Hunting the Elusive Guitar Wolf

by Alan Carruth

from his 2011 GAL Convention workshop

Originally published in American Lutherie #114, 2013



About that title: Please note that it’s hunting the wolf, not finding. These things are often hard to find, but generally easy to kill once you’ve found them. So I’m going to discuss what the wolf is, where it tends to lurk, and how you can go after it in a more-or-less organized fashion. As in any hunt, we’ll need to think about what the prey is, and its natural history: where it prowls, what it feeds on, and so forth.

I use a pretty broad definition of a wolf: It’s a bad note linked to some feature of the resonant structure of the instrument or strings. “Bad” has to be seen in context: We usually want our guitars to be loud, but one loud note in the middle of a group of softer ones is a wolf, or a soft one in the middle of a bunch of loud ones is a wolf. Wolves can thud, or warble, or just plain sound different. Like pornography, it’s hard to define but easy to recognize.