Hearing Voices: A Recipe for Voicing the Steel String Guitar

by John Greven

from his 2011 GAL Convention workshop

Originally published in American Lutherie #114, 2013



Let’s discuss a vocabulary for tone. These are the words I use when I talk to my customers.

Power. We’re talking about headroom, the ability to get louder when you play harder.

Responsiveness. I want a top that will respond easily to a light touch, but it will also sustain under a heavy one. The finished guitar will have a full voice played lightly or heavily or anywhere in between. A lot of guitars require a heavy touch; as playing pressure diminishes, the voice gets thin and loses its full substance.

Projection. How far away can you hear it? I want the guitar to throw its voice as far as possible. When I was at Gruhn’s, a 1937 D-28 came in, all original. The top was the thinnest we’d seen on a herringbone, about .090", but it was really stiff. The sound of that guitar was painful, but you could hear it for miles. For a bluegrasser trying to play lead over six banjos, that’s the guitar.