Acoustic Guitar Building Secrets...

[Imbler]

Originally Posted by mirwa

The secret for me, it’s like cooking a great meal, you use the best ingredients you can find and assemble them with the greatest of care and respect.

Treat each part as if it was the final part, not simply part of the process to achieve an end goal.

Nothing more complicated than that.

If you are starting out, subscribe to Robbie O’Briens online building courses, I think he charges 100 dollars for complete video tutorials of every step by step process to build a guitar, well worth your money.

Steve

I second the recommendation for Robbie's courses. I've take the classical and the steelstring course, and following them has let me make great guitars.

[Alan Carruth]

mercy wrote:
"If the builders responding on this thread would share their nuances of building it would be too long for a forum format. "

Gore and Gilet filled up two big textbooks, and so did Ervin Somogyi, with little overlap that I could see.

I had a friend who was an old carpenter. He said he could sit down with a looseleaf notebook and 300 sheets of lined paper, and fill it with stupid carpenter tricks. If he showed it to another old carpenter he'd say; "Great, but you forgot these!", and fill another 300 pages. That's about right.

I've been trying for the past few busy days to come up with responses to my critics in this thread that won't sound like special pleading to them. It's hard: I can't fill up books with ASCII text on line (although, in all the years I've been posting I bet I have!), and if they won't accept the reasoning I can put out in this format in this thread I don't see what else I can do.

To me it seems that there are two points that should be obvous:
1)wood is a variable material, so you need to vary the way you work with it to obtain consistent tonal results, and
2) such variation is not possible in a mass production setting.

Factory guitars do vary somewhat in tone. With proper understanding and controls, that variation can be reduced by individual luthiers. Setting, say, Taylor on one end, and somebody like myself on the other, there's a whole range of different things in between, and everybody has their eyes on a slightly different prize. It's not for me to say who the 'best' or 'most consistent' makers are: I don't know them all and their work as well as I'd need to, for one thing.

Opportunity does not equal result. Just because an individual can make more consistent guitars than a factory doesn't mean they do. There are a thousand reasons why they might or might not. Many simply don't want to. Variation certainly serves the factories well.

Finally, keep in mind that I've never heard of anybody deliberately making two good guitars that actually sound 'alike' right off the bench. I've tried, and will keep trying, but I'm not sanguine. There are plenty of reasons to think it might not be possible. So there's the question of what is 'close enough', and the related one of how much variation (in what!) you need to hear for it to be 'different'. For one thing, it matters a lot who's doing the listening and judging. This is a hard problem, and may be a 'wicked' one: inherently unsolvable. Not a very satisfactory answer, I'm afraid, but the best short one I can come up with.

[charles Tauber]

Originally Posted by Alan Carruth

For one thing, it matters a lot who's doing the listening and judging. This is a hard problem, and may be a 'wicked' one: inherently unsolvable. Not a very satisfactory answer, I'm afraid, but the best short one I can come up with.

Actually, I think it is not only a satisfactory answer but a definitive answer, if one understand the depth of your answer.

The buying habits of guitar players show, repeatedly, that "beauty is in the eye [ear] of the beholder." That is, just about any guitar will sound "great" to someone, while sounding "like a dog" to someone else. The guitar maker is trying to hit a moving target of what "good" is.

For example, look at the comments that people here make on the subject of, say, a Gibson J45. Some think they are the bee's knees, while others think they sound awful. Some will sift through many "identical" J45's to find "The One" that is "good", passing on the many that "aren't". Ditto for other brands and other models.

There is no universal standard of what is "good". If one maker, striving for his or her "good" sound makes guitars one way, another maker, striving for his or her "good" sound makes guitars another way. Their targets are different, as are their "secret" methods for achieving them. For every maker who does it one way, there are 10 who do it a different way, be it bracing arrangement, bracing shape, bracing height, top thickness, body depth, body taper, ... But for very specific instances, there are no secrets, just each with his or her own preferred methods. The mistake that many first-time builders make is that they try to take a piece from the method of this maker and a piece from that maker and another from another maker: they end up with a mess of competing ideas and methods, rather than one particular, single, cohesive method that is proven.

[printer2]

Originally Posted by Truckjohn

When you get into actual building of guitars - you quickly learn the real "Secrets" are stuff that players and enthusiasts care not ONE whit about..... They are the secrets that turn wood into an attractive, first quality musical instrument... The secret of how to joint the top properly... The secret of how to install binding so it looks clean.. How to bend sides... The secret of how to lay out frets and do intonation so the instrument plays in tune... The secret of how to level the fretboard so the frets only require minimal levelling. The secret of laying on a first quality finish... Etc....

These are the real secrets.....

No kidding.