a lot of beautiful wood from endangered forests around the world and that's a very complicated issue.

Sorry for the ramble, this is just the way I understand it. In my opinion the most important part of any of this is the builder's intention and the choices the builder makes and the understanding they have of the materials they have in front of them.

Put another way: An unskilled builder can make a crappy Brazilian Rosewood guitar and a skilled builder can make an amazing guitar out of lumberyard maple and a low grade sitka top.

voutoreenie

Great post, Paul. I haven't played a ton of these guitars but I've definitely played enough where it's pretty apparent that the top can make a huge difference, especially comparing new/newer guitars with spruce tops to woods that are quite a bit more immediately "open" like cedar. My Dupont's a 2017 so still on the newer side but even in the 5 years from when I first bought it in 2019 to now, it's definitely opened up a bit more and you can tell the finish is setting in as well, which can also factor into the tone projection (my Park Encore #313 from the 2000s is standard other than it has a "French polished shellac" finish and I think that contributes greatly to the big, round sound I get from it vs. guitars like my Dupont that have a more standard finish).

paulmcevoy75

https://www.djangobooks.com/forum/discussion/comment/119165#Comment_119165

I should have said: Various spruces vs any cedar is going to be one of the biggest noticeable changes you can make, that is definitely a significant difference.

But yeah, top is where it's at. That's a very large percentage of things.

To be further contrarian, I don't think that any of the sort of "professional" finishes, applied thinly, are going to make a measurable or significant difference in sound. Thin nitro/French Polish/varnish/various sprayed finishes, my guess is that they all pretty much sound the same or, more accurately, don't sound like anything. They should add some damping to the system but a thin film of whatever is not going to change much.

I think the sound difference you're hearing is a combination of the guitar settling in mechanically (the string tension kinda pulling the guitar together into one thing), the wood similarly mechanically kinda deforming slightly and then the wood oxidizing over time and releasing some of its volatiles.

If the finish on a guitar is HEAVY, like on some factory acoustics, that should definitely impact the sound but I don't think you'll hear a huge difference on two otherwise identical guitars finished expertly with any two finishes.

The issue with all of this stuff, saying that any one given thing is doing anything to the sound, is that it's really impossible to know what the effect of any one thing is having on a thing that is made of many individual pieces of wood and metal. You can't really double blind study a guitar because every piece of tonewood is absolutely individual, particularly top woods. So even if you had a craftsman make two identical guitars from woods from the same trees with identical dimensions, and you finished one with nitro and one with french polish (for instance), it wouldn't really be possible to know how much the finish of the guitar influenced whatever difference there was in the guitar vs what is just the variation in the woods.

Certainly any good luthier is using their ears, their intuition and their knowledge and making assumptions about a lot of things to make the best guitar they can but it is super difficult to say "I did x and that makes is sound like y". "I did x and I THINK that's why it sounds like y" is reasonable. I remember some instagram posting with some builder talking about the different neck woods they used on acoustic guitars and how different the sound is from each of them and I was like, how tf do you know that? If you built 100 identical guitars and had 10 examples with 10 different neck woods and you compared them MAYBE you could generalize but ultimately even then, I don't think there's evidence that neck or fingerboard wood contributes much to the tone of a guitar so....

My opinion, anyway.

JasonS

Someone suggested adding bridge shims to diminish overtones. Just by happenstance when I needed to make shims all I had handy was a piece of cardstock and it definitely, but subtly, reduced overtones/brightness on my guitar in a good way. It's not like a night and day difference but it's something I noticed. IIRC Django was known to use a piece of a cardboard matchbook as a shim!

I know you mentioned wanting to lower the action but it might be worth a try, temporarily, to see if the difference is something you like. In my case the cardstock is probably something like .25mm so a pretty small change in height.

Buco

My guitar originally came with the ebony fretboard. I used the silk and steel strings and a Blue Chip pick with the very round tip (nowadays I'd just go that primetone that's sometimes discussed here, it's just as good) because that took the edge off of otherwise bright sounding guitar. Risto, the luthier, told me during the consultation phase that he thought maple with ebony fretboard might make for too bright guitar. I really wanted the slick fretboard feel of ebony so that's what I asked for in the end.

Neck developed an issue and Risto said send it and I'll replace whatever needs to be replaced for free. He said he needed to replace the fretboard and I said you choose it. He put rosewood and after it came back I never felt the need to tame the brightness (the guitar has been super solid ever since too).

Just my experience, that's all.

I agree it's very hard to quantify any of this stuff. I actually talked to Risto about that a few months back. I played one of his guitars that I thought was one of the best guitars in this genre I ever heard/played. I called him to ask can he make me one just like that. He laughed and said he built two guitars using the woods from the same batches, going meticulously over the measurements and working on each step side by side, never even hours apart let alone days apart: "and they came out with a different tone".

I'll second what @voutoreenie said about shims. At least as an experiment, easy to try to see what difference it makes. Also to dampen the tailpiece resonating you could (@quinng ) take it off and put putty from the bottom. These are quick and easy to do and see if you might be on the right track.

PS funny, I see Jason and I were suggesting that at the same time...

paulmcevoy75

https://www.djangobooks.com/forum/discussion/comment/119170#Comment_119170

I get that...could be a lot of things though. You're talking about a guitar that has had the fingerboard removed, now with new frets, adjusted by the maker, etc, etc. A lot of things have changed other than the fingerboard. In general your body is a pretty effective dampener (thus why pushing the back of the guitar against your body might muffle some of the sound of the guitar), so if you think about wrapping your hand around the neck of a guitar enough to fret a note, you're pretty effectively dampening any vibrating the neck would be doing. Regardless though the neck is not really vibrating or a super resonant part of the instrument so...I stick with the fingerboard material should be irrelevant.

I do think neck stiffness is important in the sense that if you attach the end of the string to something floppy, it's probably not going to make a lot of sound (for instance, if you made your guitar neck out of rubber, it's not going to sound good). But most wood is plenty stiff to be a guitar neck. It's one of the reasons I put carbon fiber rods in all my necks, I do think it adds a tiny bit of stiffness in addition to other positive effects.

JasonS

Buco touched on a good point about pick choice. I have used acrylic picks (Dunlop Stubby 3mm) on electric guitar for decades but they sound horrendously bright and plinky on GJ guitars. I like Blue Chip and Wegen picks on my guitar but everyone has different preferences.

It may be frustrating to encounter so many eccentricities with this style of guitar but that's also what attracts many of us to them. They really are kind of their own thing when compared to other guitars and I think that's a big part of the fun.