Posted on January 5, 2010March 11, 2024 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, 2010March 11, 2024 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.
