Guitars/Design With Most Dynamic Range

[Stringmaster]

By that I mean a specific guitar or design features that can go from being highly responsive to a light touch played with bare fingers, all the way to handling heavy-handed picking including strumming, lead playing, and even slamming out swing chords.
I have a '33 Gibson L00 14 fret that pretty much does this for me, but it’s kind of a freak in that it has an elevated fretboard, maple body, and likely an Adirondack top. It’s fairly lightweight but not a feather. My Martin all hog 00-12 fret is very lightweight and super responsive to a light touch, but doesn’t really hold up to heavy hands. I’ve previously owned other L00 14 fret sized guitars and 00-12 fret guitars with spruce tops, as well as a 000-14 Martin and Collings/Santa Cruz OMs that are maybe in between the two mentioned (but it’s been a long time). My J45 hog/adi is very light for a dread and also comes close, but maybe needs a little more input to drive the top with bare fingers. Other dreads and jumbo guitars I’ve owned tended to not be as responsive to a light touch.

I know there are no absolutes but I’d love to hear opinions regarding body size/shape/depth, materials, weight, frets to the body, and so on that help achieve a wide dynamic range in a single instrument.

[Wade Hampton]

Stringmaster, I’m not certain that having that wide dynamic range is typical of certain guitar designs so much is that it’s a characteristic of some individual tops. I have a 000-42 with a Sitka spruce top that performs that way, yet an OM that I own breaks up with noticeably less energy input. The body size of both guitars is virtually identical, but they don’t react the same way.

So I think it has more to do with the stiffness and resiliency of individual guitar tops than it does the body design. Of course, bracing probably plays a part, too.


Wade Hampton Miller

[jklotz]

Guitars with red spruce tops (adarandic) seem to exhibit those characteristics.

[Jaden]

I think you’d be looking for 25.4” scale and the 000-14 fret body size = Martin OM.

It’s not a deep body guitar and it doesn’t have the extra body length of a 12 fret 000, so it exhibits a highly compressed midrange with bass and sparkle yet packs a punch.

The midrange response of the OM is always present in the background waiting to be coaxed out with colourful and complex results.

[Rogerblair]

My Halcyon 00NL has a very wide dynamic range. It has a Lutz spruce top with Adirondack braces. rosewood back and sides. Very deep body.
Really booms when strummed and very soft and delicate when fingerpicked lightly.

Rb

[Steve DeRosa]

Originally Posted by Stringmaster

By that I mean a specific guitar or design features that can go from being highly responsive to a light touch played with bare fingers, all the way to handling heavy-handed picking including strumming, lead playing, and even slamming out swing chords...I know there are no absolutes but I’d love to hear opinions regarding body size/shape/depth, materials, weight, frets to the body, and so on that help achieve a wide dynamic range in a single instrument.

Two questions:

• How willing are you to think outside the box?
• Are you OK with changing some ingrained habits (if necessary) to get the most out of an instrument?

Don't know if you've played any CF guitars, but my Rainsong JM1000 jumbo checks nearly all of the boxes: light, responsive, loud, and fairly versatile; I know some people are put off by the looks of the original woven top, but the current Concert Series boasts a unidirectional top that not only offers a more traditional appearance but a warmer tone - and you never need to worry about humidification. A good USA Ovation from the '70s-80s also meets most of your criteria, can be had for chump change, and in spite of the general disdain among so-called cognoscenti they still make viable performing instruments when used within their original parameters: plug into the low-gain input of a clean, mid-/high-powered American-voiced electric-guitar combo amp and they actually sound like a "loud acoustic" guitar, with little of the "quack" or abrasive highs found in modern "acoustic" rigs - I still use my '82 Custom Balladeer on a regular basis, and don't feel/sound "obsolete" or undergunned in any plugged-in situation...

If it's gotta be wood or nothing, IME a nice old New York Epiphone archtop will give you all the unamplified dynamic range you could ask for, at a surprisingly reasonable price given their quality (significantly less than their model-for-model Gibson counterparts). Maybe it's the fact that they were a hometown brand back in the day (along with Gretsch, Favilla, D'Angelico, and Guild) and I used to see them in abundance in NYC pawn shops, but I've been drawn to these grossly underappreciated/undervalued jazzboxes since I was a kid - I always preferred the tone to competing Gibson models (the tops tended to be carved somewhat thinner - if you've ever tried to fingerpick a Gibson archtop a nice Big Band-era Epi will come as a revelation - and the graduation specs were totally different), and you're not going to find anything of comparable quality in a prewar/early-postwar guitar for anywhere near the price. FYI a well broken-in 17" or 18" non-cut can make a fine all-arounder, as long as you have a strong technique - the shorter sustain and "forward" sound highlight any deficiencies on the player's part - and unlike a typical flattop don't expect to simply sit down, whack away, and achieve instant gratification; take the time to get acquainted, however, and you might just have a lifetime keeper...

[McCawber]

I helped my brother pick out a nice Martin OM-28 Authentic last summer that comes pretty close to what you describe. That guitar is LOUD when you crank it up and while not quite the bass response, it has no problem keeping up with any of my dreads when you drive it hard. Pick it lightly with bare fingers and it gently sings.

I want one . . . .

[gitarro]

It may be a mutually exclusive quality to be so responsive that it rings with the lightest touch or brush of the fingers but yet does not overdrive with the most ham fisted attack using hre hardest pick. Some guitars due to their design and construction and stiffness of the top can deliver more of this quality. I has ageeenfield gf once that was a very good fingerstyle guitar but seemed to also have a high headroom and I would attribute that to its construction and design.

As well the qualities of the top can lower the overdrive threshold while making it seem to respond better to a light touch. I have played cedar and englemann topped guitars that overdrove more easily than adirondack spruce topped guitars hat stood up very well to harder attack.

However at some point i would expect that one would have to compromise on either how responsive is the guitar or on how high the overdrive threshold is.

[Wade Hampton]

Originally Posted by jklotz

Guitars with red spruce tops (adarandic) seem to exhibit those characteristics.

Not always. I own a Martin Custom Shop D-18 with a red "Adirondack" spruce top that does have that kind of dynamic range, but own another red spruce-topped guitar that does not. I've previously owned two other instruments with Adirondack tops that didn't have that range, either.

So in my personal experience with that species of spruce it's only a 25% occurrence.

It's a statistically insignificant sample, of course, but it's enough to show that red spruce tops don't automatically have that wide dynamic range.


whm

[Alan Carruth]

In general, as far as I can tell, 'headroom' correlates pretty well with the use of a dense top. Red and Sitka spruce tend, on average, to be denser than, say, Engelmann spruce or WRC, and Red and Sitka both have the rep of having more headroom. Other things that can help are the use of a heavy bridge and/or heavy bridge pins, and 'tapered' as opposed to 'scalloped' bracing. All of these things contribute to high impedance of the top at the driving point, which helps to keep the energy in the string and prevent too much movement of the top. Although I don't have any data on this, it's logical to think that the sound 'breaking up' is likely a symptom of either a non-linear response of the top or some sort of feedback of top vibration into the strings, or both.

I'll note that it may well be that 'headroom' and absolute dynamic range may not correlate. In an absolute sense 'dynamic range' would be the difference between the softest sound the guitar can make (which would be pretty close to zero in any case) and the loudest. A lighter weight top will tend to produce more output for a given input of energy, so it might well be that the lighter top would produce more sound as measured by, say, a dB meter. On the other hand, if it's sound you don't want to listen to because of some sort of feedback or 'clipping' then it's not much use.

The ability of the top to make a useful and nice sound at a low level seems to me to have more to do with how well the top is working within itself. I tend to look at that as a matter of balance, in some sense, between the bracing and the top. This is, IMO,where the various methods of 'tuning' a top, such as 'tap tones' and Chladni patterns seem to come into play. I think that it's what produces the 'clarity', 'detail', 'separation' or 'definition' (choose your word) that makes those quiet sounds stand out. Ultimately, it has to do with how the top handles the highs, where 'headroom' may be more about the lows, in frequency terms. All of this would be hard to 'prove'.

[min7b5]

A twelve fret design would top my list of reliable indicators of dynamic range in my experience - definitely more about the recipe than the ingredients

[packocrayons]

I have limited experience in this regard because I rarely play guitars loud, but a stiffer top IMO tends to withstand being driven hard better, while more top area makes a guitar more responsive. These aren't mutually exclusive, but they do play into each other. Some examples:

- Stiffly braced dread (norman encore B20) has the top area for fingerstyle, but can handle a hard attack
- Moderately braced 000X1ae - the smaller top but lighter bracing gives this guitar good balance. I find it may be lacking a bit in the fingerstyle side of things, but that's because I reinforced the bracing after it was run over by a bus
- Cedar braced dread (my first build) very nice for fingerstyle, tops out easily when played hard.
- The taylor 7xx V-braced I played yesterday. Great for fingerstyle, also seemed to break up very quickly. This is probably a bad example because it's a different bracing pattern altogether

Seagulls are wonderful all-round guitars, and I think it's specifically for this reason. They're usually dreds, they're reasonably braced, and IIRC they have a bit more aggressive geometry == higher saddle