2024
AL#152 p.46
Raymond Bryant
▪ Guitarist Bryant fell in love with an instrument that he tried at a local music store. When he learned to his surprise that it was individually handcrafted just a few miles from his home, he had to make the short pilgrimage. He takes us along to meet Mark Goodman, who has been working alone for decades in his simple and efficient home workshop.
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.
2024
AL#152 p.69
Ralf Grammel
▪ Grammel shows us how to replace the rings in a rosette after the instrument is completed.
2023
AL#149 p.4
Mike Doolin Ken Parker
▪ Can you believe we have never met this guy? Hes a giant of the American Lutherie Boom, he was at the Guilds 1979 Convention, and he has been a GAL member for over twenty years. The world knows him as the maker of the Fly solidbody guitar, but now he has returned to his first love: the archtop guitar. Mentions Larry Fishman, John D’Angelico, Jimmy D’Aquisto, Scott Chinery, Orville Gibson, Lloyd Loar, Raphael Ciani, Nick Lucas, Michael Greenfield, Sam Zygmuntowicz.
2023
AL#149 p.50
Mark French Eddy Efendy
▪ Putting a tube in the port of a loudspeaker box changes the lower resonances. Makers of classical guitars have known about that for a century and a half. They call that tube a tornavoz. French and Efendy give us the math on how it works.
2017
AL#132 p.69
John Calkin
▪ How do you get the cleanest routed rosette channels?
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#126 p.22
Alex Glasser Brian Michael
▪ Brian and Alex cover a number of interesting repair projects including crack repair and finish touchup on satin-finished guitars, cracked heel blocks, magnets, steamers, and even using a parked car as a neck heater. From their 2014 GAL Convention workshop.
2015
AL#123 p.62
Greg Nelson
▪ Controlling the distance between the pin and the bit is the whole game when cutting circles with a router. Here’s a new way to do it that offers very fine control and no threads. Elegant!.
2015
AL#121 p.65
Clifford Wilkes
▪ Wilkes adds binding to the inside edge of a soundhole and avoids clamping damage by using a PVC pipe almost exactly the diameter of the soundhole.
2014
AL#118 p.66
Jack-E. Johnston
▪ Tools for working through the soundhole to attach a bolt-on neck.
2014
AL#117 p.52
James Condino John Monteleone
▪ A history of the ellipse soundhole cutter device in lutherie and it’s lineage from D’Angelico to D’Aquisto to John Monteleone.
2013
AL#115 p.68
Monica Esparza
▪ Creating a mosaic rosette from an original illustration.
2013
AL#113 p.69
Gary Bray
▪ Making a herring bone purfling curve around the soundhole as a rosette without breaking it.
2012
AL#111 p.60
David Freeman
▪ A pictorial essay on the construction of David Freeman’s spiral rainbow rosette.
2012
AL#110 p.32
Graham McDonald
▪ Rare information on building Norwegian Hardanger sympathetic string fiddles and their soundholes.
2011
AL#106 p.60
Roger-Alan Skipper
▪ Skipper makes a showy soundhole decoration for a guitar in record time with Abalam, Ebony, and dyed Veneer.
2011
AL#105 p.67
Michael Grossman
▪ Adding a binding strip to the inside edge of a guitar soundhole.
2010
AL#102 p.58
Michael McCarten
▪ McCarten devises a style with characteristics of both the ‘paper rose’ and single layer soundhole rose, but with an aesthetic not typical of traditional work.
2009
AL#97 p.68
R.M. Mottola
▪ Information on oval rosette jigs appears in AL#41, pg. 34 and BRBAL#4, pg. 140, ‘Making Oval Mandolin Rosettes’ by Jonathon Peterson.
2008
AL#96 p.54 ALA3 p.25
R.M. Mottola
▪ Do you believe that soundports on the side of a guitar make a difference to the sound perception of the guitarist? Do you believe they don’t? Either way, you should consider the facts presented in this article. It may change the way you build guitars, but it won’t give you more faith in the hearing of humans, even of professional musicians. With 1 photo and 3 charts.
2008
AL#94 p.56
Alan Carruth
▪ Carruth built a classical guitar with many ports cut in the side. By closing the ports with corks in various combinations he tested the usefulness of sideports and tried to establish the physics behind their use. Though this guitar did not make a believer out of him, he admits that his results are somewhat inconclusive. With one photo and a slew of charts and figures concerning the air modes of his guitar with various sideports open.
This article has been nominated as one of the Guild’s best articles published before 2010.
2008
AL#94 p.30 read this article
Robert-J. Spear
▪ The second installment of how geometry might have been used to design the Cremonese violin. Part One was in AL#93. With 10 graphs and a photo.
This article has been nominated as one of the Guild’s best articles published before 2010.
2008
AL#93 p.7
Marc Connelly
▪ Marc is making a flattop guitar with a large side port and no hole on the top. He likes it.
2007
AL#91 p.6 read this article
Cyndy Burton
▪ Burton’s micro history of sideports (holes in the sides, in addition to the front soundhole) in stringed instruments serves as an introduction to the next three articles. Luthiers she mentions include John Monteleone, Robert Ruck, Alain Bieber, Gennero Fabricatore, Kenny Hill, Alan Carruth, Roger Thurman, and Augustino LoPrinzi. With 9 photos.
This article has been nominated as one of the Guild’s best articles published before 2010.
2007
AL#91 p.8 read this article
John Monteleone
▪ Ace archtop builder Monteleone is an advocate of side soundports (holes in the sides, in addition to the front soundhole) and has employed them for over a decade. His article includes personal background, developmental work on his sideported instruments, and construction techniques. With 3 photos.
This article has been nominated as one of the Guild’s best articles published before 2010.
2007
AL#91 p.11 read this article
Mike Doolin
▪ The author found that a sideport (hole in the side, in addition to the front soundhole) in his guitar changed its voice in an undesirable way. Adding a bass reflex tube to the hole returned the guitar to a tonal range he liked. He remains luke warm to the benefits of side ports. With 5 photos.
This article has been nominated as one of the Guild’s best articles published before 2010.
2007
AL#91 p.12 read this article
Robert Ruck
▪ Ruck has been adding sideports (holes in the sides, in addition to the front soundhole) to his classical and flamenco guitars for many years and is a strong advocate of their advantages. The incidents that led him to incorporate ports are very interesting. He mentions Roger Thurman and Augustino LoPrinzi. With 1 photo.
This article has been nominated as one of the Guild’s best articles published before 2010.
2006
AL#85 p.30
Chris Burt
▪ Burt’s in-depth examination of plate carving continues. His techniques are old-school, relying on tap tones to define plate stiffness and definite tonal relationships between the top and back plates. With 9 photos and a drawing.
This article has been nominated as one of the Guild’s best articles published before 2010.
2005
AL#84 p.6 BRB7 p.392
Greg Byers
▪ With tools you’ve probably already got in your shop you can make mosaic rosettes that look modern and yet somehow traditional. The techniques differ from the bricks and tiles made of old and are more akin to the processes of making fancy purflings. Cooler than anything, but not for the impatient among us. With 31 photos and a pair of diagrams.
This article has been nominated as one of the Guild’s best articles published before 2010.
2005
AL#82 p.38 BRB7 p.344
R.M. Mottola
▪ It’s not necessary to understand the physics of sound to be a great instrument maker, but it can’t hurt. Many of us would like to believe that we succeed using experience and strong intuition and don’t need science. Maybe an analytical mind just gets in the way, no? Or maybe the science guys are just smarter than the rest of us and we need an excuse not to stand in the same light that they do. Who knows? Anyhow, the Helmholtz resonance is the lowest vibratory mode of an instrument, though not necessarily the lowest note that instrument is capable of. All the rest of sound physics is built on top of the Helmholtz resonance, and Mottola devolves the science enough for the rest of us to understand. It’s fun but in the end it’s not clear that it really matters. For the few among us with operational math brains all the formulas are presented in a sidebar.
This article has been nominated as one of the Guild’s best articles published before 2010.
2005
AL#82 p.41 BRB7 p.348
R.M. Mottola
▪ Here’s the numbers and how to use them.
2004
AL#78 p.4 BRB7 p.174
Dan Erlewine Frank Ford
▪ A ton of guitar repairs can only be accomplished by reaching through the soundhole. Here, two masters of the genre describe some of their methods a working in the cramped darkness, some of the tools they’ve used and/or created, and the attitude you have to acquire when getting stumped and handing back an unrepaired guitar is not an option. With 32 photos.
2004
AL#78 p.54 BRB7 p.204
Robert-A. Edelstein Ben Edelstein
▪ How would you like an inspection tool that slides into any soundhole and gives you an electronic picture of what it sees? It’s here, it’s very cool, but it’s still pretty expensive. With 7 photos.
2003
AL#76 p.38 BRB7 p.126
Michael Darnton
▪ Certainly no instrument maker has been as studied and thought about as Stradivari. Not only would modern makers like to be as successful as he was, but his methods were poorly recorded and have to be rediscovered by examining his instruments. It’s a puzzle, and luthiers are by nature patient puzzle solvers. So, was there a Cremonese formula for laying out f-holes? Darnton thinks so, and believes he may be onto the answer. With a photo and one drawing.
2003
AL#74 p.66 BRB7 p.489
Richard Heeres
▪ A new method for old style rosette that works better than gluing strips into the rosette channel.
2003
AL#73 p.14 BRB6 p.368
Eugene Clark Jonathon Peterson
▪ Clark is one of the old American masters of lutherie. Building an original rosette in the Spanish tradition is way more complicated than routing a channel and poking in some abalone, as steel stringers are apt to do, but with Clark’s instruction you can do it. Includes 22 photos. Part 1 appeared in AL #71.
This article has been nominated as one of the Guild’s fifty best articles published before 2010.
2002
AL#71 p.8 BRB6 p.368
Eugene Clark Jonathon Peterson
▪ How deeply do you want to dive into the matter of making rosettes? Here Clark will submerge you until you gasp for air or make a fine rosette, whichever comes first. Designing the rosette and dying the sticks receive deepest treatment, though no words are spared when describing the cutting and sizing of the materials. Everything is here. With 33 photos. Part Two will appear in a future issue of AL.
This article has been nominated as one of the Guild’s fifty best articles published before 2010.
2002
AL#71 p.65 BRB6 p.464
Jonathon Peterson
▪ Small adjustable-width angle gauges for a through-the-soundhole approach to repair a fractured top on a Spanish guitar.
2000
AL#62 p.58
Peter Giolitto
▪ A method utilizing a go-bar deck as alternative to gluing on a classical bridge using clamps through the soundhole.
1998
AL#54 p.51 BRB5 p.493
Filippo Avignonesi
▪ Correcting sinking soundholes, i.e, weak waist bars using this technique.
1995
AL#43 p.57 BRB4 p.495
Jonathon Peterson
▪ Using an inspection light and mirror to locate the position of the old brace from leftover glue through the sound hole on a damaged American made Neapolitan mandolin.
1995
AL#41 p.34 BRB4 p.140
Jonathon Peterson
▪ Seven luthiers explain how they cut that oval slot.
This article has been nominated as one of the Guild’s best articles published before 2010.
1995
AL#41 p.58 BRB4 p.488
Jorge Gonzalez
▪ A tool for measuring inside instruments with tiny sound holes.
1994
AL#40 p.60 BRB4 p.490
Jonathon Peterson
▪ Small fluorescent lights used as inspection lights, small enough to fit through F holes.
1994
AL#38 p.44 BRB4 p.48
Mike Doolin
▪ Anyone willing to dismantle their first guitar deserves a lot of credit, especially if it came out cosmetically pristine the first time. Doolin replaced the top of his first guitar to bring the bass response up to spec. With 9 photos and a lot to think about.
1992
AL#32 p.69 BRB3 p.474
Dake Traphagen
▪ Making baroque guitar roses.
1992
AL#31 p.61 BRB3 p.474
Robert Lundberg
▪ Literature on making Baroque guitar roses.
1991
AL#27 p.56 BRB3 p.446 read this article
Michael Darnton
▪ Darnton explains how to disassemble a fiddle, and the effects of soundhole size on violin performance.
1991
AL#25 p.21 BRB3 p.482
C.F. Casey
▪ This is one way to make a rosette when you are tired of simple circle patterns.
1990
AL#23 p.60 BRB2 p.485
Christopher Allworth C.F. Casey
▪ The Ashmolean Museum (Oxford, England) has available working drawings of a 1641 guitar by Rene Voboam, including details of construction of the parchment rose.
1989
AL#20 p.40 HLC p.94
Robert Lundberg
▪ Lundberg makes a complete lute top including carving the rose and bracing the soundboard. Contains 57 photos and 6 diagrams with detailed captions. This series ran for 19 installments in American Lutherie and has been collected into our hardback book Historical Lute Construction.
1988
AL#15 p.64 BRB2 p.81
John Schofield
▪ Schofield uses a pin router to cut matching f-holes in his mandolin tops quickly and safely.
1988
AL#14 p.22 HLC p.30
Robert Lundberg
▪ This portion of the series deals with the soundboard, or belly, of the lute, including the braces and rosette. Many drawings illustrate the shape and thickness of historical lute tops. Beautiful drawings accompany the photos of astonishing rosettes (the drawings are not patterns of the photos). Where did those old guys find the patience? This is the third of 19 installments.
1985
AL#1 p.16 BRB1 p.8 read this article
W.D. Allen
▪ Allen attempts to introduce the nonphysicist to useful concepts of resonance including standing waves, captured air mass, and soundhole size. Illustrated with the author’s own sometimes-whimsical drawings, the article aims at preparing luthiers to understand heavier fare on the physics of musical instruments.
This article has been nominated as one of the Guild’s best articles published before 2010.
1982
DS#225 LT p.7
C.F. Casey
▪ This inspection light will even fit through a mandolin f-hole.
1982
DS#225 LT p.7
C.F. Casey
▪ Uses a night light bulb.
1982
DS#209 LT p.60
Ted Davis
▪ Adjustable pin on the router base registers to a center hole.
1980
DS#164 LT p.62
J.D. Mackenzie
▪ Another design for routing rosette slots, this one uses a full-size router.
1980
DS#157 BRB1 p.166
Glenn Markel
▪ Markel offers a simple trick for sealing off instrument ports before finishing.
1980
DS#136 BRB1 p.213
Peter Estes
▪ Don’t get finish inside your flattop when you spray, use this handy, easy-to-make gizmo. With diagram.
1980
DS#140 LW p.80
Larry Stevens
▪ A drill press only wants to make holes, but you can train it to do a lot of tricks. For instance, why not use it to mill the slots for rosette rings to snuggle into? Groovy! With diagrams of the cutting bits.
1979
DS#119 LT p.6
Kent Rayman
▪ This lamp even fits through f-holes.
1978
DS#88 LW p.78
Tim Olsen
▪ Are you tired of rosettes that are just rings around the soundhole? Here’s a jumping off point if you want to take the plunge. The next step is to get rid of the round soundhole. With 3 diagrams.
1978
DS#69 LT p.61
John Spence
▪ Spence uses sub-bases for his router to make rosette cavities. The sub-bases are drilled with holes that fit over a pin mounted in the center of what will be the soundhole.
1978
DS#78 LT p.63
Al Leis
▪ Close-tolerance adjustability with a full-size router to create binding and rosette slots.
1974
DS#1 BRB2 p.104
H.E. Huttig
▪ Traditional Spanish style rosette making for soundholes, starting with veneer preparation.