Posted on May 4, 2020May 16, 2025 by Dale Phillips Free Plate Tuning, Part Two: Violins Free Plate Tuning, Part Two: Violins by Alan Carruth Originally published in American Lutherie #29, 1992 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Three, 2004 See also, Free Plate Tuning, Part One: Theory by Alan Carruth Free Plate Tuning, Part Three: Guitars by Alan Carruth Before I get into plate tuning proper I’d like to digress a bit and discuss the rationale behind the process, and a couple of other things I find it useful to keep in mind while I’m working. And I can’t think of a better way to begin than by telling you about one of my more elaborate experiments. Fig. 15 gives the relevant information on my fourth and fifth violins. The idea was to check out the influence of asymmetric back graduations by building a pair of closely-matched fiddles with that as the only variable. The one-piece backs were cut from the same plank of bird’s-eye maple and the tops were cut from a red spruce 4×6 that I took out of the wall of my house when I put in a new chimney. The molds were routed using a template. Archings were checked for height at over two dozen points on each plate and were held to .2MM. Graduation, weight, and frequency data is as shown. The delta f mentioned is the frequency drop obtained when a 5G weight was stuck to the plate in an active area of the given mode. Fittings and so on were matched as closely as possible, and the two bridges were cut back to back from the same piece of maple. 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 November 13, 2019May 21, 2025 by Dale Phillips Controlling Strings, Wood, and Air Controlling Strings, Wood, and Air from her 1979 GAL Convention lecture Originally published in Guild of American Luthiers Quarterly Volume 8, #3, 1980 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie, Volume 1, 2000 I’d like to take a minute to tell you a story. Imagine the scent in front of a cave some 20,000 years ago. A family has just killed a bear and is skinning it and preparing the meat for food. They’ve given some of the rawhide to their young son who has made some strips to string his first hunting bow. He and his sister are sitting out in front of the cave trying to tie some of the slippery strips to the bow-stick. As they do this the boy puts one end of the stick in his mouth to hold it steady as he tightens and ties the slippery stuff. As he plucks the rawhide to check the pull he suddenly realizes he can get different sounds depending on how he bites the stick and shapes his lips and cheeks around it. This could have been the origin of the musical bow. When I told this story in Ames, Iowa, a few years ago it created quite a lot of interest. After the lecture they produced a record of someone playing the mouth bow. I now have a mouth bow that a young man made for me which is quite a challenge to try to play. Actually, we are working with the same three elements that the young cave boy had under his control: strings, wood, and air. He could vary all three of these quite easily to a certain extent. In our modern bowed and plucked strings, however, the wood and the air resonances are more or less set when the instruments are made. For years I have worked to test the effects of variations in the wood and air resonances, but it means taking the instruments apart to thin the plates or slice down the height of the ribs (on expendable instruments, of course!) 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 September 6, 2019May 14, 2025 by Dale Phillips Meet the Maker: Norman Pickering Meet the Maker: Norman Pickering by N.P., with Barbara Goldowsky previously published in American Lutherie #95, 2008 Norman Pickering does not understand the concept of retirement. He celebrated his ninety-second birthday on July 9, 2008, and he is still immersed in studying the properties of violin, viola, and cello bows. This is a logical follow-up to his lifelong study of the acoustics of bowed instruments, as a player, maker, and scientist. Though musical acoustics is his overriding passion, there have been lengthy, but fascinating detours along the way into fields as various as medical ultrasound, aircraft instrument design, and his most famous invention, the Pickering phonograph tonearm and cartridge. Rather than trying to condense his multiple careers and achievements into a question-and-answer interview, Norman agreed to share his life story — so far — in an essay he wrote after moving to our current home in East Hampton. I think AL readers will enjoy it. With characteristic modesty, he calls it simply “Biography.” — Barbara Goldowsky I was born in 1916 in a small fishing and farming town where both sides of my family had lived for at least three generations. Just at that time it was on the way to being submerged in the borough of Brooklyn by development and road building. By the time I was seven years old it was no longer the integrated semi-isolated village my parents and grandparents had known. My mother’s family were farmers and my father and his father were engineers. My future education was decreed almost from birth: I would follow my father’s plan for me. And so I did; after a happy and successful time in grammar and high school, I entered Newark College of Engineering and finished in 1936, a few weeks before my twentieth birthday. I enjoyed engineering, but found that my interest in music was much too strong to be ignored. 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 11, 2010May 27, 2025 by Dale Phillips Review: Acoustics of Wood by Voichita Buchur Review: Acoustics of Wood by Voichita Buchur reviewed by Nicholas Von Robison Originally published in American Lutherie #57, 1999 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Five, 2008 Acoustics of Wood Voichita Buchur CRC Press, 1995 ISBN 0849348013 Voichita Buchur’s book Acoustics of Wood is a synthesis of over fifty years of work by the scientific community into the physics of how this complex material responds to vibrational wave stimuli. With almost 800 references into the literature and about ten years from inception to its being published in 1995, it is a tremendous resource for the luthier’s understanding of his/her main material. I don’t get the feel from the text that the author is a maker herself, even though she is a member of the Catgut Acoustical Society. The book is heavily weighted towards violin family instruments, but this doesn’t make the book any less valuable to guitar makers. After a short, well written, general discussion on the anatomical structure of wood (macro, micro, and molecular), a brief outline is presented dividing the book into three major sections. Part One explores the physical phenomena associated with the effects of acoustic waves in forests (windbreaks to attenuate noise) and architectural acoustics (concert halls, office buildings, restaurants) with wood being used as a construction material and insulator in conjunction with other nonwood materials. A survey of six European concert halls and their geometrical, acoustical, and construction data is pretty interesting. 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 11, 2010May 28, 2025 by Dale Phillips Review: Research Papers in Violin Acoustics 1975–1993 Review: Research Papers in Violin Acoustics, 1975-1993 edited by Carleen Hutchins and Virginia Benade Reviewed by David Hurd Originally published in American Lutherie #59, 1999 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Five, 2008 Research Papers in Violin Acoustics 1975–1993 Carleen Maley Hutchins, Editor Virginia Benade, Associate Editor Acoustical Society of America, ISBN 1563966093 It is with some trepidation that I pen this, my first book review for American Lutherie. As I noted to Tim Olsen, “But I’ve never made or even played a violin. How can I review such books and do them justice?” “Well,” he replied, “most of our readers are in the same position. And, having written the review, you can keep the books.” So began several months of fascinated reading of this two-volume set of violin research papers. A little over half of the papers in this collection are from the Journal of the Catgut Acoustical Society, Series 1 or 2 and the Society Newsletter. Both the Society and the journal are still alive, well, and active in mostly violin family instrument research. The remainder of the articles come from such technical journals as: Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Acustica, Journal of the Acoustical Society of Japan, Journal of Audio Engineering, Journal of the Violin Society of America, Scientific American, Wood Science and Technology, Acoustics Australia, Acta Metallica, Music Perception, American Journal of Physics, Interdisciplinary Science Review, Strad, and Physics Today. Papers from the proceedings of several conferences on acoustics and modal analysis are also represented. 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.
