Audacious Luthiery II

May 5th, 2005 by Fernando Gros

A short while back I made some com­ments on a new and inex­per­i­enced guitar maker who was charig exhor­bit­ant prices for new gui­tars. To guage some other opin­ions, I star­ted a thread on the Gear Page forum. Today, I added some more developed thoughts on the sub­ject, par­tic­u­larly address­ing the claim that making a guitar body is not all that dif­fer­ent from any other form of woodwork.

Posted in Music and Music Technology | 2 comments

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2 comments on this post.

  1. Toni:

    May 7th, 2005 at 2:33 am

    Inter­est­ing thread. I com­men­ted on your last post about this, but I’ve a feel­ing it didn’t take.

    It’s cer­tainly true that there’s more than *craft* to lutherie — there are enough good play­ing CNC made gui­tars out there to prove that. And there’s more to lutherie than pre­ci­sion — there are enough scruffy but great sound­ing gui­tars to prove that.

    Seems to me that it’s a com­bin­a­tion of many factors. Pre­ci­sion is cer­tainly required, but more than that, an abil­ity to find the tone in things, have an appre­ci­ation of mech­an­ical and elec­tric engin­eer­ing and an eye for colour and line.

    It strikes me that the guitar man­u­fac­turer in ques­tion could well have all those things. If he came to it with the wood­work­ing skills and as a player that already looked after his own gui­tars then he should be cap­able of making an excel­lent instru­ment first time. Being a small builder, he’d also be care­ful to pick decent res­on­ant woods, rather than join the odd couple of bits together so that he’ll extract max profit from the bulk timber he bought. IIRC the instru­ment on dis­play was a ‘Tele’. Pos­sibly the easi­est instru­ment to make.

    I *think* that if my wood­work­ing skills were good enough and I could find the right wood then I could make a better guitar than any stand­ard pro­duc­tion instru­ment first go. The require­ments are as obvi­ous to me as they are to you. But I’m only a ‘car­penter’, not a cab­inet maker.

  2. f:

    May 7th, 2005 at 11:37 pm

    It looks like your com­ments did make it to the other post…

    …chos­ing woods is one of the issues I do have in mind. The whole ques­tion of res­on­ance and tone is really some­thing unique to musical instru­ment making and in my view is an essen­tial skill to luth­i­ery that does not come easily.