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My necks are adjustable so they have to be separate from the body. I think that for whatever random acoustic reason this is superior, I think having the fingerboard glued to the top of the guitar ends up doing weird stuff but I have no way of proving that, other than I think the high notes on my guitars tend to sustain longer than I think they might otherwise.
It's something I've heard from other people with decoupled neck joints like that but obviously it's a biased group.
Regarding your other question, you could do that, and people do things like that. I think the reason not to is that you have a limited amount of energy from the pick emerging from the bridge. Do you want to spend some of that getting to the neck block? In general I'm trying to direct energy back towards to bridge area to pump up the Monopole of the guitar. In fact I've thought about making a massive brave below the soundhole to cut off the upper half of the guitar. When you have a nodal point like that, it doesn't absorb energy, it reflects it back.
Tbh what I have done previously seems to work for me, and doing big experiments on things can take up months of time. So now I'm trying to make small changes and see what they do. I'm anxious enough about my carbon fiber bridge plate. But if you flip the whole construction style it could take years of fine tuning to get a coherent design.
Make sense?
Yes it makes sense, but I'm also aware of how much fettling has gone on over the centuries with guitar design, so I could well end up with duds if I start messing about.
As for the sustain, I'm rather drawn to loud guitars with not as much sustain, particularly pleasing for rhythm.
I will begin work on my first guitars later this year, time permitting!
Thanks for the insights Paul
@Jangle_Jamie this thread has a fair amount of discussion about stuff you seem to be interested in.
I don't know, man. Unless you are trying something that someone has already tried before with a documented failure as result, then I would think your messing about has just as much likelihood to result in an innovation as it does in a dud. When Ralph Novak decided to solve intonation problems by using a fan fret system in the 1980s, he was going against a problem that had no doubt persisted since the 3000+ years of fretted instruments (lute, guitar, baglama, etc). There have been small bodied baroque guitars, jumbo guitars, dreadnoughts, ladder braced, fan braced, fixed bridge, floating bridge. Even these adjustable necks are a newer innovation. I think it was Scot who talked about luthiers as tinkerers and I think that is apt. All these changes at one time or another were just a fanciful idea in the mind of their maker.
So, who knows if your strut approach would or wouldn't work? You might even consider making it like an adjustable turnbuckle? 🤷♂️
I think the best thing to do bar none is have a decent or great guitar you're trying to copy. It's a bit like transcribing a solo. I think you have a nice older guitar (?) If you have a good sounding guitar, you can non-destructively take the bridge off it, measure things and try to figure out how it's working.
That's not what I did with selmers but with classical guitars, I bought a Chinese classical from a dealer in Canada that sounds AMAZING, more or less a professional modern classical and that has been a model for me for a while. The dealer was like "if you want me to sell your guitar for $8000 it has to sound at least as good as this guitar" and he handed it to me. It legit is a really solid instrument and it's awesome to have a baseline for sound. I don't know what they were doing, if it was a fluke or they are all this good but all the resonances are perfectly placed, it sounds beautiful and it's loud. Appearance wise it is a tiny bit cheap but really not bad. Obviously if I had a Hauser on hand to copy, that would be preferable, but this is pretty great.
Anyway, point being that if you're interested in making good guitars, copying something that exists, especially at the beginning, is very helpful. I didn't really do that with the Selmer guitars, I didn't have access to a good one at the time so I made one from the Charles plan and then I made a more wacky one that was pretty fucked up looking with a gigantic soundhole but ended up sounding really great. So I sort of copied what I liked about that one and that's now the Big Bouche thing I'm making. And now I'm trying to sort of copy my own recent guitars to see how consistent I'm making them. I don't want a bunch of different sounding guitars right now. I'm really suspicious of makers when they say they can tailor their instruments to different sounds consistently because, at least for me, it's hard AF to make guitars consistent, seems impossible to be dialing in different sounds.
that was 1 and 2...