Experimentation?

[Mr. Jelly]

I don't build guitars though I am curious about the learning curve that some of you may have experienced. Have you experimented with different bracing patterns or always used variations of the same X bracing? Have you experimented with different, meaning nonstandard, wood? Is all this just a waist of time as it's hard enough just to build a decent guitar?

[Truckjohn]

As a point of reference - the entire design of the guitar (including scales and intonation) was worked out by trial and error over many hundreds of years. And "The Guitar" piggybacked on a "Stringed musical instrument" tradition that goes back many millennia... There hasn't been particularly any "Formal science" involved until perhaps the last 50 or 70 years. Ironically - the "Clean Sheet Scientific designs" have been glaring failures....

So there is a fine tradition of experimenting as well as constant trial and error. And you see this within basically all the small shop hand makers...

Modern Industrial Manufacturing has diverged from that tradition - simply because high volume industrial production requires labor saving jigs and tooling - which in turn require fixed designs...

For myself - basically every guitar is an experiment of one sort or another.

[redir]

Yes I have done much experimentation early on. What I found was it was not worth it. Well. that or I had crazy ideas in my head that simply were not true. I've gone from over braced to under braced in various patterns on a few occasions. I usually just ended up retopping the guitars so it's all good in the end.

I applaud those who continue to push the envelope, for me it's not worth it any more. There is still plenty of ways to adjust the traditional systems and get after certain tones that you want.

As for wood, I almost always use not traditional wood except for tops though I have used things like Southern Yellow pine and White pine and others besides the regular Spruce or Cedar. You can build a guitar from any hardwood you want and get just as good results as the traditional woods given that your top is more traditional.

[charles Tauber]

Originally Posted by Mr. Jelly

Have you experimented with different bracing patterns or always used variations of the same X bracing?

As stated in the previous responses, nearly every instrument incorporates some variation and experimentation. As redir found, I've found that the more radical the departure from traditional sizes, shapes and interior designs, generally, the more radical the tonal departure.

Have you experimented with different, meaning nonstandard, wood?

Sure. My favourite quote is from Sergie de Jonge, who, when asked what is his favourite wood from which to make guitars, stated, "The kind that grows on trees". Two years ago, I played an all-spruce guitar he made - spruce neck, back, sides and top. It sounded good.

A skilled maker can make a "good sounding" guitar out of nearly any kind of wood. "Good sounding" is very largely subjective. Certainly in the steel string guitar world, almost any guitar will sound good to someone, but not everyone.

Is all this just a waist of time as it's hard enough just to build a decent guitar?

It is and it isn't. It depends upon what you want from your guitar making. If you want tried-and-true and "guaranteed" success, stick with traditional designs - the choice of wood species, generally, matters far less. If you are willing to repeatedly fail in the search of "improvement", you can be as radical in your designs as you wish.

Fretted string instruments have evolved through trial and error, mostly, over the last number of centuries. If one looks at the general areas of evolution, these include design, sound, manufacture and materials.

As far as the sound goes, I think with the acoustic guitar we are at the point that I don't think there is that much room for "improvement". Sure, there are tweaks to be made to this or that aspect, but as long as people want the instrument to sound as it now sounds, I don't think there is that much more that can be done to it to "improve" it acoustically.

Where there is room for improvement is in ease and uniformity of manufacture. Ovation and Taylor are good examples of those who have made innovative strides in that area. Angle-adjustable bolt-on necks are an improvement in ease of adjustment and consistency. Taylor has added a patented groove around the circumference of the lower bout of the top. The groove provides greater flexibility of the top than one without it, lending itself well to the factory environment. (Hand makers usually graduate the top thickness so that it thins near the edges: Taylor's groove is a method to automate that in an industrial setting.)

Ovation, of course, revolutionized guitar manufacture, in part, by using non-wooden materials, allowing them to form enclosures into a bowl shape - lutes were individual wooden staves glued together into a bowl, so the idea of using a bowl-shaped back is not a new one. (Long before Ovation, Macaferri made plastic ukuleles: his plastic guitars weren't very successful, though is ukuleles were.) And similar evolutionary improvements. Other manufacturers have used carbon fibre, eliminating wood partially or all together. Others have used carbon fibre to reinforce braces, making them stiffer and lighter. Others have used non-wooden materials to make multi-layered tops. Then there's the relatively recent use torrefaction of guitar tops. And so on.

Some the the design changes are made to improve ease of manufacture, ease of setup, consistency in setup, differences in tone/response, ease of playability and reduction of warranty work. Some design aspects are made to distinguish oneself from the rest of the (very competitive) market. Some examples include the "Manzer wedge" and Grit Laskin's arm and rib bevels - both of which, originally, distinguished their instruments and offered improvements in playability.

In summary, you can choose what areas of guitar making you want to experiment with: design, manufacture, sound or materials. There is constant experimentation going on. Whether or not the results of that experimentation is "innovation" or "improvement" is in the eye, ear and wallets of the beholder. History will sort that all out.

[Truckjohn]

Wood wise - local, domestic, and "Sustainable" wood for guitar construction is another *VERY* old tradition....

In Ye Olde Days - "Regular instruments" made for "Common people" were made of less expensive local wood.... And "Fancy Pants" instruments made for "The Elite" were made of very expensive and hard to get exotic wood... And so you see old cheap European guitars made of birch, poplar, maple, and cypress... And you see expensive European guitars made of Ebony and and Rosewood....

It's pretty funny to consider that Martin's use of Mahogany stemmed from CF Martin's quest for an Extra-Cheap wood for his "Cheap" models.... Mahogany shipping dunnage was nearly free if you scavenged it at the docks in New York Harbor.... And the Mahogany Martin guitar was birthed!! Literally - Mahogany was the cheapest stuff that he could get to make guitars for regular working people out of..

Even today - beautiful straight grain quartersawn african mahogany costs about half what equally good quartersawn maple, walnut, or cherry lumber costs (if you can even get it at any price...)....

We see the same with Koa guitars and Ukes in Hawaii - it was just a local, domestic hardwood.. Literally just growing on trees.... There's no maple or birch native to Hawaii.. So that's what they used....

But when your goal is to *Sell* expensive guitars (not cheap ones) - you would probably have better luck trying to sell stuff which people already consider "Premium"....

[printer2]

I never planned on making more than 3-4 guitars (acoustic). The first one was an experiment in building it all without going the regular luthier supply route. I built the guitar also to get my first mistakes out of the way. I did things the hard way, I know some here thought, well they were wondering. I built my own drum sander, dust collector, heat blanket, made my own truss rod, resawed a cedar fence board for the top using a 4x6 metal bandsaw, used pine for the back and sides, fir neck. In the end it turned out being a not bad sounding guitar. I was suppose to use the tops and back and side sets (two spruce and a cedar) to build my other three guitars and move on. Never did build with them yet.

Instead I get an idea and want to see if it is viable, my all walnut guitar was one of them. I wanted to see how small a guitar I can make and have it still sound like a guitar. Then I tried home torrifying wood and made a first for me, Spanish Foot styled build with the baked wood. Did my first volute and it was my first nylon sting guitar also. I like the result but the highlight to me is the neck which was made using a 2"x3" stud. I moved onto building with 2"x4"s instead, the 2x3 needed an extra piece laminated onto the heel. Since then I have made a number of all spruce guitars, one is a 00 size that except for the bridge, fretboard and bridge (and rosette) is all from one 2"x4".

I have harvested a piece of the oak tree my neighbor had taken down, built a guitalele out of it and the rest should be seasoned enough to be used for guitars. Used jatoba flooring for fretboards. I experimented with making Martin size 5 guitars out of Home Depot materials and bits and pieces from China in order to build a under $50 guitar that I could give away to kids. Again the spruce bodies I learned how to build although it hit me after that a softwood guitar might not be the best for a younger kid as it probably will get banged up soon enough. Thinking of going maple for the bodies.

Plan on doing bracing experiments next year, just a test mule that I can rebrace over and over with. Thinking of using hide glue and just heat and peel off to try a different idea. That way all the top and the rest of the guitar will be the same and I can hear what the changes of the bracing effects. Lots of experimentation going on and more to come. I am building more for my own enjoyment and to have something I can keep learning about. I have no reason to build the same guitars over and over except for the giveaway guitars. If and when I find myself settling on a recipe and try to build guitars the same I probably will find a creative outlet I need in the appearance of the guitars. There is so much to learn and skill to acquire I doubt I will get to the point where I find I have nothing new to try.

[macmanmatty]

Deadwood guitars has a patented non standard bracing system shaped like a spider web. It works well and handles high string tension well. They also use non standard woods like sweetgum, black locust, cherry, white oak, hemlock ect. I saw picture of a guitar someone had braced that looked like the top of an apple pie no idea how it sounded, but the bracing was thin though. Mcpherson guitars uses their own bracing system composed of two strips of spruce glued with rosewood in the middle in a offset x shape. They also use non standard woods. There are builders getting innovative with design and woods.

[Alan Carruth]

Designer and craftsman David Pye wrote:
"Where the problem is old, the old solutions will nearly always be best (unless some new technique has been introduced) because it is inconceivable that all of the designers of ten or twenty generations will have been fools."

Every guitar maker I know is always trying new things. Most of the experiments fail, but some work out. Whenever somebody comes up with even a slight improvement everybody else copies it right away. As a result, most of the stuff that works is already in the design. Most of the innovations that have come up recently and caught on have been applications of new technology, such as CNC, or new materials, such as Nomex and CF.

As Truckjohn says, most of the 'clean sheet' 'scientific' designs have been failures. That's because the folks making them started off with the acoustic understanding of the day, and tried to make up a 'perfect' design on that basis. The problem is that guitars are far more complex acoustically than the models can take into account, and then the success or otherwise of the design is judged by people, who are even more complex. It's not too hard to decide that the world needs a 'louder' guitar, nor to come up with a design that will make one. Making a much louder acoustic guitar that people can play, and will want to listen to; that's tricky.

There has been a lot of 'science' done over the past 30-50 years working the other way: trying to understand how the existing designs work, and what makes one guitar preferable to another. At this point I'd say that a 'scientific' or maybe 'technical' approach (real science is hard to do, and takes time) has been useful in two ways: it can raise the 'standard of mediocrity', and it can help narrow down wood choices.

Given the variability of wood, even from the same species, it's hard (and may be impossible) to make 'identical' guitars. Measuring the wood you use, and the parts you make from it, can narrow down the variation in the final product. It may not help you make a 'great' guitar, but it can keep you from making really bad ones.

Understanding how the guitar produces sound, to the extent that we can, can point to the properties of the woods to use for various parts. As the 'traditional' tropical woods become harder to get, for whatever reasons, we can search for substitutes that might work well.

One of the characteristics of a really evolved design is that the difference between a 'very good' example and an 'average' one is small, in an objective sense, but it's also very important. All of the runners on the starting block for the Olympic 100 meter race are far better than I could ever have hoped to be, and the difference between the winner and the one in last place is a fraction of a second, in all likelihood. A guitar carefully built of any reasonable set of wood to a 'standard' design is likely to be a pretty good instrument. The difference between it and the Greatest Guitar Ever will most likely be hard to measure, but it will be easy to hear. Everybody is experimenting to find a way to make a 'great' guitar. Most of the experiments are 'tweaks'. Once in a while somebody tries something more radical. It usually doesn't work, but sometimes... Of course, in the circumstances, even an objectively small change can be considered 'radical'.

[Braindead]

Sometimes, playing against the odds does work. For instance, Taylor's "V Bracing" design!!!

[B. Howard]

Started as a hobby at this in 1984, been a full time pro almost 9 years now and I am never done experimenting....... Never done learning.

I always have one experimental build happening somewhere in the shop. Whether I am trying a new functional concept or a new design concept there is always something cooking on the back burner. When I am done and have assessed what I need from them I often put them up for sale at a discount price to recoup some of my costs in the project. And I learn something every time.....