Posted on January 5, 2010May 23, 2025 by Dale Phillips Review: Classical Guitar Making, A Modern Approach to Traditional Design by John S. Bogdanovich Review: Classical Guitar Making, A Modern Approach to Traditional Design by John S. Bogdanovich Reviewed by John Mello Originally published in American Lutherie #95, 2008 Classical Guitar Making, A Modern Approach to Traditional John S. Bogdanovich ISBN (hardcover): 9781402720604 Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., 2007, $29.95 Classical Guitar Making, A Modern Approach To Traditional Design by John S. Bogdanovich is a hardbound 310-page volume filled with beautifully clear photography that amply illustrates the detailed text. While the back cover proclaims that the author will “help you develop all the necessary skills, even if you’ve never made anything more complicated than a school woodworking project,” a fairly high degree of proficiency in both hand and power tools is assumed, particularly regarding the use of hand planes. You’ll have to bring your own chops and/or be willing to develop them on the fly. The tone throughout is personal, almost conversational, and we are presented with a lot of biographical material and philosophical ruminations that may seem extraneous to the physical task at hand, but for someone considering a long term engagement with the craft rather than a one-off build, it’s one of the book’s strengths. As a novice, I would have loved to know how a working professional got started, influences shaping their sonic and aesthetic choices, and the many facets of the mysterious lifelong refining of one’s craft. “Part One — Preparation” includes discussions of guitar anatomy with an emphasis on the interrelatedness of the parts, wood types and selection, and shop requirements, including brief descriptions and photos of recommended vises, benches, and generic and specialty power and hand tools. There are clear, dimensioned plans for making a number of specialty jigs, bench tools, and specialty items such as shop-made calipers and sanding disks. One small problem arises in the author’s discussion of the need for concave sanding disks of 15' and 25'. Fabricating these is discussed only perfunctorily, with uncharacteristically no illustrations, and no indication of how to obtain or make the illustrated radius sticks. If we take the author’s suggestion and simply purchase the disks we can certainly make our sticks from them, but the degree of back and top arch is an important, alterable variable, and knowing how to generate alternative radii, short of getting a 25' board, a pencil, and a big room, would be useful. This may be a little beyond the scope of an introductory tutorial, but the growing current reliance on commercial concave disks of limited selection to set the back, while a facile solution to a process Irving Sloane once described as “exacting and tedious,” may lose sight of the fact that many of the great historic and contemporary classical guitar makers did and do not set the back in a uniform dome with its attendant reduction of side depth at the tail block. End of rant. Sorry. 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 January 5, 2010May 22, 2025 by Dale Phillips Review: Lyre-guitar: Etoile charmante, between the 18th and 19th centuries by Eleonora Vulpiani Review: Lyre-guitar: Etoile charmante, between the 18th and 19th centuries by Eleonora Vulpiani Reviewed by John Doan Originally published in American Lutherie #99, 2009 Lyre-guitar: Etoile charmante, between the 18th and 19th centuries Eleonora Vulpiani Two volumes (Italian and English) plus CD Rome, 2007 www.eleonoravulpiani.com No one can question that the guitar has great popularity today and that the lyre-guitar is little known and all but forgotten, but few realize its past significance and the important role it played in the early days of the birth of the classical guitar. Rediscovering an instrument from a forgotten tradition brings with it many intriguing surprises, which is what Eleonora Vulpiani presents us in her self-produced book Lyre-Guitar: Etoile charmante, between the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a small window into the grand world of the lyre-guitar. For those not students of history, let’s back up to the last quarter of the 18th century to a time when Western culture was entering into a Neoclassical era, both intellectually and artistically exploring aesthetics and values of a Graeco-Roman world. It was nothing short of revolutionary (note the American and French revolutions at this time) putting aside notions such as the rule by kings and various religious beliefs, and wanting to be guided instead by principles of reason based on evidence and proof. There was a flourishing of the sciences and a rise of the middle class at a time when people surrounded themselves with Greek inspired art, architecture, and literature. The music of this time celebrated clarity, simple structures, and folk-like melodies that were to be graceful and elegant. 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 January 5, 2010May 23, 2025 by Dale Phillips Review: Step by Step Guitar Making by Alex Willis Review: Step by Step Guitar Making by Alex Willis Reviewed by John Mello Originally published in American Lutherie #94, 2008 Step by Step Guitar Making Alex Willis ISBN (paperback): 9781861084095 Guild of Master Craftsman Pub. Ltd., 2008, $17.95 In the predawn (1960s) of the current somewhat optimistically termed “Golden Age of American Lutherie,” nascent craftsmen and craftswomen roamed the land, struggling on their own, haunting the few professional practitioners, and occasionally wheedling an apprenticeship, where they spent long unpaid hours in the shop, after which they trudged to their dwelling, inscribing their hard-won knowledge on stone tablets dutifully stacked at the back of the cave for future reference. Hard data was difficult to accrue; the only readily obtainable publications being the helpful but maddeningly brief offerings by A.P. Sharpe, H.E. Brown, and Joseph Wallo, and the seminal Classical Guitar Construction by Irving Sloane, an inspiration for many, but at ninety-five pages, many taken up with background info and photos of older master instruments, more a porthole view of a mysterious and beautiful island on the horizon than a detailed prescription for sonic and cosmetic excellence. Art Overholtzer’s Classic Guitar Making, edited and published by experienced technical writer Lawrence Brock, and at 324 pages, the first method with enough detail to give one a decent shot at making a guitar even remotely like that of the author, was published in 1974, significantly followed in 1987 by Cumpiano and Natelson’s Guitarmaking: Tradition and Technology, a thorough exposition of the craft by working professionals, its detail and clarity setting the bar pretty high for anything to follow. 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 January 5, 2010May 22, 2025 by Dale Phillips Review: More on Somogyi’s Responsive Guitar Review: More on Somogyi’s Responsive Guitar Reviewed by Michael Sandén Originally published in American Lutherie #102, 2010 I first meet Ervin in 1984. I was in my second year as a wannabe guitar builder, and already I had read about him in Frets magazine. Over the years we have met a few times when I have passed through San Francisco and of course at Guild conventions. I have listened to his workshops and I have read his articles in American Lutherie magazine. When I saw these two thick books of about 300 pages each, I got the feeling that Ervin had left nothing out. Finally someone has taken the time and effort to write all of this down. He goes through the many aspects of the guitar and just tells you his experience (which spans over four decades) of how everything works. Ervin makes a full chapter of some topics that are barely mentioned in many guitar building books. Take for instance the chapter, “The Functions of the Guitar Back.” I have been building guitars for almost thirty years. To now be able to read about these things that have been in my head for so long gives me great satisfaction. 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 January 5, 2010May 23, 2025 by Dale Phillips Review: Building the Selmer-Maccaferri Guitar by Michael Collins Review: Building the Selmer-Maccaferri Guitar by Michael Collins Reviewed by John Calkin Originally published in American Lutherie #96, 2008 Building the Selmer-Maccaferri Guitar Michael Collins Acoustic Guitar Resources DVD, 14 hours Available from Stewart-MacDonald, $159.98 The Selmer-Maccaferri guitar, whether D-hole or oval hole, is unlike any other commonly encountered. As far as I know, this DVD set and the accompanying book (available separately) are the only thorough guides to the construction details and how to put one together, though the DVDs only cover the oval hole model. Although Michael Collins makes references to the book and plans to help clarify specific details, I haven’t seen them, so we’ll have to examine the DVDs on their own. The most obvious and remarkable aspect of the DVDs is their ten volume, fourteen-hour run time. Editor Tim Olsen’s e-mail to his crew hoping to find a reviewer asked, “Is anyone not in prison going to have time to watch these?” Well, there I was with my cybernetic arm waving in the air. I guess I’m just a glutton for this stuff. I must confess, though, that while I try to watch video media at least twice before reviewing, once through had to suffice for this set. 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.
