Posted on April 7, 2021March 6, 2024 by Dale Phillips Improved X Bracing Improved X Bracing by Don Musser Originally published as Guild of American Luthiers Data Sheet #172, 1981 and in Lutherie Woods and Steel String Guitars, 1997 After building a number of guitars with the standard steel string X-bracing pattern, I noticed some problems. First, even when the braces were precurved to a 25' radius, there was still a deformation just behind the bridge that was caused by the upward pull of the strings on the inner bridge plate. Energy which could have gone to sound production in the whole top was being lost to wood deformation in a small area of the top. Second, there was always a problem of creating a guitar having both an outstanding bass and treble response. Good bass response requires less or lighter bracing on the bass side of the top. A crisp, well-defined treble requires more or slightly heavier bracing on the treble side. The challenge was to be able to achieve both without retarding either. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on April 7, 2021March 6, 2024 by Dale Phillips In Search of the Perfect Cone In Search of the Perfect Cone by Tim Earls Originally published in American Lutherie #30, 1991 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Three, 2004 I think I've got it. I have here an untested method of finding the exact, correct multiple radius for any given fingerboard using simple barnyard geometry and no computer. Danny Rauen and Tim Olsen wrote interesting articles on multiradiused, or conical, fretboards in American Lutherie #8. (See Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume One, p. 298.) Great stuff! Let’s talk about cones for a moment. A cone is a tapered cylinder extended up to a point. Or a tapered cylinder is a cone with its point lopped off, take your pick. You knew that. Bear with me. In a two-dimensional view, this looks like Fig. 1. The circular base of the cone is seen as a horizontal line, since you’re looking at its edge. The height of the cone, what I call “true length” is measured on the centerline from base to point. The side line of the cone I call “true distance.” The radius at any spot on this cone can be found by drawing a horizontal line from the centerline to the true distance line and measuring it. You probably knew that too. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on April 7, 2021March 6, 2024 by Dale Phillips Skin Heading Ethnic Drums, Etc. Skin Heading Ethnic Drums, Etc. by Topher Gayle Originally published in American Lutherie #2, 1985 Derbeckis (A.K.A. dumbegs or Arabic tabla) are medium-sized (10" to 18") hand drums used most frequently in Middle-Eastern folk and Belly-Dance music, and also heard in jazz idioms. Two main types of the drum exist: metal bodied drums, usually Turkish, utilizing a mechanical drumhead tensioner much like that on bongos or conga (which drummers frequently want to have replaced by banjo tensioners); and the clay-bodied drums which come in a large variety of sizes and shapes. Wood-bodied drums also exist and may usually be treated as clay (for the most part). Tim Olsen asked if various skin-headed stringed instruments might be treated by this device. I have not done so myself, but I don’t see any serious complications. A radiator hose clamp chain can be used to fix the skin to the side of the body if the body side joins the top at a right angle. I used this technique on a small wooden drum with good results. Blocks were required to raise the body up to the top frame hex, since the drum was so short. The skin was brought up to tension as described below, and then the radiator clamps attached. The assembly was let dry just as is usually done. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on December 28, 2020March 6, 2024 by Dale Phillips A Review of Three Old Lutherie Books A Review of Three Old Lutherie Books with an Emphasis on Their Guitar Sections by Jan Tulacek, Alain Bieber, and James Buckland Originally published in American Lutherie #104, 2010 As we undertake this overview of three 19th-century lutherie texts, we recognize that much older documents were circulating from late medieval times. Some, such as the manuscript of Henri Arnault de Zwolle written in Dijon in 1440, already contained good descriptions of instruments, but to our knowledge, none had the goal to become a comprehensive “how to” lutherie handbook. From the Baroque era there are the important musical treatises of Michael Praetorius (1620) in Germany and Marin Mersenne (1635/36) in France, with good descriptions of our Western European string instruments. We also have a few fascinating descriptions of particular aspects of lutherie such as the Antonio Bagatella violin booklet of 1782, or the lesser-known Pierre Trichet viol making manuscript of 1640. And while the encyclopedia format of the Enlightenment Period of the middle 18th century never allowed extensive coverage of the topic, the French Diderot and D’Alembert books had wonderful drawings and interesting lutherie information. But in the late 1820s and early 1830s, still considered by many as the apex of the classical guitar in written music, we see two real lutherie “how-to” books appear, describing all the steps in the fabrication of the guitar. The first writer was Wettengel in Germany, followed a few years later by Maugin in France. In spite of many imperfections, they give a good understanding of the methods used in the two main centers of lutherie at that time, i.e., Neukirchen (now Markneukirchen) in Saxony and Mirecourt in Lorraine. A third important how-to book, by Hasluck, was published in the United States in 1907, but was likely written in the last decade of the 19th century. It is a very important work since it represents the first attempt to write a “how-to” lutherie book in English. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on December 28, 2020March 6, 2024 by Dale Phillips Cutting Michigan Maple Cutting Michigan Maple by Elon Howe Originally published in American Lutherie #37, 1994 In 1983, I had the guts to try to repair my dad’s old fiddle. I reglued it, sanded it, sprayed on a varnish — it looked great. I was later advised that I had spoiled the fiddle by doing the wrong things. Later on, I bought a fiddle kit. It had the wood, a machine cut scroll, four ounces of varnish, and a half-pound of glue. About six months later I turned out my first fiddle and of course it sounded great. Dan Erlewine, who ran a shop north of us at that time, had to admit that it looked pretty fair. He later admitted he was afraid to see what I might turn out because he knew he would have to be honest. He seemed to be relieved that it didn’t look like a shoe box. At first, information was hard to come by. Finally, we found an address for Hammond Ashley. He recommended a book called The Techniques of Violin Making by Harry Wake. I got to meet Harry at the Arizona Violin Makers’ Association Competition in Tucson — he even bought some willow wood from me. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
