2024
AL#152 p.52
Devon Pessler Alyssa Fernandez Mark French
▪ A lot of people have a rough idea of how it would affect the sound of a flattop guitar to make the sides deeper, or to make the soundhole smaller. But now a college professor and two students have built the test apparatus and quantified the question. Read this article and see if you guessed right.
2022
AL#147 p.60
Roger Haggstrom
▪ They say you can improve the sound of a new guitar by attaching a machine that will provide direct vibration to the instrument for a few days, simulating the breaking-in that might occur from months of playing. Not surprisingly, “they” will also sell you such a machine. But what else might work? Ask a luthier who also publishes a magazine for exotic fish fanciers, and he might suggest belting an aquarium air pump to the face of the guitar.
2022
AL#146 p.44
Mark French Alyssa Fernandez
▪ How stiff is that neck blank? You could cut all your blanks to the same dimensions and then set up a rig with a hanging weight to measure deflection and such. But hey, got a smart phone? It can listen while you tap on a bunch of neck blanks, and then tell you how stiff each one is.
2021
AL#144 p.6
Roger Haggstrom
▪ A hundred and some years ago, Swedish folks sat around the house all of a dark winter and sang hymns together, accompanied by the strummings of cheap mass-produced guitars. Those days are gone, but a lot of the guitars are still hanging on the walls of old houses. Roger Häggström has made a business of restoring them to useful condition and modifying them to sound and play better than they ever could have. He restores and modifies. Restomods. Mentions the Levin guitar company.
2021
AL#142 p.55
Max Krimmel
▪ If you are luthier who does not remember the name of Max Krimmel, you might be under age fifty. Max was a pack leader in the early days of the American Lutherie Boom, before he went on to specialize in a few of his many other artistic interests. Anyway, why and article about marimbas? As Max says, “Think of it as deep background learning.”
2020
AL#141 p.70
Howard Stephens
▪ The author argues that they don’t sound very different.
2021
AL#142 p.4
Michael Cone
▪ Collecting frequency response data from completed guitars. In reply to a question in AL#141.
2020
AL#141 p.47
F.A. Jaen
▪ These linings are something like reverse kerfing, but they are built up in place, starting with an ingeniously aligned set of individual blocks. There’s always a new way to do it.
2019
AL#138 p.54
Harry Fleishman
▪ Harry teams up with the owner of one of his flattop guitars to try some major changes to the bridge and evaluate the results. He reaches conclusions about the relationship between saddle height and bridge beefiness. And speaking og beef, Harry shows how he makes individual tapered saddles out of chopsticks.
2019
AL#136 p.69
R.M. Mottola
▪ Can you still get Bradley signal generators, the kind used for glitter-testing instruments and instrument parts, now that Don Bradley has passed away? No, but there are many more-modern alternatives.
2019
AL#137 p.22
Cyndy Burton Joshia de-Jonge
▪ Joshia de Jonge was a sensation at the 1998 GAL Convention when, as a young female luthier, she brought a nicely-made and fine sounding instrument to the classical guitar listening session. It helped to have grown up in a guitar-making family. And now that she has left her parents’ home and shop, she is raising guitar-making sons. Mentions Geza Burghardt; Linda Manzer; Sergei de Jonge; Eric Sahlin.
2019
AL#137 p.62
Greg Maxwell
▪ Australian luthier Trevor Gore is the co-author of the two-volume book Contemporary Acoustic Guitar, Design and Build. Gore teaches a three-day seminar in which he demonstates his very specific and number-based method of measuring and controlling the resonant frequecies of guitars. Maxwell attended one such seminar, held at Robbie O’Brien’s shop, and gives a brief overview.
2019
AL#136 p.20
Mark French
▪ We all know what “impedance” is, right? It’s that stuff… the force that… well, what is it really? Turns out it’s something like pushing a kid on a swing at the wrong time. And it has a lot to do with the resonances of acoustic instruments, which has a lot to do with how they sound. Anyway, in this largely math-free presentation, Professor Mark gives us the scoop.
2019
AL#136 p.42
Massimo Maddaloni Lizabeth-Jane Hella Giacomo Parimbelli
▪ From the time that the violin was invented, Cremona was the world center for the highest quality string instrument making, until it gradually became known for lower-quality mass production of fiddles. After its dark age, Cremona has more recently seen a renaissance of its lutherie heritage. This article looks at an unusual guitar made by a Cremonese luthier in the 1930s and sees echoes of the old masters in its design. Mentions Stradivari, Panormo, Fibonacci spiral, Archimedean spiral, golden ratio.
2018
AL#134 p.34
Greg Byers
▪ So you made a classical guitar, and it sounds good. You want your next one to sound good, too. You want your output to be consistently good. How do you do that? After decades of lutherie experience, Byers has developed a method of recording the frequency responses of the soundboard at each major stage of construction. Does the tap-tone of the raw top set tell the whole story? No, but it can help you steer the project to a successful conclusion.
2018
AL#134 p.42
Michael Bashkin Harry Fleishman
▪ Everybody knows Harry Fleishman, right? We first “Met the Maker” in 2001, but by then Harry had already been an active GAL author and convention attendee for some time. Now we are catching up with him. This recent chapter of his story is a doozy, with major moves, businesses opening and closing, fruitful collaborations, international travel, and new beginnings.
2018
AL#134 p.52
Chris Herrod
▪ You’ll often read article in American Lutherie where scientists explain the sound of guitars in terms of resonant frequencies and onset transients. On the other hand, longtime wood merchant Chris Herrod is here to give the metaphoric pendulum a big old shove back to the right-brain tradition of using evocative adjectives like “dry,” “creamy,” and “poignant.” He also discusses psychoacoustics research and how confident we should be about our “ears.”
2018
AL#133 p.3
Brent Benfield
▪ Do finely-sanded guitar tops actually sound different from the usual ones? An experienced luthier writes in to aver that they do.
2017
AL#131 p.3
Samuele Carcagno Chris Plack
▪ A study at Lancaster University seeks luthiers to help with a scientific study of the impact of wood choice on the percieved sound of acoustic guitars.
2017
AL#130 p.22
David Freeman
▪ Freeman has made a number of guitars with varying combinations of off-center soundholes, graduated body depth, rolled-over edges, and adjustable side ports. He gives us his thoughts on how these design factors interact and how they advance his quest for a more erognomic steel string guitar.
2016
AL#128 p.58
James Blilie
▪ We all have ideas about the stiffness of brace wood, probably based on a combination of intuition, hearsay, and informal flexing. Blilie aims to accumulate more quantitave data. Here he reports on his latest tests. He also describes his methodology and the reasoning behind it. This is Blilie’s second article on this topic. The earlier one is in AL128. A third article appears in AL133.
2014
AL#118 p.68
R.M. Mottola
▪ Reading up on the subjects of psychoacoustics, human sensory evaluation, music synthesis, audio electronics, and magic, in order to provide some insight on general guitar acoustics.