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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...
Interesting thread- thanks for sharing all this!
Do you build to a target weight for the strung instrument? (I shoot for sub-1800g and can usually get there, with lotsa effort)
Like for the total instrument? I don't. For one thing my instruments are relatively heavy because of the structured sides and the large neck block (not that anyone seems to notice but there's def a lot of extra mass).
But tbh I don't know what the value would be. I don't think the overall mass of the guitar has a particular relevance to the sound (like if I put a 500g weight on the neck block, I don't think that would significantly change the sound....although it might, for the better). It's all the individual choices that are made that will make the difference.
What I have done is I measured all the tops on the last 3 guitars I made and also was able to post build measure the density of the maple of the back on my favorite guitar, so I can target the mass of the back and top to match those guitars. I'm using Giuliano Nicoletti's TPC system for measuring wood and it seems (!!!) like maybe I can target thicknesses based on previous guitars to get a consistent set of parameters and hopefully guitars that are doing the same thing.
That said, I have no idea...I hope it works ;)
Glad it's helpful, just realize that I'm barely holding this in my brain and I'm liable to be misunderstanding something.
Taking a workshop with Giuliano is highly recommended, I do think he's cracked the code to a significant degree, taking what Gore has done and made it a bit more approachable and holistic plus adding a lot of his own newer research.
I would say though that I don't think overall lightness is advantageous in and of itself. Gore and Giuliano are both adding side mass and Rye Bear who is a great maker is doing structured sides plus side mass and says the side mass very clearly improves the sound of his guitars.
This is mostly for finger style guitars for the record.
I have the Gore books, have crawled through them, I learned some things…it’s some dense stuff as we know. Anyway I’ve been lucky enough to have a bunch of gj guitars on my workbench (for bridge and tuner work mostly), and always I try to get a bunch of measurements including body tracings, pictures, and strung weight. Plus Michael on this site always lists the weight of the instruments for sale. Vintage Selmers seem to be the lightest of anything out there. Big honkin’ Favinos and the good copies usually clock in just a hair over 4 pounds. So for me at least, getting to a sub-4-pound weight is an important part of the stew (along with the 600 other psycho-interactive ingredients).
I guess for better or worse I'm not prioritizing older instruments, there's a sound I have in my head that I'm trying to hit and I'm trying to see if I can consistently hit that sound and feel.
I know you've had your hands on some hot guitars! One thought might be to pick the best sounding guitar and do some testing on it and see if you can understand what's happening with it. Trevor's book is pretty rough. Tbh I am lucky that Giuliano is a friend and has entertained a lot of questions from me, none of whatever it is I understand came easily.
I'd be happy to talk over the testing stuff, you can do some basic testing pretty easily in a totally non-destructive way (tapping on the bridge or where the bridge is with a felt piano hammer).
It might not make much sense, some of it is sort of personal notation, but this is what I'm working off of now as far as my "ideal" instrument. Basically measuring the last guitar I built and trying to make an acoustic model of what it's doing.