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Tag Archive for: Ervin Somogyi

As mentioned in a previous post, Leonardo Buendia, one of Ervin Somogyi’s current apprentices and an amazing up and coming builder, is wrapping up his 3 year apprenticeship with Ervin and is moving to his own shop in Oakland, California.

We caught up with Leo and asked him a few questions regarding his new shop.

1) Where will the shop be located? Why did you pick there?

Leo: My new workshop is located in East Oakland.  I was offered the space by Lewis Santer, whom I’ve known for 3 years and who for a long time shared this same space with Michi Matsuda.  Lewis has been in this shop for 10 years and it’s well-equipped and already set up in a very smart way.  It’s a pleasure to be able to work with Lewis, who was also Ervin Somogyi’s shop manager for many years.  The transition is going smoothly – I’m getting back into my rhythm quickly.

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2) How are you configuring your shop? Why will it be configured this way?

Leo: Since everything was already set up for the construction and repair of guitars, I’ve only had to put together two benches–one in the dry room and one in the common space.  In the dry room I’m going to keep all of the wood I will be using for the guitars commissioned for these next few years.  The dry room is also where I will be doing all of the gluing.  I will be using the bench in the common space for shaping, scraping, sanding, etc.

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3) Any sources of inspiration that you can point to in your new shop?

Leo:
Ervin Somogyi’s shop, of course, is a big inspiration for how I would like my shop to look. I love the use of different workstations and I’m emulating that.  It allows my work to be very efficient.  I also took away from my experience at Ervin’s that it’s extremely helpful to have plenty of backstock of blocks, braces, fingerboards, pre-bent sides, pre-bent binding, etc.

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4) Any neat facts about your building process in your new shop that you’d like to share?

Leo: In the near future I will be working on designing a different kind of headstock.  So far I’ve been molding the heads in the style of a classical/Spanish guitar.  In Argentina we play Spanish guitars, so I’ve always liked the headstocks I learned to make with Ervin, which are reminiscent of these. Now that I will have more time for experimentation and designing, I am going to make headstocks with a more modern style, while still avoiding the symmetrical and conventional.  This new design is more like that of my fanned fret guitar.  Another change that’s coming is that in about 6 months I will begin with a new model, the OO.  The big sound that it makes is very surprising given its small body. In fact, it’s the guitar I plan to make for myself.

Click here to learn more about an Incoming Leonardo Buendia OM Build

Click here to watch Paul interview Leo Buendia at this year’s Memphis Acoustic Guitar Festival.

“The guitar itself has always been my best teacher.  She has always revealed herself to me bit by bit, taking her own sweet time.  I’ve been the student.” – Ervin Somogyi

We are extremely fortunate to have three Somogyi Guitars in-stock at the moment so we decided to record all three for another special video which we have named, “Three Decades of the Somogyi Sound!”

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Click here or on the video image above to watch “Three Decades of the Somogyi Sound!”

“Ervin Somogyi has long been one of my favorite builders. He was one of the original luthiers 80-somogyi-mod-dto create the open modern voicing that we now all think of when we hear fingerstyle guitar recordings. In the 1970s and 80s when artist like Alex De Grassi first started to record fingerstyle guitar, they went to Ervin Somogyi and asked him for guitars with more open voicing that would be more appropriate to make recordings with. The factory guitars of the day were simply not expressive enough for solo guitar pieces. To this day Ervin is considered one of the masters of guitar voicing and he has taught his ideas and techniques to many of today’s top luthiers the world over.” – Paul Heumiller

Here at Dream Guitars we have been a dealer for Ervin Somogyi for many years and he is constantly a favorite for our clientele. It is a sheer delight to have three of his guitars in the shop right now, each from another decade.

We simply could not resist recording them side-by-side to share with the world. Somogyi’s voice is one that all lovers of guitar should know and understand. It has so influenced modern guitar perhaps more so than any other single builder.

We asked Ervin Somogyi himself for a few thoughts on how his building has evolved over the last few decades and here’s what he had to say:

“Lately, some guitars of mine from the eighties and nineties have come on the market, and some of them have come to my shop for visits, checkups, or for a tweak or repair . . . or because the original owner was no longer playing guitar and wanted to see if I knew anyone who would want to buy their baby.  And so on.

I have been pleasantly surprised in every instance by how well they’ve held up.  Yes, they’ve had signs of wear and tear — if not in small scratches and such, then most notably in the look of the lacquered finish.  Lacquer has the capacity to separate from its underlayment, over time; and these guitars show small spots of lacquer separation/bubbling from the wood underneath.  This is not in the least bit serious; it’s cosmetic and easily fixable; a guitar simply looks not-brand-new in this regard.

Happily, not one of the guitars that I’ve seen or heard about, from this period, has been mistreated: they seem to be structurally sound.  And I’ve been pleasantly reminded of how far back I was using certain elements of decoration, or arrangements of bracing, that now seem to me like the most intelligent way to carry out this work.” – Ervin Somogyi

 

Click here to view our in-stock Ervin Somogyi guitars.

Our own Paul Heumiller recently sat down in front of the cameras to talk about one of Dream Guitars’ favorite builders, Jordan McConnell of McConnell Guitars (and the Grammy-award winning band, The Duhks) for a video interview.  You see, Paul is not only has a savvy eye when it comes to great luthiers and their instruments, but also sees things from the mindset of a player. In fact, he’s a proud owner of a McConnell and shares his feelings about that fine, custom made instrument with the viewer. Paul makes clear the guitar’s ability to bring out the music and sound he feels inside, a rare trait for any custom instrument.

McConnell builds rich-sounding and versatile instruments in both steel string and classical models at his shop in Winnipeg, Canada, on the fringes of the Canadian Prairies. McConnell became enamored with the construction of guitars at a young age and has studied with famed Spanish luthier, Jose Romanillos, gaining a valuable education in the work, the craftsmanship.

Among his customers: Tim Sparks, an award-winning fingerpicking player, jazz greats Larry Roy and Harley Card, Seth Avett of the Avett Brothers and Irish player John Doyle.

So, Paul sat down in our Weaverville, NC, studio, to talk about this fine luthier, who works with his father on the construction of the guitars. As a builder, Jordan McConnell has become a hot name and his work is in demand. While we do not have currently any in stock, Dream Guitars is accepting orders for his custom builds. Paul will personally work with you to ensure you get what your music deserves. Contact us to discuss the possibilities.

Considering a McConnell now? You may also want to check out this video of Jordan McConnell at the Dream Guitars headquarters a few years ago, offering an exclusive performance. We also have several other video samples of various McConnell guitars on our YouTube channel as well as the Listening Studio on our home page.

Special thanks to Dan Crapsi and Ginny Temple, who visited our shop and filmed this interview for their blog, thegoodguitar.com.

Recently Doug Young dropped by Dream Guitars and taught this great 3 part guitar lesson on arranging Amazing Grace for fingerstyle guitar. To follow along with the tablature, please click here.

From Doug’s website:

Doug Young is a fingerstyle instrumental guitarist based in the San Francisco South Bay area. An active perfomer in the local acoustic guitar scene, Doug hosts a monthly guitar showcase that has featured performers like Dorian Michael, Thomas Leeb, Steve Baughman, Teja Gerken, and many more. So far, Doug has released one CD, Laurel Mill, featuring his solo guitar playing, compositions and arrangements. Mel Bay has published his best-selling instructional book: “Understanding DADGAD: For Fingerstyle Guitar.” He is a Contributing Editor for Acoustic Guitar Magazine, and has also been published in Fingerstyle Guitar Magazine. In his role at Acoustic Guitar, Doug has written numerous instructional articles, gear reviews, and interviewed many of today’s top guitarists including Tommy Emmanuel, Sergio Assad, Andy McKee, Laurence Juber and Pierre Bensusan.

To learn more about Doug, his gig schedule, and his array of reviews and quality products, click here.

 

 

 

One of our favorite builders is the brilliant Jordan McConnell from Winnipeg, Canada. His guitars are impeccably crafted, and they offer stunning design and rich, articulate tones. Recently, Jordan informed us that he has developed a new model with the following dimensions.

Length: 19.5″
Lower bout: 15″
Upper bout: 11.25″
Standard scale length 25.25″

In Jordan’s words, “I like this shape for it’s versatility. It can be voiced to put the focus more in the midrange and trebles to create a very intimate and clear sounding guitar, but it doesn’t lack power and can still pack a pretty serious punch in the low end if that is desired. It’s a very comfortable size to play and can be more manageable than a jumbo sized body in a stage setting if someone is gigging a lot.”

If you would like to receive more information on this stunning guitar, or on any of Jordan’s other guitars, please give us a call. We’ll be happy to talk to you about these very special creations!

 

To see more photos, please click here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kathy

Kathy Wingert is an artist that has complete control of her medium. I met her for the first time at the most recent guitar festival in Ft. Lauderdale, at the Hard Rock. Her displays are hugely popular at guitar shows — the lines of her instruments are so elegant, the voices of her guitars are so original, the inlay work is beautiful and so…non derivative.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Kathy’s skills. She is an exceptional luthier, and consistently builds instruments with supreme voices.

First a little biography please. How long have you been a builder? With whom, if anyone, did you study or do repairs? Please tell me about your “ah-ha” moment when you realized luthiery was to be your chosen path.

A tiny little seed got planted during a trip to a guitar shop, the World of Strings.  One of the employees showed me a billet of Indian rosewood and proudly proclaimed that he was going to learn to build a guitar.  I was very curious about where and how that got done, and he said he would be learning from his boss, Jon Peterson.

My ah-ha came during a moment of soul searching, which I happened to be doing in the library.  I was ready for a new chapter and a new direction, the kids had gotten old enough for me to start thinking that way, and I was wide open to new ideas.  As luck would have it there was a book on guitar making in my library.  (I wish I could say which book it was, I haven’t seen it since.)

Though I knew instantly and deeply that I could be good at guitar making, I also knew it would take a little time to find my path.  I was on the cusp of the internet, and back in those days, kids, you had to leave your house to get information.  I read my way through five libraries and had collected quite a few books, including books about sharpening chisels and the amazing number of ways a router could be used, but I hadn’t found in print the book that made it all make sense.  I really don’t know how long the discovery process went on, but one morning I woke up and I understood how to build a guitar, not from a plan, but from a design of my own.

The next hurdle was finding materials.  A kind employee of a woodworking store told me about a guitar making class at a community college, and after I had been in the class for two months, the instructor told me that Jon Peterson at the World of Strings was looking for someone.  I took in some necks I had carved and an electric drop top that I had completed and got hired in 1995.

Has being a woman, in a field largely dominated by men, been advantageous or disadvantageous in anyway?

It was annoying as heck in the busy repair shop.  If I went to the counter they’d just ask for the “repair guy.”  I think being a woman kept my client list a little leaner than some builders with whom I feel I am well matched, but time has sorted a lot of that out.  I do know that I have had more than my share of wonderful customers with whom I have enjoyed every part of the journey.

On your website, you mention that you are in love with your job, and how deeply you enjoy the creative aspects of being a builder. Can you tell me more about that emotional connection, and how it relates to building guitars for clients, who may have different preferences than your own?

The answer to that probably relates pretty closely to the issue of being a woman in a male dominated business.  I think many times the people I work with are just open to letting me do what I do.  I can tell you for sure guys have let me build some pretty frilly guitars for them while pretending it was my idea!

Look, I’m very invested in what I do, and I am emotionally connected, but I’m also 100 percent pro.  There is almost always a middle ground, and I can catch the vision even if a client’s tastes are different from mine.

Working with your daughter Jimmi must certainly add to the love and meaningfulness of designing and constructing your instruments. How does that collaboration work?  How much free reign do you allow her to incorporate her own ideas?

Jimmi just continues to get better and better busier and busier, so I’m loving what’s going out the door to other builders, and I stare meaningfully in her direction hoping she will have time for me again one day!

Jimmi works with me much the same way as she works with any builder.  A lot of the time she works directly with the client and then construction issues are sorted out with the builder.  When we’re working on one of mine we have the advantage of passing materials back and forth, but she works it out really well by mail too.

When someone calls you to commission a guitar, how does the communication process work? How do you discover what type of guitar to build for a client that has difficulty articulating how they’d like the

instrument to be voiced?

Sometimes it’s a matter of discovering how much a potential buyer might know about the subject of tone and wood differences.  If it’s an experienced collector I ask a few questions about what they like and/or don’t like about guitars that they’ve owned.  I always look for that little area of common experience and we work from there.  If it’s a less experienced guitarist or guitar buyer, I look for the same thing, but perhaps instead of talking about whether they like the punch of sitka or the twinkle of koa, I might ask a lot of questions about voices of singers or instruments in an orchestra.  The point, for me, is to find out whether they are looking for a guitar like mine.  Occasionally I have suggested other builders when I’ve felt there would be a better match up.

Speaking of voicing, please take me through the process of voicing a guitar with a contemporary sound, and how that differs from voicing a guitar that is more traditional.

I don’t know if I’m qualified to answer that one.  My work has been toward a sound that I wanted to hear, and I have learned through hard lessons what takes me away from that.  I have all the same anecdotal information about what makes a prewar Martin sound like they do, but I have never pursued that sound.

You have mentioned using a signal generator and Chladni patterns in voicing your guitars? Could you describe what Chladni patterns are and how you use them to help in the process?

When you play a harmonic on a string, you have divided it in segments, but the reason it physically works is because at the mathematical division of the octave or fifth or whatever, there is a nodal point on the string that allows it to vibrate freely around a still point when the conditions are right (meaning when the string is struck and your finger is on that node).  At those naturally occurring places, there is no displacement. When a guitar top is excited with vibrations, there are also nodal points and in those areas of little to no displacement, the glitter piles up.

The arrangement of the glitter patterns at a given frequency range indicates the efficiency of the top, or more instructively, the non-appearance of a pattern at a target frequency means I have work to do.

Chladni patterns are not a recipe for a great guitar, they are an indication of what you just did.  Hopefully, if you stumble on a great recipe, you can do it again.

I am not an expert on Chladni patterns or any other science approach to lutherie, so my use of glitter testing is merely a way to double check that I’m on the right track.  The range of frequency at which I get certain patterns are what I’m interested in, and the rest I do the old fashioned way.

The first Kathy Wingert guitar that I had the pleasure of playing had back and sides of blackwood. It immediately became my favorite tone wood, even passing Brazilian Rosewood as my tone wood of choice. Please tell me about working with blackwood, how you view its tonal characteristics, and when you would recommend it over Brazilian.

I love AB, but I’ve come to hear it very differently from Brazilian, and for a long time I wouldn’t have said that.  What I like and what I hear in the heavy woods, AB and cocobolo is a weightiness and sustain in the mids.  If you try to hold me to a blindfold A/B test, I’ll be happy to tell you that I learned a long time ago it’s darned hard to do!  I believe that 90% of tonewood choice has to do with the feedback the player gets and has very very little effect on the listener 15 feet away, at least not if there is any other noise in the room.

How important are trade shows and guitar festivals for bringing in new clients and expanding the growth of your business?

I think the trade shows and festivals are enormously important for custom lutherie as a whole.  I know I personally benefit from doing them, though many times it is long after the show.  I always see or hear something the kicks my fanny.  I also believe it’s really important for the community as a whole to show up, present well, and let people know that we are accountable to a larger community.  As a community, professional luthiers have built a lot of trust.  We have buyers who write checks for a deposit on something they aren’t going to see for years.  That’s huge.

You seem very environmentally aware. How can the traditions of luthiery evolve to embrace a new “greener” philosophy?

I might be wrong, but I think small builders working on a few instruments are remarkably green.  We waste as little as possible and most of us don’t do a lot clothes or shoe shopping for this career.  Many of us commute only a few steps from the house to the shop.

I am going to guess that the nastiest thing we do is over use abrasives.  I love working with planes and drawknives, but I have power tools and it just goes faster.  If I were to grab for that knife, the dust collector could stay quiet.

As for the protection of exotic hardwoods, it’s important to care, and it’s important to stop asking for woods that are in trouble from places that are over harvested.  The highest and best use of precious exotic woods is in fine instruments, and some of the controls that are in place should go a long way toward stopping the indiscriminate use of fine woods on not so fine factory instruments, or as flooring or lawn furniture.  It’s also important to understand that the trees won’t be protected if they have no commercial value, so it is important as a community that we fight for the woods that we need.  For those who are somewhat new to the subject, please re-read that last line!

Please tell me about your fascination with Harp Guitars?

That was a case of a customer wanting something I didn’t really want to do.  In fact, I refused for more than a year.  But the customer was a friend and he has patience, so he wore me down.  After I built one and had a minute or two to try to play one, I was interested in building more, if only for my own use.   I haven’t been able to hang on to one long enough to learn much, and what I do work out on one is easily forgotten, but harp guitars aren’t meant to make guitar playing harder, they are meant to make it easier once you get a toe hold.  The jumping off place is a lot more difficult on harp guitar, and I’m still there.

Some of your larger harp guitars have sycamore back and sides. Why sycamore? Tonally, what does this wood offer?

Some of my harp guitars are sycamore because I had it!  Harp guitar sets are hard to come by and I thought it would look cool.  It was very successful for harp guitar because it didn’t add a lot of clutter to the bass.  The bass was clear and strong, but not ringy.  The first thing you have to learn is to find the sub basses on a harp guitar, the second thing you have to do is shut them up.  I haven’t built a standard six out of sycamore, so my experience with it is limited to the outcome of those two harp guitars.

When I play your guitars, I am always impressed with the strength of the treble frequencies all the way up the neck, and how well balanced they are with the lows and mids. What is the secret to building an acoustic guitar that has such strong treble fundamentals?

Thank you!  Again, I can only tell you that my recipe has been added to over time.  I tease that it used to take me 120 hours to build a guitar and now I’m pretty sure it takes me twice that long.  There are all the added steps that I have acquired over the years.

I think one of the big secrets in guitar building, and one that gets talked about very little has to do with how well the neck tunes to the body.  I’m really lucky that my steel string headstock seems to be about the right size and weight.  I have nodal points that fall pretty much where I need them to be, and that little extra adds to consistency up the neck – or so my violin making mentor taught me.

In the next 5-10 years, what do you envision for Wingert Guitars? Will there be a continuing evolution in your designs? Will you branch off in new directions?

I have been working on something old rather than something new.  I love classical guitar and I have started taking time to pursue that.  I’ve built some passable classicals and have sold them at fair prices for their abilities, but I am ready to take commissions on classical guitars now for the right buyers.  By the time this goes to print, I will probably have had time to prototype the last couple of things I want to iron out.

I’ve learned over the last couple of years that I really enjoy teaching, but my personal evolution isn’t complete yet.  So much of what I do is intuitive or ingrained, it is hard for me to break it down for someone else, so in the next few years, I would like to get better at that kind of communication.  I think it might be so appealing because it is at a completely different pace from the daily madness of wearing all the hats.   To explain the steps to someone else simply requires taking a deep breath, and that’s kinda nice.

Finally Kathy, do you have any additional thoughts that you’d like to share with our readers, i.e., thoughts about guitars, information about you, thoughts about creativity, life lessons… anything?

Well, all of your readers need a Wingert guitar because they know lots of songs, will entice your creative muse to show up,  and will even improve your singing voice in just 14 days!

My great thanks to Kathy for her participation in this interview. Dream Guitars is proud to carry her uniquely voiced one of a kind creations.

 

Steven Dembroski

 

 

 

 

 

James Olson, Larry Robinson, Kevin Ryan, and Michael Keller

Clearly, luthiery requires a diverse set of finely honed skills, but it also requires a deep aesthetic understanding. Do you consider yourself more of an artist or a craftsman?

I definitely consider myself a craftsman with a very strong artistic sense. I had always been fond of arts of all kinds — decorative, interpretive, pre-modern, impressionist, surrealistic. I am fond of many types of art. But I’m also very fond of many types of crafts, pottery, jewelry and knife making, and furniture. This is the world of my imagination.

MICHAEL KELLER

MICHAEL KELLER

When you’re starting to build a guitar and you’re trying to picture it in your visual mind, many artistic considerations come into play that go beyond crafting a fine sounding guitar. Different colors of wood, different colored shells, colored purflings, bindings and shapes, all become a pallet that is available to you to compose a beautiful looking instrument.

One must also realize ultimately you’re making a tool for a musician. No matter how beautiful or arty a guitar looks, if it doesn’t play well and sound great I don’t care how arty it is. I would much rather have a guitarist tell me, “I love the sound of the guitar”, rather than “the sound is OK but the inlays are great”. It’s really totally about the sound and playability.

Recently, flying back from a guitar festival I noticed one of the editors of a guitar magazine on the plane who had been at the show. We started talking, and he mentioned that he had played a lot of very expensive heavily inlaid guitars that didn’t play or sound very good. He said exactly what I was thinking from my own experiments at the festival. A lot of the guitars at the show were designed to be eye catching, but a lot of effort had not been put into making them play well. So the artistic side of guitar making is a field that one should embrace carefully, making sure the instrument sounds and plays well first. After that, as far as I’m concerned, anything goes.

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Ervin Somogyi is not your average person. When speaking with him, or when reading the things he has written, it is immediately obvious that he is keenly insightful, full of equal parts of knowledge and good humor — both a scientist and an artist. He is a lovely man with uncommon patience, and sincerity.

Viewed from any direction, Ervin’s career is the template of success. His list of achievements is unrivaled. He is an innovator, educator, creative thinker, author, artist, lecturer and inspiration to myriad builders who have followed his lead.

If there was a Mt. Rushmore of luthiers, you would certainly see the face of Somogyi chiseled out of stone, staring down on the throngs of guitar enthusiasts who view his work as the quintessential representation of the modern Renaissance of steel string guitar.

The following is an interview recently conducted with Mr. Somogyi. It was my extreme honor that he agreed to share his thoughts with me. Thank you Ervin.

Ervin Somogyi

Ervin Somogyi

Yours is a prolific, celebrated career. You have received recognition from the guitar world, and you are highly respected by your associates and peers. As one of the cornerstones of what is often called a new renaissance in instrument making, what are your thoughts on the future of lutherie as an art and as a lucrative career?

I wrote a four-part series on the future of lutherie (at least, as I see it) for Fingerstyle magazine back in 2001.  I don’t know that I want to repeat all that, but the gist of it is that ‘real’ lutherie (in the sense that I understand that word) will probably survive between the cracks of mainstream commercial culture — which is certain to do its best to standardize, efficient-ize, productive-ize, and roboticize the life out of it.  All in the service of progress, of course.  Factories like the Taylor facility are already doing pioneering work in that.  Sorry if sound negative, but I gave a lot of reasons for my thinking so in those articles, and none of the reasons have changed.

There are two main reasons for this.  The first of these is the sorry state of the manual arts in this culture: people use their hands less and less to accomplish things these days.  The second is the primitive state of lutherie education.

When I was young a lot of kids, teenagers, and even adults puttered, futzed, tinkered, whittled, played with clay and plaster, built models, and fixed things . . . much more than people do now.  At least, as far as I’m aware.  Does any of you remember hobby shops, the Revell model kits, fixing up old jalopies (or even newer cars), erector sets, tiddly-winks, ships in bottles, woodburning kits, balsa-wood gliders, paint-by-number pictures, or even making playhouses out of cardboard boxes, or any other long-term-attention-span-engaging activity?  Today, most productive work is driven by the need for speed, efficiency, and profit and the element of human judgment is dumbed down through steady reliance on the latest jig, accessory, tool, or set of time-motion guidelines that do a lot of the work for us.  Entertainment is provided not by ourselves but by electronic devices and use of computers in a myriad ways.  Oh, and there’s television too.  This is a costly trade-off, and it ain’t exactly progress as far as I can see.

On the other hand, making guitars isn’t likely to produce lucrative careers under any circumstances, hand skills or not, unless one knows what he’s doing.  I won’t beat the existing guitar schools up for doing the best they can, but their efforts don’t extend past a beginner’s level education in making-and-assembling-guitar-parts.  This education lasts as little as ten days to as much as several months; it’s a great starter kit, but necessarily cannot be more than that.  In comparison, there are respected schools of furniture making that turn out competent journeymen craftsmen and which put their students through several years of training — which includes design, proportion, a variety of woodworking techniques, history, joinery, and finishing.  The better violin-making schools have a four-year curriculum!  A large part of the problem is that many people simply don’t know that there’s any more to making a guitar than its merely being a more complicated woodworking project than, say, making movie sets.  You know: looking good but nothing substantial behind the façade.  I think you can appreciate that just learning to put a guitar together — with very little actual joinery (sand-flat-apply-glue-and-then-clamp is not a difficult skill to master) or tone-making savvy going on — is not going to provide a realistic foundation for any kind of success.  A hobby, maybe; but not an income.

And even with a competent education, lutherie is a tough gig.  You only need about a hundred brain cells and minimal knowledge of the history of the world to get an appreciation for this.

I do think that you should make guitars — and/or art — if you find that you cannot be happy if you do not do so.  At least until you determine that you need to go into something else.  Otherwise, lutherie really isn’t for everyone.  There’ s too much romance in it, for one thing, but one soon finds out that it really is a bunch of hard work.  The upside is that one can get some genuine peace of mind and satisfaction on this planet, throughout most of a lifetime, if one goes into this work with genuine love and curiosity.  The smartest alternative plan is to approach guitar making as a business; you can support yourself doing the work like that.  It ain’t quite the same as being an artist, but it’s better in some ways: it produces paychecks, not to mention happier mates.

Mr. Somogyi

Mr. Somogyi

Your two volume master-work of “The Responsive Guitar” and “Making the Responsive Guitar” is destined to become the standard by which all future written works on the subject of lutherie are judged. Did you feel obligated to capture your method and philosophy for the benefit future generations?

“Obligation” is the wrong word, I think. Luthiers are rather obsessive in many ways.  While this may be problematic in the realms of addictions or living a self-actualized life, it’s a real plus in lutherie — not to also mention in other things like brain surgery, parachute packing, and chess — because being ridiculously careful produces better results.   But mainly it never occurred to me to write a book that only told 3/4 of the story.  It never occurred to me to edit out things that were arguably minor but still pertinent, or to not include plenty of photographs (there are almost 1,000 photos and images), or to not have the nicest hard binding and cover art that I could manage, etc.  The books are no different from my approach to making any of my guitars.  I mean, in Japan they don’t call me a crass act for nothing, you know.

I am not resolved, either, as to how much I’ve written my books for Future Generations.  I did, obviously, do it in part for that reason.  I also did it for my own selfish reasons that have nothing to do with those readers.  I like to write.  (I don’t think I did it for the money: there’s money in writing only if there are descriptions and  pictures of naked people; but I’ve written a damn textbook: how exciting is that?)  Furthermore, I’m approaching 70 and have had triple bypass heart surgery.  It’s a truism that I can’t take my knowledge with me and some of it just might be useful to someone.  I  mean, most of my life is nicely  behind me . . . and I can appreciate a nice behind when I see it, I’ll tell you.   God knows, I would have given a lot for any guidance such as my books contain, many years ago when I was stumbling around in the dark wasting untold hours on guitars that I now can appreciate had no chance of sounding good.

I’ve had my successes, failures and insights and have written my books in a way that more or less ‘tells it like I see it’, but without insisting that others take my path.  I’ve already gotten criticism for not having written my books the way others thought I should have, or because I’ve presented the information in a way that isn’t what people have been used to.  Some readers just don’t get my perspective: they want right-and-wrong answers or simply want to be spoon-fed ‘the quick, easy recipe for making great guitars’  without having to do any thinking.  To these, I say: hmph; grow up.  To the others, who do understand that a given sentence or paragraph in my writings might have taken me fifteen guitars worth of work spread out over six years to figure out, I say: you’re welcome; and pass some information on to someone else who is in need, when you can.

I can also say that I’m not sure I would have written these books had I suspected just how much work it was going to take.  It took eight years and the writing, editing, cross-referencing, correspondence, photographing, fact-checking, re-writing, etc. came to dominate my life.  Not to mention out-of-pocket expenses for everything.  By quite reasonable reckoning I would have been much better off simply making guitars and creating a cash flow.  Warning: don’t do this at home, folks.  Leave it to the professionals.  And think twice before criticizing someone else’s major projects.

Andamento Guitar

Andamento Guitar

Many of your apprentices have gone on to become well known, in demand builders themselves — Michi Matsuda, Hiro Ebata, Mario Beauregard, etc. That makes you an extremely successful teacher as well. Please tell me about your teaching style, and explain what special insights you bring to the equation when working with young builders?

Ummmm . . . I guess I could say several thing about this.  First of all,  I happen to like teaching and I want to do a good job of it like everything else I do.  Second of all, it’s hard work and it certainly doesn’t pay well.  Teaching is a really bad business model: it takes too long and too much attention and energy.  There’s absolutely no truth to the rumor that Donald Trump made his millions by teaching.  And it’s not always a successful pursuit — at least if you do it the way I’ve done it, which is to make it a full-immersion experience, as opposed to doing it every day from, say, ten to five.  It’s not unlike my approach to writing my books: I have a desire to be thorough.

I never set out to teach ‘future masters’ — although I’m glad that some of my apprentices will go on to make their own significant and unique contributions.  I teach because I like sharing my hard-earned information with people who appreciate its value, and I like seeing their eyes light up with ‘ah-hah!’ moments. There’s nothing casual about my teaching; it takes a real commitment for me to take anyone on.  Also, for a long, long time I didn’t make enough money to pay anyone with anything except knowledge and experience; so I agreed to train people in exchange for help in the shop.

I am aware that my more successful students and apprentices are talented in this work.  But while it’s tempting to think that my success as a teacher is the fruit of a magically successful teaching style, I think it’s largely because I teach something genuinely useful.  Remember, in my answer to your earlier question about the future of lutherie, I cited the primitive state of teaching that is available.  Well, I simply give a real, honest, and comprehensive grounding in the work — just as you’d get in any institution of higher learning, technical or vocational school, or professional school that takes several years to go through.  That a better education produces better craftsmen shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Choosing whom to take on as an apprentice has been a  difficult learning experience: I’ve made some really bad choices.  And also some lucky ones. By now, motivation and sincerity are not the first things I’ve learned to look for: everybody claims to have those.  Instead, I look for (1) ability to commit to the learning curve and stay focused (which includes the ability to subordinate one’s self to authority in the interests of learning a skill), and (2) capacity for independence of thought within the learning situation.  I also (3) try to get a sense of their learning style: not everyone learns the same way by any means.

Finally, because my apprentices are typically half my age or less, (4) I try to get a sense of how these young men will negotiate — their own and my — power and authority.  There is always a sizeable power imbalance, at least at first: I have all the power and authority and they have none.  The best indicator of how they are likely to behave in the face of the inevitable stresses (a completely new environment, learning tricky new procedures, making mistakes, deadlines, discipline, etc.) is to take a close look at what kind of a relationship these young men have with their own fathers.  This is critical.  It is is particularly acute in a work setting in which there is a lot of one-on-one interaction and there’s an age imbalance in addition to the power imbalance. All the excitement, interest and learning aside, the thing is hardly free of stress. And, incidentally, it is a significant stressor for them to eventually learn that they can make better guitars (the very thing they have come to me for!): it upsets their status quo and forces them to renegotiate the power imbalance — and they sometimes do this in very inappropriate ways.

Andamento Guitar

Andamento Guitar

All in all, the fact is that the same way these young men have learned to get along with their most significant, older, same-sex authority figure (yes: it’s their dads every time) is how they’ll behave in the shop.  I can rely on this absolutely.  If they got along with their fathers (or father surrogates), we’ll get along.  If they were afraid of their fathers, or abused, or abandoned, they’ll be terrified of me.  If their fathers were authoritarian, they’ll resent me regardless of how I actually behave — and they’ll bully newer people in my shop who are lower on the totem pole than they are.  It happens.  If they’ve learned to survive by seeking approval, they’ll be obsequious and charming rather than productive or independently curious — and they won’t stop seeking approval from me regardless of how much approval I do give them.  If they’ve learned to ‘get away’ with stuff, or be spacey, defensive, or defiant, etc. in order to get their way, they’ll want to keep on doing that.  Whether they’ve been supported, respected, or disrespected they’ll expect those things from me — and behave in ways guaranteed to elicit such responses.

Are these bad people?  No, they’re merely young and not fully formed, and they don’t know any different way to be.  They bring their predilections into the workplace every time and act them out without being aware that they are doing so.  The pisser is that problematic attitudes sometimes don’t make a public appearance for several months because people can be on their best behavior for quite a long time.  But it cannot last — so it’s a smart idea to have a several-months-long probation period.  On the plus side, if these young men have learned to communicate their needs and negotiate power and responsibility reasonably openly, they’ll do so with me from pretty early on.  And so on.

Anyway, one of the first things I have to do is to explore this territory, to get a sense of whether there are any landmines, and whether or how they can be avoided.  The fact is, an important part of an apprenticeship is that taking someone on means taking on their early life, and no amount of patient lutherie training is going to make the slightest dent in non-lutherie processes which have only one resolution: growing up.  And that’s not quite the same gig as making guitars.  And every candidate is of course unique.  And outside of all that are the necessary evaluations for focus, motivation, problem-solving ability, patience, craftsmanship, style of taking information in, business-vs-artistic orientation, and basic what’s-it-like-to-be-with-them-all-day-long considerations such as personal hygiene, ability to communicate, sense of humor, ability to understand instructions and priorities, argumentativeness, being accident-prone or not, etc. etc. etc.

I’ve trained a few people whom I really hated working with; we got off to a good start but were at each other at the end.  They’re no one whose names appear anywhere in this interview, by the way. The whole thing is a tricky balancing act. Otherwise, my teaching style is fairly relaxed and informal.  I lecture, I discuss, I recommend reading something, and we discuss more.  I’m more interested in educating than instructing.  These are different things.  Education comes from the Latin ‘educare’, whose prefix ‘e’ means ‘out of’.  Educate means ‘to bring out’.   Instruction is the opposite.  The prefix ‘in’ means just that: one puts something into place — like a fact or a technique.

More specifically, my approach is a mix of direct transference of information (through conversation or lectures) and Socratic dialogue.  I ask a lot of questions about what my students think of this or that, and why.  But I ask those questions mostly about things that I have already given out information about.  My attitude in these discussions is pretty much: “I know that you have enough information to figure some of this out — because I’ve given it to you.  So, use your brain and let me know what you think about the matter we’re discussing.”  The Socratic method brings some people in my classes up short; they will have learned to be comfortable with receiving knowledge passively, and not so much with being asked to participate in critical thinking.  Sometimes I’ll say these things out loud.  And, sooner or later, these guys begin to think, to look at things from new angles, and to have their own ideas.  The surprise of having an idea come out of the collision between raw experiential data and a newly learned rule or principle is exciting, I have to say.  Once they experience that, they’re hooked.

Finally, I think the purpose of an education is to enable one to discriminate between the essential and the superficial.  There are lots of superficial, meaningless, and unimportant data, phenomena, and lore in guitar making — as there are in any endeavor.  There are also things that are gateways, and pivotal.  I help my students see which is which.

Ervin at Woodstock 2010

Ervin at Woodstock 2010

Certainly some of your most ambitious builds are destined to become integral parts of future museum exhibits, and retrospectives on this period in lutherie. How do you think history will remember Ervin Somogyi and his instruments?

It’s likely that my guitars and I will be remembered well, although I don’t know whether this will be in a major way or as a footnote.  I am flattered by the prospect of being well-thought of in the future, to have my work in books and museums, and so on.  It’s also a somewhat irrational aspiration for anyone to have, I think.  It is very much in keeping with the Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, in which one’s life is fixed with a grip of iron on the future, not the present or the past.  The older I get, though, the less sense it makes to me to place weight on what kind of impression I might make on people I’ll never meet.  I mean, of course I’d like people in the future to think well of me; but I cannot really understand why I’d go out of my way to care about that.  The older I get, the less real “the future” is for me.  I mean, let’s face it: I have less and less of that ahead of me.  The people and things I care about are right here and now.

So my answer to your question is not simple.  As I said, I don’t really know how history will remember me.  Anyone who has an awareness of the vagaries of life and society will have noticed that prominent people often sink without a trace surprisingly quickly, unworthy people rise to the top despite all evidence of incompetence or lack of worth, and every now and then someone completely forgotten (or even initially unknown) is resurrected as a significant enough figure in this or that realm to compete with whoever had been the top dog up ‘til then.  My reputation will be somewhere in that mix, I’m sure.  Roman emperors and conquering generals, as they paraded in their triumphal parades through the city in their gilded chariots, were accompanied by a slave whose job it was to whisper to them: “fame is fleeting . . . fame is fleeting . . .  fame is fleeting . . . “

There’s even a joke about that kind of thing.  A vacationer, traveling through Scotland, stops at one of those picturesque, rustic inns up in the Highlands one afternoon.  He goes in, sits down at the bar, and in a few minutes begins to chat with the Scotsman sitting on the next stool over.  As luck would have it the Scotsman is a pretty taciturn dude and conversation is rather an uphill slog.  Then , when the traveler asks the Scotsman’s name, the man pauses a long time, turns, and points out through one of the tavern’s windows and says, bitterly: “do ye see that stone fence out in th’ field over there?  It’s half a mile long.  I built it.  I dug and carried every stone.  I mixed the mortar.  I built that wall straight as an arrow, true and plumb, over hill and dale.  It’s a grand wall, one o’ the best around.  But do they call me MacTavish the wall builder?  Nay!” . . . .    Even more dourly, he goes on.  “And do ye see tha’ brick house over there?  That great big one?  I built it!  I built the walls straight up and true, brick by brick; thirty feet high it is, and fifty feet long.  But do they call me MacTavish the house maker?   Och, Naay! “. . . . .   He goes on, his frown deepening.  “And do ye see that jetty over there, at the water’s edge?  I built that!  I built it with m’ own two hands, put in the pilings, cut the wood, mixed the cement.  I built it straight as an arrow, three hundred yards right out into the water.  And strong!  It’s stood up to storm after storm!  But do they call me MacTavish the jetty builder??”  Naayy, he says, . . . . . . . . .  “But fuck ONE goat . . .  “

So you see, it can be tricky.

The fearless luthier, keeping the streets of Oakland safe from Unresponsive Guitars!

The fearless luthier, keeping the streets of Oakland safe from Unresponsive Guitars!

Second of all — even though this is very undiplomatic of me to say — I’m don’t anticipate giving much of a hoot one way or the other once I’m dead — with apologies to those of you who believe in reincarnation.  While I do value the opinions of my friends and others whom I think well of, the prospect of being well-though-of by, say, a Bostonian of the year 2057 doesn’t do much more for me than the idea of being well thought of by the citizenry of, say, present-day Cazpizapa. (It’s a small town in Peru, where I spent two years in the Peace Corps.  It’s doubtful that anyone reading this has ever heard of it.)

Finally, this being a Capitalist society and all, it does sort of chap my hide that dealers and collectors are going to make a whole hell of a lot more money off my work, after I’m dead, than I ever did while I was alive and trying to pay my bills.  You know what I mean?

Let’s examine a hypothetical situation. A customer calls you, and wants an OM sized body. They fingerpick primarily but also want an instrument with lots of headroom for the times they break out a plectrum. The guitar needs to have plenty of bass, articulate low end, and strong trebles all the way up the neck. They are convinced that they want Brazilian back and sides, but ambivalent about the top wood. What do you suggest? And why?

Well, anyone who has read my books will be able to begin to formulate a good answer to this.  I can’t take as much time and space here as it would take to tell the whole story, but I’ll give you an outlined version of my approach:

AREA OF CONCERN RELEVANT FACTORS

OM: The customer is the boss

Fingerpick: This has implications for the use of the right and left hands, and hence the width and contouring of the neck.  I’d take a look at his present guitar and offer to duplicate the neck, or, if it’s not quite right for him, change the neck so that it works better for him.

Headroom: As I explain in The Responsive Guitar, this has to do with openness/bass capacity, even though that sounds simplistic in sound-byte form. We’d also have to discuss optimal string action, and perhaps including some extra different-height saddles.

Plenty of Bass: As I describe in The Responsive Guitar, this has to do with the dynamics and design of both the top and the back: plate thickness, bracing, profiling, tapering, etc. — all in the service of a strong monopole motion of the top. The main thing is to not overbuild, which most luthiers manage to still do. String gauges should be discussed. Air mass comes into play too; so perhaps the client might opt for a larger bodied guitar.

Articulate low end: I’d send it to a private school.  Just kidding.  An ‘articulate’ low end actually has to do with (1) the calibration of the acoustic gradient of the top with respect to monopole response (see chapter 18 of The Responsive Guitar), and (2) building with some of the more vitreous woods.  It’s all just the tiniest bit technical.

Strong trebles & power all the way up the neck: Repeat of the above: careful voicing and calibration of the top plate. Also, engineering of the neck and head block that it’s anchored into. This too is just the tiniest bit technical.  Finally, it’s important to not sand the perimeter of the face too thin; you’ll lose the treble if you do.

Brazilian rosewood?: Why not?  It’s traditional, on the expensive side, acoustically live, and a good investment.  We could discuss straight-grain vs. figured, old-growth vs. stumpwood, etc.

Top wood?: The choices are several.  I devote a whole chapter in The Responsive Guitar to the tonal implications of each.

Anything else?: Well, we’d talk about string gauge, shape and size of neck, ornamentation, string spacing at both nut and bridge ends, action, electronics, tuners, solid vs. slotted peghead, rosette design, basic warmth vs. crystalinity of tone, size of frets, a cutaway, projection, sustain, recordability, balance, and possible other customization — such as an perhaps an espresso spigot on the bass side or a listener’s-side airbag.  J

What are your thoughts on fan frets?

They’re not parallel with one another.

Right: I’m being silly.  If you are asking for the rationale behind fanned frets, it is this: having the bass strings be longer than the treble strings serves the needs of musicians who like to play in open tunings, especially ones in which the bass strings are tuned way down.  Normally, if you de-tune your bass strings on a regular guitar enough you run the risk of having a very muddy low end, or losing it entirely.  What fanned fret arrangements offer is the strategy of starting out at greater initial string tension (at standard tuning), and arriving at a workable string tension when the string is loosened enough to give you your target bass note.  Integrity and frequency of sound have everything to do with string mass and tension, and lengthening the bass strings allows low-frequency response that has a strong enough envelope/presence that it can keep up with the guitar’s other, higher notes.

Otherwise, fanned frets are a more ergonomic arrangement than parallel frets are.  If you stick your barre-ing finger out and move your hand away from your body and back in again you’ll notice that your finger makes an arc as it moves: that’s the same arc that fanned frets present to the hand.  It’s surprisingly comfortable.  It actually takes more muscular effort for the hand to keep the finger locked into a parallel track as it moves up and down the guitar neck.

While many builders discuss the role that a guitar’s top plays in the tone of an instrument, you are one of the few that has explained the back’s function, and the way it responds to incoming energy. Could you please explain your thought on the contribution the guitar’s back makes to the tonal equation, and how variations affect the overall response and volume of the guitar?

Oh, goody: at last, an easy question.  ‘-)

Actually, I may be the only builder to delve into the dynamics of the back, in print.  Who else does so?  I’d start by directing readers to chapter 14 of The Responsive Guitar, which lays out all my thinking on this subtle and complicated matter.  But for purposes of this discussion I think I can provide a simplified answer that’ll be a clever amalgam of half-truths, plausible fictions, wishful thinking, evasions, and outright lies.  Well, I’m kidding about most of these.  Sseriously, though, I’ll be quoting myself extensively from that same chapter 14.  But first, I’d suggest the readers skip down to question 15, about impedance, and read my comments and then come back to this discussion.  Impedance has a lot to do with the guitar back and one should know something about this to understand what I’ll be saying.

Let’s start with the proposition that the guitar back does something besides keep the dust out of the soundbox.  The back is, in reality, an important secondary vibrating plate which works in tandem with the face.  You can easily tell that the back makes a contribution to tone: next time you’re playing your guitar, hold it in the air horizontally by the neck, with one hand, and tap lightly on the bridge with the other.  You’ll get a woody/musical sound as the top thrums to your finger-tap.  Then lower the guitar down until its back rests on your thigh, and tap in the same way on the same spot.  You’ll get a very different sound: it will be muted and damped.  Lift the guitar off your thigh, tap again, and the former live, open sound will return.  In good, sensitive and responsive guitars this difference in tap-response is clear, obvious and even dramatic; in cheap, less sensitive ones it’s not likely to be.  What’s changed is that the back, which was damped when the guitar lay on your thigh, is now free to make its contribution.  The back, obviously, does something audible and, therefore, important: and it does it in response to and in tandem with the activity of both the face and the air mass in between.

This leads to a discussion about the proper construction of the back.  Should one make it so massively solid and heavy that it is inert?  Or so light and gossamer that it practically isn’t there?  Or something in between? And then, how would any one of these structure affect the sound of the guitar?

The answer lies in how these different plates manage incoming energy.  Backs that are so massive as to be inert act as acoustic reflectors, much like the acoustic baffles that are sometimes placed behind guitarists on stage, or the hard facades of buildings that bounce sound away and make echoes.  These reflectors function to redirect back toward the audience sound waves that are otherwise traveling away from it, and thereby increase the amount of sound listeners can hear.  On the other hand, guitars with backs that are sensitive enough to respond to the musical energies of the soundbox will act in concert with the vibrating face in a different dynamic: rather than acting as reflectors, these backs act as diffusers. This has to do with the way in which a guitar projects its sounds, as well as the characteristics of the sounds that are so projected.

We are at an interesting fork in our inquiry, in yet another way.  Obviously, a guitar with a non-vibrating face is of no interest to anyone except possibly a pickup manufacturer or an interior decorator; but some steel string guitars have purposely (or at least functionally) non-vibrating backs and others have active ones, and no one thinks either one of these guitars to be better or worse simply because of this one factor.  Consider: bluegrass flatpicked guitars are held/played on a strap, so that the backs are more or less damped out against the players’ tummies.  As I said, inert backs like that will function as reflectors — at least to the degree that the backs are damped out and thus prevented from being active.  On the other hand, fingerpicking guitars are played in a sitting position that usually allows the back to have its full motion; such backs — if they are not too massive — will tend to act as diffusers.  Far from either one being a failure, these instruments are being used successfully in different ways. And, technically, there’s no reason a fingerpicking guitar can’t be played in bluegrass style, and vice-versa. So, the strictures about the function of the guitar back will be partially dependent on how a given instrument is to be used, not how it was built.

Since the back is usually made of a dense, heavy wood one of the main functions of an active back is to act as a flywheel that catches and stores the top’s energy and feeds it back into the system so as to keep the acoustic activity going.  Just as the weight in the physics experiment that’s mentioned in question 15, once started, will want to keep going even if the motion of the hand stops, the back’s/flywheel’s mass makes it slow to start and slow to stop, and this very quality will enable it “tap the rolling hoop” of the face.  Tops and backs moving with another in this way function as coupled harmonic oscillators . I repeat: this entire dynamic is undermined if the back is so overbuilt as to be functionally  inert, or if it is prevented from vibrational motion by contact with the player’s body, or if it’s made out of a relatively lightweight wood that lacks vitreousness.

Getting back to the primary dynamic of the back — that it obviously does something audible and therefore presumably important, and that it does it in response to and in tandem with the activity of both the face and the air mass in between — means that the thoughtful guitar maker must sooner or later come to grips with the question of what, exactly, should the proper relationship of structure, mass and fundamental frequency of face to that of back, to be?   Popular wisdom is that the back should have a higher tap tone than the top by one or two or three semitones.  Other wisdom holds that the back should have a higher resonance than the top by either two or seven semitones.  This is partially because the back is a denser material than the top and will naturally have a higher tone, and partially because empirical experience has shown this relationship to be valid. But opinions are not unanimous on this, and there’s wide disagreement about everything else concerning the back: thickness, bracing, etc.  For instance, the later Kasha model guitars’ backs are made of redwood and lightly braced so that they have a much lower pitch than the faces.  Presumably, the two-or-seven semitone mismatch from the face in this opposite direction would have the virtue of coupling the top and back plates in a mirror-image-to-the-normal relationship.  But I’m guessing; no one has explained the specific logic or rationale for low-pitched backs to me satisfactorily.  The backs of most commercially made steel string guitars are remarkably alike in construction.  Ovation guitar backs have no tap tone at all.  Torres, Smallman, Hopf, Fox, Martin, Sobell, etc. guitar backs (among others) are heavy; Ruck’s, Monch’s, Carlson’s, Elliott’s and mine (among others) are not. I cannot tell you in a few sentences which approach is “right”; whatever the back does only happens in relationship to the face and its construction, and this relationship has to serve the intended range of sound of the instrument.  It should be paid particular attention to in the cases of open-tuning guitars, in which the tonal range is purposely extended over that of normal guitars.  This may all be a wee bit more technical than you were really curious to know about, by the way, but it’s part of the package.

Finally, the tap-tone pitch of the back is not exclusively a function of how thick it is, nor the specific shaping of its braces, nor where the braces are placed.  It is also largely a function of (1) choice of wood, (2) the volume of the air mass contained inside the instrument and (3) how the back is coupled and connected to surrounding structure.  A larger air mass will contribute to a lower sound.  A reasonably light, delicate back will be more responsive than the chunky backs that one finds on average guitars.  Finally, relatively lightweight woods that have low vitreousness (such as most maples, mahoganies, walnuts and koas) will have a lower tap tone — but a fuzzier, less clearly defined one — than denser and more “live” woods like wenge, padauk and many rosewoods.

Sorry to be so long-winded; it’s just that I have a lot to say about some things.

With Vicki Genfan, on stage -- Woodstock 2010.

With Vicki Genfan, on stage -- Woodstock 2010.

When I am playing with a pick, guitars with narrower diffusion sound more appropriate to me — but when I fingerpick softly, guitars with wider diffusion seem much more appropriate.  How much control does the luthier have over directional projection, and how do you control it?

Hmmmmm.  We’d have to start with what you mean by “more appropriate to me”; that could get us into an interesting discussion all by itself.  I assume, from your question, that you think ‘appropriate’ and ‘directional projection’ are related.  I don’t know how to respond to that.  But let’s go on to the question of the luthier’s control over directional projection.

Let’s start with tapping on a guitar’s face while the back is free to be active, or is damped out — as when the guitar is lying on a couch or sitting in its case, as discussed in the previous question.  The sound of the first will be very different from the sound of the second.  What you’re hearing is the contribution of the back to the tonal mix.

When we tap on a guitar with the back removed from the tonal equation we’re listening to the volume, brittleness, ping, thumpiness, brightness, etc. of the tap itself.  With the undamped back we’ll be hearing the duration of tone as well as specific fundamental frequency.  Tapping on the combination of a well-matched top and back will — even on a guitar box without strings — produce a response that has an echo-like sustain, much like the sustained sound of a shout in a cavern or an acoustically live room. This echo lasts about a second; it is the response of a top and a back that are playing ping-pong with sound energy, batting the air between them back and forth, and serially activating each other.  Once heard, and especially when compared with sound in a “dead” chamber, this quality of liveness is unmistakable.  A “well-matched top and back”, however, aren’t simply two plates that are tuned to such synchronous frequencies.  They do this, it is true; but at least as important is the fact that these plates are constructed to be the most lightly put together things that one can manage.

So: heavy and inert vs. delicately constructed and active.  With these two examples you can grasp the quintessential difference in soundbox architecture that distinguishes a reflector from a diffuser.

END OF PART ONE

Click here to read part 2.

Special thanks to Robert Carrigan for providing photos from the Woodstock Guitar Show.

Click here to read part 1.

PART 2: ERVIN SOMOGYI

On stage, Woodstock 2010.

On stage, Woodstock 2010.

You seem to be one of, if not the most, scientifically informed builders. Did you find that you needed to learn things from a scientific perspective to fully understand the full potential of the steel string guitar?

No.  I am, in fact, an essentially intuitive builder.  This doesn’t mean that I get messages from crystal balls or anything like that.  It just means the feel, heft, density, flex and tap-tones of my woods make sense to me.  But also my cortical brain has gotten connected to my somatic brain and I’ve been able to use some of the ‘scientific’ language to communicate information verbally that previously existed in only the wordless realm of  hands-on and ears-on impressions.  I mean, try to explain what it’s like to be right-handed; you won’t be able to until you find words for it.  Until then, you’re stuck with metaphor.

I never felt the need to master scientific perspectives in order to have a better relationship with, or understanding of, the guitar.  I felt the need to find language with which to articulate a craftsman’s reality in order to answer my students’ earnest questions.  Unless you’re studying Zen, for which words are entirely the wrong track to be on, a teacher needs a language.

The thing is, scientific jargon is discriminating, critical, cerebral, and ‘yes-no’.  But my guitar making is integrative, immediate, total, and somatic; it has to do with my sense of things.  These words merely mean that my work is, well, personal, in a way that technical language and linear thinking aren’t.  It’s as personal just as one’s dog is personal.  In fact, I can claim that I’ve gotten to know the guitar in the same way that one gets to know one’s dog over the years: one pays attention, one loves it, and one learns to notice the changes in its behaviors even when they are subtle.  I’ve done this ‘befriending’ with my hands, eyes and ears, through playing the guitar and making it and listening to it and thinking about it.  I have measured thicknesses and weights and kept records, but that’s not, strictly speaking, scientific; it’s common-sense.

The book Engineering the Guitar was published at about the same time mine was; as its title suggests, it’s a very engineering/physics perspective on lutherie and its pages are replete with jargon and the kind of complicated looking formulas that will make any

Coffee Bean Guitar

Coffee Bean Guitar

left-brained person’s heart beat faster.  But these are all unintelligible to me.   I  think that such language may make you seem very impressive at a cocktail party but I don’t see how you can learn to build a good guitar out of that approach.

Is it essential for modern builders to understand the principles of structural engineering?

It depends on what you mean by ‘understand’, but I don’t think so; at least not any more than knowing the few basic principles I’ve written about.  Any competent luthier will certainly have internalized a body of practical knowledge that will be consistent with any formal, scientific approach — even though he may lack the training, background, and language to sound formally educated in that discipline.  From my point of view a guitar maker needs to understand his tools and woods, period.  However, if he wants to be a teacher, that’s a different ball game.

In your DVD, Voicing the Guitar, when lecturing on the different ways guitar tops vibrate, you made brief mention of triploles. What are they, and how do they effect a guitars top in comparison to monopoles, cross dipoles, and long dipoles?

Graham Caldersmith, among others, has written some very informative articles about guitar vibration modes, for the Guild of American Luthiers.  He considers tripoles to be very important for good sound.  ‘Tripole’ is the word used to describe a mode of movement in which a string or membrane is vibrating in three sections of maximal activity, separated by two nodes (points of non-vibration).  It sort of looks like a stretched and elongated number “8” (or an infinity sign) but with three tummies/bulges rather than just two.  There are ways of bracing and constructing a guitar so that it has the freedom to move like that, while most guitar tops have a facility for vibrating mostly as a unit and also, simultaneously, in two halves that seesaw around a center line or center point.  As far as I know, tripoles have been studied in Spanish guitars top vibrations, but not so much in steel string guitar tops.

Tripole motion can happen across the grain (cross tripole), or diagonal to it (diagonal tripole) or along the grain (long tripole), and in various combinations of these. Each of them has a specific implication for the kind of sound that the listener hears, and each of these modes can be facilitated or inhibited by judicious calibration of the top and the placement and profiling of its bracing.  It doesn’t take much to shift this mode, either: a ridiculously small amount of wood removed from here or there, or left here or there, will do it.  The tricky thing, of course, is to facilitate one or two or all three of these modal orientations without inhibiting some other mode of motion.  With the rather limited energy budget that the average guitar has, whatever energy you channel into one mode will starve, or potentially starve, some other one.  You simply can’t have it all unless your top’s motions are amplified electronically.

The significance of the tripole in the Spanish guitar is that this instrument needs a specific mix of higher-frequency action than the steel string guitar does.  As modal motion gets more complex, it contains more high-frequency signal.  The monopole has the lowest pitch; the dipole has a higher pitch, the tripole has a higher pitch yet, and so on.  Going up this particular food chain, you might consider that there are also quadropoles, which are by definition the first harmonics of the dipoles (each half vibrating in its own halves); and there are then the pentapoles, in which the face vibrates in five sections with four nodes in between them; the pentapoles would be quite high frequency indeed.  And so on.  But no one has studied these yet.

Somogyi Gryphon

Somogyi Gryphon

To help all this make sense, I might give you a bit of background here.  Bear with me.  Or simply skip the next five paragraphs.  (I discuss these matters more fully in chapter 32 of The Responsive Guitar, by the way.)

THE BACKGROUND: There are significant structural differences between steel string and classic guitars.  They also are expected to have distinct and differently balanced ‘target’ sounds.  Steel string guitars want to produce a bright sound, not a bassey one, as a function of their basic construction and stringing.  The natural voice of the fan-fretted nylon strung classic guitar, on the other hand, is the opposite: the bass is normally stronger than the treble.  This is likewise a function of its basic design, construction and stringing.  The woods might all be the same; but the stringing, structure, and mechanical tensions these guitars operate under are hugely different.

Yet, these are not at all the desired target sounds for these instruments.  In any discussion about classic guitars it is essential to recognize that the ‘best’ instruments have treble notes that sound brilliant.  They not only stand up to the bass notes, but they have their own very clear identity: that’s the standard by which these guitars are judged.  ‘Best’ is here defined by the ‘romantic’ standard that Andres Segovia created, and which standard is still applied even to the newer classic guitars with thinner tops (about which there’s a lot to say but that’s outside the scope of this discussion).  When an experienced classic guitar player first puts his hands on any guitar that he’s never played before, his left hand immediately goes to the twelfth fret position and the first notes he plays will be the high ones; it’s the acid test, pretty much the first thing one does.  It’s sort of like stepping into a new racing car and immediately revving the engine to get a sense of its power.  In contrast, any steel string guitar player, when he picks up a guitar and strums a first chord on it, will have put his hand in first position.  Have you ever noticed these things?

And what is this brilliance in the classical guitar?  Well, listen to some of Segovia’s early recordings in which he plays slowly, expressively, and romantically.  He emphasizes some of the high notes in such a way that their smoothly accented ping becomes part of the romantic sensibility of the song. Those notes are very musical, and they sparkle.

On the other hand, in any discussion about the steel string guitar, the ‘best’ ones are those that have a full, good, solid, vigorous, punchy, present, and open low end response.  This is the realm of the monopole and the cross dipoles.  Historically, the quest for a strong bass response has been the main factor behind the creation of the larger steel string guitar bodies such as the dreadnoughts and the jumbos. Low-end response is important in the steel string guitar; but smaller soundboxes can’t give it easily.  (It is interesting to note that the Spanish guitar, in spite of having every opportunity to grow physically bigger along with its metal-strung cousin has — with only one technical exception — not done so.  That exception is the Mexican mariachi bands’ bass guitar, the guitarron.)

In the light of all this, the luthier’s challenges in making either one of these models of the guitar are directly opposite.  In the steel string guitar — to achieve a good target sound — the maker has to ‘build in’ a good bass response, which the instrument will normally lack.  In the nylon string guitar — to achieve a good target sound — the maker has to ‘build in’ a good treble response, which the instrument will otherwise lack.  “A good treble” is the realm of the tripole, the quadrapole, the pentapole, etc.

Finally, to get back to your original question: awareness of the ins and outs of the tripole is thought to be an important part of the skill set required to make a good nylon string guitar.   As far as I can make out, while the steel string guitar undoubtedly engages in tripole motion, this is less important for that instrument.

Parenthetically, the luthier may or may not have a cognitive understanding of these things; he may have only an intuitive one.  One interesting thing is that as consumers we are taught to evaluate the things that we buy on the basis of how understandably that thing’s good points are brought to our attention.  But a lot of perfectly adequate luthiers aren’t all that verbally articulate; they will be unable to ‘talk knowledgeably’ or ‘convince’ you that they know what they’re doing.  Intuitive knowledge is by definition difficult to communicate verbally.  Lutherie, lovemaking, Zen, and a bunch of other perfectly wonderful things share this quality. So when evaluating your next guitar purchase don’t get hung up on whether the maker knows about the tripole: listen to the guitar and

Somogyi Guitar and Sarod!

Somogyi Guitar and Sarod!

determine whether it has a voice that you can’t live without.

The cube rule — before watching your aforementioned DVD, I had not heard of it, yet the application of it seems to be essential knowledge — especially for those interested in variations to conventional bracing. Could you please explain, the cube rule for our readers, and how it has informed your opinion on structure?

The Cube Rule (it’s my wording; engineers call it different things) is a fundamental principle of physics and engineering.  It states that the load-bearing capacity of a  material such as a beam or joist is a cubed function of its height or thickness.  That is, a ceiling rafter one inch thick has a ‘stiffness’ of one (1 x 1 x 1); a floor joist that is two inches thick is eight times as stiff (2 x 2 x 2); a beam that is three inches thick is twenty-seven times as stiff as the first one (3 x 3 x 3); and so on.  What this geometric progression means is that relatively small increments of thickness can  translate to significant differences in stiffness.

The percentages/gross numbers are the same for every unit of measurement: that is, the same formulas and numbers work for inches, feet, centimeters, etc. And they work the same on the small scale of guitar parts, too.  What this means is that a thirty-second of an inch or two, or even less, maybe just a few thousandths of an inch too much or too little, one way or the other, can make a difference of stiffening or loosening a guitar top by as much as 100%.  You can really hear that; it’s certainly worth knowing about.  Especially when you can appreciate that you’ve unknowingly been making one guitar top up to two or three times as stiff as your last one, without knowing you’ve done so.  From the standpoint of the strings, that’s hugely significant.  Your guitars will of course sound very different from one to another, possibly without your having any clue as to how you’ve managed to do that.  And it’s all from adding or taking away very small amounts of wood.

An important corollary to the above is the connectedness of your structure.  If your braces are a little longer or shorter (even if they’re the same size), or are a little further from or closer to their neighboring braces, or possibly angled a bit differently, it makes just as much difference.

Are you a good guitarist, and what do you look for in a personal instrument?

I’m a great guitarist.  I play the flamenco guitar very well.  I’ve played this music for almost fifty years and from early on I managed to play expressively and lyrically, and with impressive rhythmic control and technical subtlety.  I improvise well.  My teachers discovered pretty early on that I’ve got a remarkable Natural Talent, because of which gift I hardly ever make mistakes or play a wrong note.  Most impressive of all, I play a lot of the very same notes and chords that really famous, great musicians play — and even record with!    I’m . . . . oh, sorry.   Wrong cue card.  I got a bunch of these cheap at a White House garage sale when the Bush people moved out. J

Well, I do love and play flamenco — somewhat of an irony in view of the fact that I’m so prominent in the world of steel string guitar making.  But I have been under flamenco’s thrall since high school.  I’m not a  great player but I’m pretty competent.  Most important, though, is that playing music simply makes me happy.  I actually made my living as a flamenco guitar player for a while — when I was young, skinny, had no responsibilities, and lived on close to nothing.

Somogyi Lute

Somogyi Lute

I came to the guitar in high school, during the huge popularity of the Kinston Trio.  They were at the forefront of the folk music movement (among white people, that is; but that’s another story) and all of us high school guys ran out and bough cheap Mexican guitars (this was in San Diego, only an hour from exotic Tijuana, where there were cheap guitars to be had; my first one cost $22), learned three chords, and started to belt out folk songs.  We’d found out that if we played the guitar and sang we could get girls to pay attention to us!  That was a pivotally significant learning experience.  It was also when I found out that I can’t sing.

#&%?©*$!

But I liked the guitar and plunked on it a lot, and eventually I found my way to flamenco — in which the singing sounds so awful that I felt at home with it.  I got some Carlos Montoya and Sabicas records and I was really blown away: they were playing a whole lot more than three chords.  I’ve made myself a few flamenco guitars over the years and I have been sufficiently impressed by the work of luthier Eugene Clark that I’ve commissioned two flamenco guitars from him, which I own and will play forever.  Clark is legendary in flamenco circles.  He’s one of the earliest living American guitar makers, and a brilliant craftsman.  He lives in Tacoma, Washington.

As I said, it is an irony that I have become known as a steel string guitar maker, as it’s an instrument I don’t really play.  I tried making a living at making flamenco and classic guitars for some years early on, but I was on the early part of my own learning curve and that effort didn’t pan out.

However, all is not lost.  The fact is that knowledgeable musicians seek pretty much the same qualities of response in their guitars, regardless of how they’re strung.  These qualities are: overall sensitivity of response, a ‘great voice’, dynamic range, a certain warmth, a dynamic ability to keep up with the technical demands of the player’s right and left hands, plenty of head room, and vibrancy and liveness.  And ease of handling and playing, natch.

For my flamenco guitar playing I don’t look for a smooth, golden voice such as classic guitars are supposed to have.  I want something that sounds dry, almost harsh, with a metallic edge.  Sustain should be minimal.  A little string buzz adds to the spice, and the strings need to be low, close to the face so that I can make the tapping sounds that are part of that music. A good, rough flamenco guitar sound that carries well really pleases me.

Skull detail one.

Skull detail one.

Houses of fashion design, like Givenchy or Perry Ellis, have taken in the next generation of designers to carry on the brand name. Have you ever considered to continuance of Somogyi Guitars as a future enterprise, under the creative leadership of a younger builder?

No.  Well, yes, briefly.  But not really.  I think that when I go I should go.  The idea of becoming ‘Somogyi, Inc.’ is weird to me.

In any event, none of my apprentices have wound up making guitars that sound exactly like mine.  They make guitars that have the same qualities of openness and complexity that mine have . . . but they still manage to have a sound of their own.  So I’m not sure that anyone could meaningfully ‘carry on’ the work that I do.  I  mean, the label might say Somogyi but it would be someone else’s sound.

Skull detail two.

Skull detail two.

What is your method for determining the natural impedances inherent in your building materials and compensating for them?

First of all, all materials have some amount of natural impedance.  Interestingly, most luthiers have never heard of impedance, yet it is fundamental to the functioning of the soundbox.  I’ll quote myself from the Foreword to Making the Responsive Guitar and chapter 34 of The Responsive Guitar, in explaining this.

Impedance is a basic concept of physics and electrical engineering.  Any time  energy transfers (such as the one between strings and a soundbox) happen, impedance will be part of those processes.   Impedance can be defined as the mismatch of materials properties or capacities, such that an efficient transfer of energies or transformation of energies from one form to another and/or from one material to another is hampered or prevented.  Impedance occurs, for instance, when mechanical energy becomes electrical, magnetic, acoustic, or heat energy.  Friction, heat buildup, mechanical deformation, or just plain waste, dissipation, or loss of energy can be consequences of impedance.  Put in different words, they are all versions of a form of resistance or damping that is innate in materials. One thing to do, therefore, is to work with materials that have little inner damping.  Brazilian rosewood, wenge, padauk, and a lot of spruces, cedars, and redwoods are acoustically live.  Maple, oak, walnut, ash, koa, bubinga, teak, myrtle, African blackwood, zebrawood, etc. are less live and manage to damp vibrational movement to some significant extent — in spite of the fact that one can build perfectly adequate guitars with these.

A simple example of impedance is one that we might all have done in a high school physics class when we suspended a small weight from a rubber band and observed the motion of this weight as a function of our jerking the rubber band up and down at different speeds and with different amounts of vigor. We could move our hands up and down quickly and vigorously without moving the weight very much at all: it seemed like a total waste of energy and the weight might as well have been an anvil.  But we could move our hands up and down minimally at the right frequency, and the weight would bob up and down in tandem with our hand motions: this showed an efficient coupling as a function of a frequency-to-elasticity-and-mass relationship.  This is, on a different scale, exactly what a gymnast bouncing up and down on a trampoline is doing: he can leap higher and higher as he bounces in harmony with the trampoline’s elastic membrane; and he can stop his motions in a second by changing his body movements.  Same body mass, same trampoline, different impedance. On yet a different scale this is the same phenomenon observed in the behaviors of suspension bridges when, during military maneuvers, the bridges’ harmonic frequencies are matched by the footsteps of soldiers marching across them and the bridges start to shake.  Soldiers are supposed to not march across bridges in lock-step for this reason: in extreme cases they can bring the bridge down by simply exciting it at that particular frequency.  A fourth example might be that of firing a gun at a parked car: the bullet would probably go through the car or smash itself against the engine block, but the car wouldn’t move.  On the other hand, if you stood in front of the car (and it was parked on level ground, with its parking brake off) and you pushed with the same amount of energy that the bullet had but at a different velocity (and of course pushing in a greater than bullet-hole-sized area), you would move the car a few inches: impedances will have been matched (or nullified, depending on the wording one prefers).  The principle illustrated in these examples is that, in the right frequency/harmonic relationship, a small amount of energy can move a large mass — even when brute force fails to achieve the same result.

What does this have to do with the guitar?  Everything . . . and at every level.  Potential mismatches between the strings’ energies and the receptivity of the guitar’s various parts are easily resolved once the respective energy-receiving/exchanging capacities of these components are “lined up” with each other. When those conditions are met dramatic results/activity will result where there has been little or no impact before.  In other words, a well made guitar is amazingly and dramatically more responsive than an ordinary one.  It is possible to look at top-making and top-bracing in general as nothing other than an attempt to match the impedances of the materials

7 String Peghead

7 String Peghead

so as to allow/invite/bring about the most spectacularly easy and wholehearted cooperation possible between the strings and the guitar’s respective parts.

This formulation is likely to be somewhere between baffling and amusing to the novice guitar maker — particularly as (1) this is likely to be unfamiliar language, and (2) the language that often is used makes it sound as though one either needs a higher degree in physics to understand the concepts or (3) that there’s some kind of spiritual energy or Zen/metaphysical thing going on, instead of something that happens on any practical, real-world [albeit scientific] plane.  Also, (4) he or she has probably not yet had the chance to experience for themselves how dramatically different, positively explosive, a really intelligently built guitar’s tonal response can be — so they don’t yet have their own language to use.  But it is unproductive to worry about how “right” or “wrong” any of these formulations are.  I think that, mumbo-jumbo aside, guitar making is an art — but it is a real-world practical art in which knowing “the science” makes you a better artist.   Bottom line: don’t worry about the language; simply do the work, pay attention, learn from everything you do . . . and you’ll get better at it regardless of whether you believe you’re matching impedances, simply being a skilled woodworker, or speaking to the spirits of dead trees.  You will find that as you make the guitar lighter and lighter in construction, and its parts engage less and less in resisting and fighting each other and the strings, it will become better and better . . .

In question #9, above, you asked me whether I’d considered it important to learn technical language and concepts in order to further my lutherie work.  I didn’t.  What I did instead was to work away at it, accumulate a bunch of interesting learning experiences (one could uncharitably label these as ‘failures’), and possess a pretty large number of as-yet-undefined impressions.  Then, I stumbled onto the concept of Impedance and a bunch of stuff just fell into place for me: it gave me a name for something that I couldn’t have put my finger on previously . . . sort of like the silent, mysterious spook in old spy movies who wears a dark trench coat and hat and skulks around in the shadows stalking the hero: you know he’s there, but who is he and what is he doing? And why?  Being introduced to the concept of Impedance was a genuine lightbulb-going-on episode for me.

So, to get back to your question of “how do I determine the impedance of my woods and compensate for it”: I don’t do anything like that.  I start with the most live materials I can get my hands on — unless there’s a tonal reason for my doing otherwise.  (For instance, I once made a guitar for a professional songwriter; he returned it because it was too loud and drowned his singing out.  So I made him a quieter guitar that he was happy with.)

I think the real answer to your question is in my treatment of the voicing of the guitar, which is described at great length in chapters 18 and 19 of The Responsive Guitar.  This is: I remove wood from certain specific parts of the guitar top, in certain amounts.  I do this slowly and carefully, listening to the voice of the guitar change as I do this.  There comes a point when the guitar’s voice starts to open up.  It’s an unmistakable transformation.  Then I push the envelope a little more, until the guitar top literally makes a live, drumlike sound when I tap it even lightly: the top is, after all, a kind of drumhead — and you can get it to actually make a sound like one. To someone who has never experienced this it’s jawdroppingly dramatic.  But mostly, instead of ‘determining’ something, I’d say that my work is very much like stumbling around in a room that’s dark but that I know by feel and by ear — until I find the light switch.  Or, if you will, the volume switch.  This effort is spread out over two days of steadily inching forward.  I have some special chisels I do this

Carp

Carp

with.

One of several things I studied at University was composition  — a topic which when approached formulaically, quickly lost its luster. In your guitar building classes, how do you encourage the creative thought process in a field that is experimental yet closely bound to physical rules?

Mostly, I teach the Principles that I’ve learned about over the years and try to get my students to apply them to the design of guitars.  I don’t teach ‘creative though’t in the sense that one might teach it in an art class, though.  Physics, acoustics, and a sense of the materials come first; pretty lines and inlays come second.

There are Principles and Rules that work to make a guitar sound really good, in the same sense that there are Principles and Rules to follow to make an airplane fly.  I haven’t studied such things formally the way an engineer might; instead, I’ve made a lot of guitars and noticed that they behaved in certain ways that seemed to be connected to specific work I’d done on them.  Then, I noticed that if  I changed something structurally the guitars’ sounds changed in predictable ways (and by the way, I didn’t do this all by myself; I got lots of feedback from musicians.  I couldn’t have done this without them).  I call these cause-and-effect phenomena ‘principles’ — which they are, even if others would have more formal names for them.  Which brings me to the question of acquiring a useful vocabulary, which I’ll address further below.

A lot of people such as airplane designers, chefs, and acrobats deal with experimental work that’s tied to physical rules.  Airplanes, automobiles, and guitars can all be designed in lots of ways and still do what they’re supposed to.  And they’ll work quite well so long as the designers, cooks, and acrobats stay within the applicable Rules of Physics, Energy, Dynamics, Materials, Air, Chemistry, and Engineering.  It’s just that luthiers have had no access to this level of education until recently; hence they’ve been working in the dark, mostly empirically and, in default of a better method, copying Martin guitars as well as each another.  And they’ve not had a way to talk about whatever they’ve learned; they’ve only had the most primitive practical vocabulary to work with.  (I’m using ‘vocabulary’ here to mean both the words and the concepts behind the words.)  Once you have a grasp of the underlying Principles and can formulate your thinking into cogent sentences — regardless of whether you call these principles the Cube Rule, the Third Law of Thermodynamics or, say, the Purple Thursday Principle — the sky’s the limit as far as artistic creativity, aesthetics, use of natural or space age materials, ergonomics, etc. are concerned.

Largely, I sort of think that my contribution will be to have helped cobble together a  verbal and conceptual vocabulary with which to talk about guitar making to both ourselves and with each other . . . a bit like taking an L.S.L (Lutherie as a Second Language) course.  I did not invent any of this, by the way: engineers and designers have known a lot of this stuff since the Wright brothers time.  I’ve just brought it to our network with more user-friendly language.  Well, o.k., I have contributed a few ideas and insights of my own, too.

Much has been made about the openness of French polish versus lacquer. Can you quantify the noticeable differences of each on otherwise identical tops?

One could.  I can’t: I don’t have the electronic equipment with which to do that kind of work.  I can tell you, though, that I can really tell the difference between the tap tone of a guitar back before the finish is applied, and the tap tone after.  You can, too.  It’s really obvious with lacquer, even to an untrained ear.

The importance of the finish is twofold.  First, its function is to protect the guitar’s woods agains the elements — not the player.  (It doesn’t hurt if the finish is beautiful, but that’s a commercial and aesthetic consideration, not an acoustic one.)  Second, to the extent that the finish is heavier than it really needs to be, it will hold the vibrating plates back from full motion and damp the instrument’s sound.  Finishes (lacquers, urethanes, etc.) are significantly heavier and denser than spruces, cedars, etc. are.  It doesn’t take many thousandths of an inch of finish thickness to kill off a lot of sound.

The virtue of a French polish is that it’s really thin.  Much more so than lacquers and urethanes.  This is better for sound.  It’s so thin that it can scratch easily; but it’s still better for sound.

Finally Ervin, do you have any additional thoughts that you would like to share with the readers of our blog?

Thank you.  This certainly sounds like my chance to get on my soap box and proclaim away.  Pardon me while I light up this doobie . . .    ;-p

First . . . uh . . . I’d like you all get my books and DVD, and to visit my website.

I think my guitars are interesting for no other reason that they’re the product of a certain amount of human intelligence applied in a new way to a very common material.  I’m smarter than some people; I’m dumber than others. Otherwise, I generally put my pants on one sleeve at a time.

Turtle

Turtle

I’ve cited a number of Guitar Making Principles in this interview, and I cite a few more in my books.  They represent the Basic Rules of working with wood.  But there is another interesting Principle that I would like to mention.  It’s from a different discipline entirely, but it has an application to lutherie.  I have in mind something that former California governor (and trained Jesuit) Jerry Brown said in a televised political debate some years ago: that as far as our society is concerned there is no Principle of Enoughness to contain all the striving, efforts and judgments we make, as a people and as a body politic.  I’d never heard anyone mention this thing before but it seemed like a shaft of light in the darkness. There really is no Principle of Enoughness at most levels of personal, social, business, or governmental life.  In our own ways, we all want to Increase Our Market Share — without any ultimate stopping point in sight for such effort.

I think that this very New-Agey-sounding principle can be a metaphor for guitar making.  It has as legitimate an application to lutherie as do the Cube Rule, the Monopole and Dipoles and Tripoles, Stiffness to Weight Ratios, Coupled Harmonic Oscillation, Structural vs. Monocoque engineering, the guitar-as-air-pump, Helmholtz resonances, the Law of Conservation of Energy, Impedance, Huygens devices, bracing (i.e., strategies for regulating vibrational modes), Young’s Modulus of Elasticity, and the behaviors of I-beams and engineered trusses — all of which are discussed in my books.  They all support the idea of ‘that’s enough; you can stop carving away now’.

(Oh, wow: The Jesuit’s Guide to Guitar Making!  . . . But I’m kidding about kidding: I think Enoughness is a profound principle in real life.)

Aside from that, and on a different level entirely, I find butterflies fascinating.  Bear with me a bit here.  They are GREAT design work!  Consider the humble butterfly’s life course.  The young larva emerges from the egg, which of course has previously been fertilized; and that’s a whole different discussion.  The larva then feeds, grows, survives, and becomes a  pupa, and then a caterpillar — which is basically a bigger, fatter larva that’s reached full puberty, except for the acne.  The caterpillar encases itself in a cocoon (ever wonder how those peanut-sized worms ever learn to do such a thing?  I mean, with humans, it takes agriculture, an entire viable culture of teaching, the complex social relations involved in learning, problem-solving, extracting dye from plants and dyeing the fibers, making looms, division of labor, skill and experience , etc. . . . to just weave a friggin’ blanket, for crying out loud!) . . . and a whole goddamn butterfly emerges from the cocoon, in due time.

Now, the butterfly is totally different than the caterpillar.  It’s more different anatomically than you are from your pet cat.  It has different internal organs, body shape, mouth, eyes, color-coded wings, legs, sexual organs, it doesn’t eat leaves any more, it flies, it swarms, it gives off pheromones . . . etc. etc. etc.   And get this: the caterpillar doesn’t ‘morph’ into the butterfly the way a seed ‘morphs’ into a tree — that is, through a process of serial steps of growth that you can observe, measure, and track.  THE CATERPILLAR BECOMES AN UNDIFFERENTIATED LIQUID INSIDE THE COCOON.   It just melts away!   And a whole new TOTALLY DIFFERENT CREATURE is formed from that . . . uh . . . soup.  Wow.  It’s like putting all the Legos back in the box and then making something completely different with them.  Now THAT’S reeeeeeallllllly cool.  I mean, it sort of puts a monopole to shame, you know.  Can you imagine the time and hassle that would be saved if your teenage kids just melted into a puddle and then came out as fully formed adults?  It is enough to make one weep with awe.  And no one has any real clue as to how this is done.

Likewise, consider the common spider.  You know, those icky things.  Spiders have no muscles. What!? you say.  Even bees and beetles and maggots have muscles!  How do spiders manage to get around?!  The answer is top-drawer-level design work, Watson.  You see, spiders’ legs are hollow and filled with fluid.  Spiders — the big ones and the small ones — move around through a system of carefully controlled and coordinated hydraulic pressures.  I mean, Dude, what a brilliantly great design idea!  And with these carefully articulated hydraulic pressures spiders can coordinate their eight legs to weave webs, catch food, etc.  Not only that, but their webs — material for which come out of glands in their abdomens — are sticky to everything except themselves!  And no one has any real clue as to how this is done.

Well sure, you say, it’s the DNA thing, obviously.  Everybody knows that.  Don’t you watch the Nature Channel?  Oh, yeah, right, totally.  And this might perhaps segue us into an appreciation of the fact that you and I, along with your first grade teacher, and the clerk who sold gum to the bully who made your life miserable in the fifth grade, and your sister-in-law’s ex-husband’s second cousin’s neighborhood librarian, and all the Ugandan building custodians who were hired last November, etc. . . . are each made up of one trillion cells . . . that are furthermore mindbogglingly specialized, and that started out as one measly single one.  That’s pretty cool too.  I mean, it sort of puts a monopole to shame, that does.

Know how much a trillion is?  Hah!  I betchayadon’t, as Sarah Palin might say.  If you were to read out loud the following sentence: “a thousand, plus another thousand, plus another thousand, plus another thousand, plus another thousand, plus another thousand, plus another thousand, plus another thousand, plus another thousand, plus another thousand, plus another thousand, plus another thousand. . . . . . “  etc., at a rate of two of these every second, it would take you sixty years to get to a trillion.  You couldn’t ever stop for lunch, dinner, sleep, bathroom breaks, or to admire my guitars, or even to scratch where you itch.  Not ever. Two thousand, every second, for sixty years!  All from one little germ cell!   Yep, I’m not gonna worry much about being well-regarded by that Bostonian in 2057 who never met me — and who furthermore might turn out to be a sonofabitch I wouldn’t even like.  If that guy has any sense he’ll be out worshipping butterflies and spiders. And maybe even Jerry Brown.

Of course, I do feel peeved that the guy might be making a bunch of money off my guitars, without his having ever made even one.  That sort of sucks. It is soooooooo unfair.

Any idea of whom I can complain to?  Anybody out there?  Hello? . . .

The Great Ervin Somogyi!

The Great Ervin Somogyi!

END OF PART 2

Special thanks to Robert Carrigan for the generous use of his Woodstock photos.

Somogyi Book Review, by David Lang

Title:  The Responsive Guitar
Author:  Ervin Somogyi
ISBN 978-0-9823207-0-9

Title:  Making the Responsive Guitar

Ervin Somogyi

Ervin Somogyi

Author:  Ervin Somogyi
ISBN 978-0-9823207-1-6

THE RESPONSIVE GUITAR

“It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.”
— Voltaire

When the idea of building a guitar first dawned on me in the nineteen-seventies very little information on guitar building was easily available.  Books by Irving Sloane, David Russell Young, Arthur Overholtzer and Joseph Wallo were the only sources of information commonly available. These texts became my sacred how-to manuscripts.

Fast-forward thirty years to the present state of published luthier information for guitar builders.  There are now more than twenty published books, two major magazines, two major web sites and innumerable blogs.  We have the ability to get instantaneous good and sometimes dubious answers to our questions.   We have access to dozens of blueprints of fine instruments to copy or glean inspiration from.  Furthermore, the left-brained of us have enough books, spreadsheets, sites, and testing jigs to keep our heads spinning and keep us busy for a lifetime.  With some woodworking skills, a box of nice wood, a few tools and all this information the average builder can with some persistence craft  a nice guitar with an assurance that it will “turn out” reasonably well.  With all this information do we really need another book on guitar building?

Despite the ready availability of all these resources, the path to the luthier’s grail, the “fine guitar”, is a different path than simply building from plans and advise from the library of luthier information.   Despite all of this information very few of us will ever build the “fine guitar”.  What is the secret to building a world-class guitar?  Is it more precise jigs and fixtures?  Is it finding that piece of drop dead gorgeous rosewood or spruce?  Is it building dozens of guitars? Perhaps tapping or electronically testing tops will lead us there.  Is it achieved by the faithful reproduction of a detailed blueprint or an existing model?  Is it a spiritual property imparted to our instruments through our loving touch and shaping of wood?   Is there a short path?  Must I build hundreds of instruments to get there?  Honestly, I don’t really know, as I am not there yet.

Ervin Somogyi has written a unique new book in two companion volumes titled “The Responsive Guitar” and “Making the Responsive Guitar”.    Most would argue that Ervin is one of the premier builders of our time.  He is well respected for his knowledge, the quality of his instruments with their artistic and tonal balance, and of course his sense of humor.    The title alludes to his path to the fine guitar.  His path is to build a guitar that is responsive to the player’s skills and faithfully produces music with all the desired nuances.  In short, he recommends building a responsive guitar that does what the player expects it to do.   He explains in his new book how he does just that. This is not a beginner’s book.  This two-volume book is not a simple reiteration of existing luthier literature.  He doesn’t give us a single blueprint, a new “wow” jig or a step-by-step pictorial guide to faithfully copy his guitar.  He gives us one book of the “why I do it” aspect of his methods and a second book of  “how I do it and why”.   This instructional approach is unique among all of the published guitar literature, both printed and electronic, that I am aware of.  He skips most of the basic mechanical aspects of guitar building and takes us further.  With this book he leads us onto his very personal path to guitar nirvana.

Book One:  “The Responsive Guitar”

Book one is comprised of thirty-four chapters laced with Ervin’s opinions and observations, eminently practical applied and workbench friendly science, and useful advise on better building.

He covers material science and wood science in a very understandable and more importantly a useful way.  His “cube rule” as applied to tops and braces helps us understand why careful top and brace graduation is so important.  Run-out and heliotropism is explained in a common sense way–it is how the tree grows.   His treatment of tone wood selection and wood evaluation not only helps us pick good wood  using objective criteria, but also he helps us avoid the trap of using merchandising grading systems to judge good wood.  He debunks several misconceptions of wood grain and strength.    Twelve of the chapters are devoted to the mechanical properties and  “light” physics of individual guitar parts such as the “X” brace, the bridge, the functions of the back, doming of tops and the function of bracing.  He covers mechanical beam theory without the math.  Voicing is defined and explained in an understandable way through vibrational modes, stiffness, elasticity, and “connectedness”

He also covers his approach to joinery, ornamentation, and intonation within a context of how and why they affect the sound of the “responsive guitar”.  Ervin finishes with a discussion of methods and mechanics of sustain, projection and settling in of guitar sound.

Book Two:  “Making the Responsive Guitar”

The table of contents of the second volume, “Making the Responsive Guitar”, would suggest that it is simply another step-by-step how to guide.  It does approach the elements in the usual order of tools, molds, wood care, humidity control, glues followed by the top, sides, neck and back, etc.  It is this and yet much more.  Are you a luthier? Check out the preface to find out.  These chapters cover in order the construction of a guitar but from the vantage point of “why” and not just “how”.     Ervin covers why use a hand plane and a scraper, improvements on the mold to help dome the sides, and shows off his famous mini-bench.   His key concept of jig DNA is as vital to volume two as the cube rule is to volume one.

I found his coverage and philosophy of the neck joint interesting in that it melds the modern mortise and tenon, separate body and neck construction with the rigidity of a permanent Spanish heel neck body joint.

Ervin’s explanation of the neck alignment and fingerboard relief really shines.  He provides the most lucid and well reasoned details of the how and why’s of fingerboard relief I have ever read.

A Book Within a Book

I found the “tucking in the corners” sections in Ervin’s books to be one of the most enjoyable, if not entertaining aspects of the text.  They are full of historical information, clarifications, references and humor.  Several of the chapters are mostly footnotes so you won’t want to miss them.  Finally, a very complete almost encyclopedic section on sources, complete literature references and a glossary complete the text.

Conclusions

Ervin’s book(s) “The Responsive Guitar” and “Making the Responsive Guitar” are clearly the summary of his years at lutherie.  They are replete with his philosophy, his prejudices, his well-reasoned techniques and knowledge that covers the length and breadth of the art, the craft and the science of the guitar.  Rather than approach guitar building as a step-by-step technical exercise he approaches it as an artistic, philosophical, a scientific, and a technical journey.  These are not books for the uninitiated beginner or books for the builder of guitars who doesn’t care how or why it works.  This is not a book for the extreme left-brained among us.  There is not a single mathematical expression in the books.  These two books are for those luthiers interested in a very complete synthesis of the philosophy, science, art, and technical procedures that encompass Ervin Somogyi’s approach to the creation of the grail- The Responsive Guitar.  They are a very good read.  It makes you think about guitars, about physics, about metaphysics and life.  Thank you Ervin for guiding us down your path.

David H. Lang

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to travel back in time, to observe Shakespeare writing by candlelight, giving  voice to his tortured Hamlet  — or to sit in the corner of a cold Dutch room watching Vincent Van Gogh turn a lifeless canvas into a post-impressionist masterwork?

Given the power to travel time, I would choose to watch Hoagy Carmichael spin out endless chordal variations of Stardust, and maybe later, I’d sit in on a Sidney Bechet session,  and watch as the art of Jazz improvisation is being born.

Sadly, this is only the stuff of fantasy.  Or is it?

Upcoming generations of guitar builders may not have a time machine to help seek out the advice and techniques of of the master builders — but now, they will have the next best thing — a rare peek into the mind of a master.

THE RESPONSIVE GUITAR

Ervin Somogyi, The Responsive Guitar, Limited Edition, luthier, custom guitar

Ervin Somogyi, The Responsive Guitar, Volume One

In writing his epic 2 Volume treatise, The Responsive Guitar, Ervin Somogyi has bestowed an invaluable gift to the future luthiers of the world, and also to the guitar community in general.

These two luxurious books, are deluxe leather-bound, numbered and signed, and housed in a protective slipcase. * Volume One is all about the fine points of making a successful guitar. This includes everything from materials analysis to theory of guitar acoustics and dynamics, as well as illuminating historical perspective.

Volume Two: Making the Responsive Guitar delves into the methods and procedures  outlined in in Volume One. It emphasizes constructing the steel string guitar, but it also heavily touches on making the Spanish guitar too.

In Ervin’s own words, “This is a book about understanding and making the guitar as I know it, practice it, think about it, and appreciate it. It is a comprehensive method, covering material that other books stint on, or skip over entirely…”

45 years of experience — a lifetime devoted to the perfection of his art, is contained within the 650 pages of The Responsive Guitar.  Adding to the text, are hundreds of detailed illustrations, diagrams and photographs. So not only can you read Ervin’s descriptions in plain, everyday language — but you can also see direct examples of those words in practice.

I am not a luthier, but I found these books a joy to read. They advanced my understand of the instruments I love, and gave me a rare view into the brilliance that goes into every Somogyi instrument. I have no doubt that The Responsive Guitar is essential reading for every new builder. Consuming these books feels less like reading, than it feels like thinking about guitars, and creative processes  as Somogyi himself thinks.

Ervin Somogyi, Making the Responsive Guitar, Volume Two

Ervin Somogyi, Making the Responsive Guitar, Volume Two

Whether you are a neophyte or a professional, a player or a collector, there is a wealth of information here that can be found nowhere else. I encourage you to pick up a copy and enrich your understanding of the Somogyi process, and all things acoustic guitar.

Dream Guitars is proud to have such an important, informative resource to offer our clients. Please call for more information.

*Additionally,  both books may be purchased individually, or in a non-leather bound 2 volume set. Call Dream Guitars for more information.