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SOME COMMENTARIES AND INFORMATION ABOUT A WEEK-LONG CLASS IN THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE OF VOICING THE GUITAR; PART 2 OF 4
BY ERVIN SOMOGY
THE DAILY WORK SCHEDULE
The vocing class lasts seven consecutive days. I first organized this whenthe American School of Lutherie, then operating out of L.M.I. in Healdsburg,asked me to teach a five-day long class in voicing the guitar. They'd hadall kinds of other teachers signed up to teach a wide spectrum of topics andsubjects, but they lacked someone to teach this for the flat-top guitar. Iagreed, and I organized a five-day course, and lesson/work plans for it.A.S.L. folded the following year; L.M.I. entered into a partnership with alarge European wood company, and this parent company pulled the plug on theschool. They were Businessmen, and the school wasn't pulling its ownweight. Anyway, I'd gotten a taste for teaching the material that I'd spentmany years putting together experientially but had never needed to explainto others . . . and I thought to teach this on my own. I sat down, andfigured out that if I wanted to include everything that I thought wasessential for such a class I'd have to expand it to seven days. And I did. Here's how it works. We start with basic basics, just the way I did manyyears ago, and build on them. The course replicates, in a week, my own slowprocess of discovery. The daily work is organized around specific dailytask assignments, each of which relates to the questions which allinstrument makers eventually wonder about and need to deal with, such as whydo guitars sound different from one another, what is a good sound, and whatis the relationship of bracing and structure to sound. Furthermore, thework is progressive and systematic, with each day's work building on theprevious day's experiences and discussions. There are plenty of discussions, and plenty of handouts. Trust me: plentyof them. The object is to not just throw information at people (althoughthere's plenty of that) but to reduce the information and hands-onexperience to a limited number of principal concepts that the students cangrab hold of, internalize, and take with them. We all know that there are alot of classes out there that, while really exciting in the moment, don'tgive the student a chance to soak the subject matter in very well . . . andmost of the stuff is forgotten three days after the end of the class. Wedon't want that. So we keep on hammering away at the main ideas . . . whichturn out to be principles of materials qualities and sound dynamics thathave already been discovered by engineers, physicists and acousticians.It's like we're the last to know. But we open these doors to knowledge, ifI may use a hokey image, with our own tools: chisels and wood, and not withspecialized precision instrumentation and formulas about force vectors.Most of the work is hands-on, starting with an introductory lecture on theproperties and qualities of wood as a material, and a day-long practicum intonewood selection. In it, we learn what qualities to look for in the woodswe build with: what they look like, what they feel like, and what they soundlike when we tap them. Most importantly, we begin to learn what to expectfrom this or that sample of raw wood. From here we go on to each student carefully making two special guitar tops.The first one is a learning tool. It is attached to a wooden mold that actsas a rigid frame/guitar sides, that allow us to work the top. It is braced,and close attention is paid to how it taps and behaves at each stage whilewe thin it, brace it, profile it, scallop the braces, taper them, rebraceit, etc. We pretty much work it into the ground and it doesn't have to lookpretty. The format is to have a lecture in the morning, followed by hands-on work.Sometimes there are two lectures in a given day. And there's constantquestion-and-answer activity. The main requirements for the hands-on workare some patience, and the ability to pay attention to how the sound ofthese tops changes as a function of the bracing, debracing, rebracing,profiling, etc. that we do. And we don't do any of this randomly: weattack/approach different quadrants specifically and differently . . . andpay attention to the shift in sound. This is also where having a group ofstudents working together comes in handy: it is encouraged that everyonepeek over everyone else's shoulder, ask questions, offer comments, exchangeinformation. None of this is designed to be or remain a secret, and we allwant to benefit from everyone's experience. And it's not as though everyoneis doing the same work: some students will be carrying out these proceureson smaller guitars, or larger ones, or steel string ones vs. nylon stringones. Every variable contributes something to the mix, and paying attentionto other people's work as well as one's own makes this a really goodlearning experience.This is furthermore helped by students staying up after dinner and talkingwith each other, shmoozing, letting ideas percolate and settle, talkingabout things that might have been unclear in the moment, apparentcontradictions, etc. etc. If I haven't mentioned it before, we also taketime out several times each day to gather and have question-and-answersessions.All this involves the working guitar top that each student makes.The second top each student makes is a keeper; these will go back to theirworkshops with them to be a standard which they well refer to in their nextprojects, and which will remind them of the principles and functions theylearned in the class. These may wind up becoming only the first of severalhands-on standards that the student will have as he or she evolves andchanges his or her design(s). The purpose of these "standard" tops is to bepermanently available to feel, tap, measure mechanically or electronically,do Chladni testing on, etc., copy and replicate and even modify to the sizeand shape of that luthier's designs. But they are not to be wasted onbecoming an actual guitar. At least, not until one has a better standard.If you have any questions or comments to this point, please let me knowabout themErvin Somogyi39090.6598842593
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