Mario Maccaferri's design inspiration

paulmcevoy75

https://www.djangobooks.com/forum/discussion/comment/124185#Comment_124185

Seeing my name there made my day, thank you!

I do actually wake up thinking about how I can make these guitars better. It's a bit odd to me but I'll wake up thinking of maybe putting a carbon fiber bridge plate in the top instead of the two little feet braces to keep top deformation under control. But then as I'm getting out of bed I stress out that it's going to mess with the sound in some unforseen way. It's a strange way to wake up.

voutoreenie

https://www.djangobooks.com/forum/discussion/comment/124193#Comment_124193

Hey Paul, just out of curiosity, were you always mechanically inclined and into crafting/tooling or did it more just hit you later on? You just seem to have an organic curiosity about discovering "how/why things work" along with a great aptitude towards refining/augmenting/improving/redesigning/etc. and it's been a ton of fun reading your posts about all the experiments you've been exploring with each build.

paulmcevoy75

https://www.djangobooks.com/forum/discussion/comment/124194#Comment_124194

Thanks for asking...I've been interested in working with wood since I was a kid. Mostly into wooden boats and violins/guitars. I did an apprenticeship a long time ago restoring basses in a high end shop in NYC and I've studied boatbuilding a bit and rebuilt a fiberglass sailboat. So I've always been interested in wood and how it works as an engineering material, both in traditional settings and more modern composite things. I rebuilt a cruising sailboat and lived onboard off and on for 5 years. Prior to that, I kinda couldn't get much done, I'm pretty adhd or pretty...something... The boat really taught me how to work like a dog because it turned out to be a secret mess after I bought it. I learned a lot.

Mostly now I'm stealing ideas, I'll see someone do something and think it's cool and maybe I can improve on it or modify it a bit. It's a golden age as far as lutherie going. As much as Instagram is a horrible thing, it's a potpourri for luthier ideas, there are so many great luthiers on there. And the guitar making community is pretty famous for sharing ideas, there's very few secrets. Violin making is like that now as well even though in the past it was very weird and secretive.

For my cosmos, the heavy hitters are Trevor Gore and Guiliano Nicoletti. Gore codified a lot of prior research and added a ton of his own to the first sort of publicly available treatise on "scientific" guitar making. Measuring, testing and engineering guitars more or less. Guiliano built off Gore and has added a lot of ideas of his own and I think has a more organic/wholistic system but they are both great. I know Guiliano pretty well and he's been a great friend and that is like an insane blessing. He's helped me understand the basic mechanics of how a guitar works a lot better.

There's a lot about it that fascinates me. I really like how wood is still the superior material for making guitars as there's no synthetics that come close to its benefits right now (mainly stiffness to mass for what is required for guitars). I really like the psychoacoustic thing where we can't really know what a guitar sounds like in an objective way because our ears are horrific liars, we hear a lot with our eyes and our brains as much as we hear the notes. My day job (two days a week) is as a nurse, and I spent a fair amount of time hearing smart people on podcasts reviewing medical studies and there's a lot of interesting stuff there in understanding how bias and placebo works (namely that because you change something on a single guitar and then you perceive the guitar as "better" or "worse" you really have no idea whether the thing you changed made the difference or a difference...you'd have to that to a bunch of guitars and see. That's been helpful. And I think they are just massively beautiful objects/tools.

Anyway, sorry for blabbing. That's the short version :)

billyshakes

I just got finished listening to a book about the Edmund Fitzgerald. In the book, there was an anecdote about the topside crew vs. engineering crew. Unlike a car with a gas pedal, the speed of a large ship can be tweaked by changing pressures and other minute adjustments rather than just throttle position. Captains will always want more speed, even if it might be detrimental to the long-term performance of an engine. But, the chief engineer has ownership over the care of his engines. So, there is a natural tension between the two camps.

In the anecdote, the captain of a ship called down to the chief and asked if he could get more speed. The chief said he'd try....then sat back down at his console and continued what he was doing. He didn't want to add anything more as they were already near max. After 5 minutes, he called back up to the bridge and asked if it made any difference. "Yeah it did, thanks Chief," was the reply from the Captain. So, the bias you speak of is more than just perception of tone in guitars. :-)

paulmcevoy75

yeah the medical research angle has that in excess. I'm not a researcher for the record but I listened to about 800 hours of a virology podcast during COVID (300,800? a lot). 4 or more virologists discussing whatever the current research was at the time. The funny and interesting thing to me was how often they would poke holes in the research papers for having huge flaws. These were papers that would then be covered in the press as if they were factual but the studies oftentimes had some fatal flaw in design or implementation that made the data innacurate and the conclusions worthless.

I was an ER nurse as well and the same stuff happens there. Also a lot of stuff that we used to do because the older research said it was good we would later stop doing, because the newer, better research said it was bad. And some stuff we do but the research is really foggy and some people interpret it one way and one the other. The "clot buster" medication for strokes, TPA, is one where, last I checked, people were very strongly for or against and pretty viciously partisan. (ER people tend to be against, Neurologists are for, more or less. I don't really know but I was in the ER when it was given and the pt immediately died, which, is, like, not good. Luckily I was not involved but you don't forget shit like that).

And the other thing is you have people who are reviewing the research and you realize those people are fallable people too. This guy used to have a podcast and was super eloquent, very funny and interesting and very opinionated about the current ER research, I used to listen to it religiously, and then I found out he was a really bad person. He was a "thought leader" in the field and when all this happened, I think it left the whole community in a weird spot because he'd influenced everything in very specific ways and you had to unpack his influence. It was bizarre.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/nyregion/manhattan-doctor-david-newman-prison-sexual-abuse.html

Anyway, yeah, our perceptions of things are really interesting to me. I know that because my guitars are non-traditional looking, people have pre-conceptions about how they might sound. I find that really interesting but if I hand someone the guitar I try to just let them play and not say anything and just see what they think.

terribly off topic, my apologies, I was led down the road ;)