Official Luthiers Forum!

Some of the members here may have had the pleasure over the years of meeting and talking with Australian luthier Graham Caldersmith. He was one of the world’s leading researchers into stringed musical instrument acoustics. He combined this understanding with great practical skill, constructing the very finest classical guitars and instruments of the violin family. He died entirely too early a couple of years back, and I thought it would be a useful project to gather all his various writings on guitar and violin acoustics into one volume.

The Caldersmith Papers is a lifetime of research into the way guitars and violins work and make musical sounds. The book brings together 33 articles written between the late 1970s and early 2000s that were originally published in American Lutherie, the Catgut Acoustical Society Newsletter, the Journal of Guitar Acoustics, Acoustics Australia, The Strad and other journals. Caldersmith's research was highly thought of worldwide and he was able to able to explain complex ideas on musical instrument acoustics in a way accessible to the non-technically trained, while at the same time publishing peer-reviewed papers on in the major acoustics journals in Australia, the United States and Europe. This was in addition to building more than 200 guitars, 116 violins, 60 violas and 38 cellos, pioneering the use of Australian timbers in many of them.

The book is being published by MusicBooks Press as a hard copy printed book only, available in a couple of weeks through IPG in the US and Canada.

Amazon is taking pre-orders at https://www.amazon.com/Calder.../dp/064 ... f=sr_1_1... and I think they should be able to ship anywhere in the world.

In Australia copies can be purchased directly from http://www.mcdonaldstrings.com/caldersmith_papers.html where there is more information and copies are available now.

Thank you for posting this here. I never got to meet Mr. Caldersmith, but I've read several of his articles over the years. Wonderful to have them assembled in a book--and at a bargain price! I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys reading about the science of guitar acoustics.

Will be getting…

It is great to hear that this collection is finally in print. Graham Caldersmith's early published research of musical instrument physics was of major importance. His work on the scaling of guitar family instruments was very influential on my own lutherie development. One thing I always feel obliged to point out about Graham's research is how much of it led to techniques of practical value to working builders. Much of what he did confirmed the value of lutherie approaches that could be considered to be intuitive or traditional. All this by way of pointing out that much of his research is of more than purely academic interest.

Although he never stopped doing research, he stopped publishing articles a long time ago. I and others encouraged him from time to time to publish something, but he was more interested in his lutherie work than the production of papers at that point. But he always had research projects cooking, so I am very interested in mention of some of those in the book.

BTW, that this book is available is due to the efforts of Graham McDonald. Collecting, assembling, editing, and production of a book like this is truly a labor of love. If it wasn't for that labor, we would have to satisfy ourselves with only that part of Graham Caldersmith's research legacy which exists in previously published papers.

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R.M. Mottola
LiutaioMottola.com

Author of the books Building the Steel String Acoustic Guitar and Mottola's Cyclopedic Dictionary of Lutherie Terms.

Nice! Look forward to checking this research out.

Graham McDonald is himself something of a legend…