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I’m going to try not to sound too geeky here - but I wanted to get an idea of who besides me, relies on intuition to build with? So often, I do what feels right instead of what should be right.

Example, some of you use deflection testing for your tops, I've messed around with this, but always fall back to my thumb. Ill flex the top as I’m thinning it - usually never even checking its thickness, just thin –flex – thin-flex. After its all braces and glued down to the box, ill use my ROS and sand the top, thinning the edges and pushing down with my thumb at the bridge spot until I get a certain flex that im looking and feeling for.

This seems to work very good for me.

There are lots of places were intuition come into play so I thought id start a thread about this topic and see where it goes.

Lance

One last comment that I thought of after posting - I enjoy doing it this way better.
LanceK38464.4431365741

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Lance@LuthiersForum.com

Don't underestimate the accuracy of your hands to make measurements. Al Carruth once told me of a German Violin maker who sorted a bunch of plates just by flexing them. The plates were later measured and they had all been sorted properly and to a high degree of accuracy. Experiance is very good at teaching you.

One of the down sides to your method, however, is that it is ephemeral knowlege. Can you answer the question, How much flex are you looking for? so that I could replicate you technique? I think measurements were created to communicate to others.

I do most like you. I am sure those with deflection test and such feel confident and they are getting more. I don't for one. I have a pretty good reference as to where I want to go in thickness and from there go little thicker or thinner dependant on how it feels to me. I would make a bet you could have some done this way and some done with deflection and probably not many if any would know the difference if they didn't know which was which. I would not demean anyone for whatever method. Some of it I think comes from someone did it, and the thought of more engineering aspect really will make a difference. Maybe. maybe not. I bet a person with a feel and doen't take long to get that, and know what looking for in voicing will do it on intutition just as well as with lot of engineering and testing. Main thing is do what makes feel better about your work, no best way,probably no real difference. I may be wrong just my opinion which you know everyone has one

Same here lance. I don't really have the knowledge to be overly scientific about thinning tops and backs so I have to go intuitively. However I don’t think this is a shortcoming. By being intuitive in such a process you become more aware of the materials attributes. If you used purely a scientific method to determine when things are just so, you end up with tops that sound just so. I personally like the idea of being more hand and ear critical as apposed to using data from electronic instruments. I think that the data derived from scientific means is wonderful to help me understand the causes and affect principles. But I am too left brained to use them to determine when a top is ready. Accurse this means I may not produce a top that responds the same as the last top. But that is not such a bad thing in my book.

Your intuition tells you if you can trust your senses and it must be learned/taught** to make judgement, so I think it is a good idea to make measurements of some sort and these do include feel but should include the rule until you know you can trust your other senses. Of course you will always be taking measurements, you wouldn't trust your intuition to put the fret slots where they need to be but your intuition based on the trust you have in yourself and your fret scale will tell you that they are correct. Intuition goes way beyond taking measurement though and is already equiped to handle certain judgments like style, proportion, sound quality, etc so we all have and use intuition.

** By learned/taught I mean mostly self induced learning or teaching yourself by experience.John How38464.5193981482

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Tickle your guitar daily, and it'll tickle you back.

Clearly what we are doing is a mix of art and science. There is never one absolutely "right" sound. What is "great" to some will only be "good" to others.

I think that in all aspects of this there is a high dosage of personal opinion, experience, and intuition... whether you are measuring or feeling.

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Brock Poling
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http://www.polingguitars.com

Yep I do almost all of it by feel/sound. I just flex/tap/flex/scratch/flex/
dance/flex...

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John Mayes
http://www.mayesluthier.com

Yes John we KNOW you like to dance

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Lance@LuthiersForum.com

Good point John, I do keep measurments but I don't live by them on top thickness anyway. I guess what I mean is I don't thickness to a dimension and call it good. Instead I compare how this top is reacting and make my deterination by this tops responces, then make note of the dimensions of the top for future refferance. more for comparitive reasoning than to make maufacturing templates.

[QUOTE=LanceK] Yes John we KNOW you like to dance [/QUOTE]

haha... I wish I were as good as John Travolta! Oh well.. I'll back to doing
my version of the robot.....

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John Mayes
http://www.mayesluthier.com

You know I'll give you my breakdown on this, it's something I've thought of for a long time now...

Someone asked Ramirez what he used to measure the thickness of his tops and he responded by showing his thumb and finger saying those where his calipers (can't remember where I read that now )

I think there's a ton to be said about that little statement, even if you weigh, measure, flex, record, vibrate on and on and on. Nothing and I mean Nothing can beat tactile sensations, there is no one 'Formula' for building a good sounding guitar.

I just finished a class on setup with Harry Fleishman, both of us use CF in our braces (like Mario does) but his are way way way smaller than mine, and he braces everything else much lighter than I do, but when we strung up the one we were setting up he was very impressed with the sound. Two different approaches yet both get a really good sound, there are just too many variables in building to say that one measurement or one set of rules works best, it's all subjective.

I almost started down the path of measuring my tops, weighing using glitter patterns but after listening to the people who where doing it locally I discovered that even with all their work they still didn't have any concrete answers I could use to get a good sounding guitar. I'm not saying that it's not good information, and at some point maybe we will hit that point. I watched at a NCAL meeting a gentlemen spend the whole meeting showing how he measures plate movement using a computer and a little probe built into a hammer, but the walk away was that he couldn't give any solid answers to help me build something would sound better. It was cool and all, just not really useful unless you have a brain like Al Caruth's (who by the way I have great respect for in case you think I'm bagging on the other way to do all this).

I've heard a number of people admit more than once that even with all the measurements it's no guarentee of a good sounding guitar, my point in all this is that I would rather build than study the science of the guitar. I have a pretty good feel now for what I want in my tops and body's, I know the tap tone I want to hear both from the top and from the back. So I shoot for that, I check my tops with my fingers and hands and most importantly my ears, it's worked pretty well so far.

Just My Opinion ;)

-Paul-

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-Paul-

Patriot Guitars

Yup. I measure (tops, sides, backs, etc) after it gets to what feels right, just to see where it ended up. Also I make use of what i call my "library of sounds" that is in my head. It's basically a lot of tap tones gleaned from years of building and I use them at various stages of the build. If it has a certain ring at a specific point in the build, I feel pretty sure it will come out sounding like what I want when complete.
Data gathering may be useful for history/comparison, buit not, IMHO, to establish a norm to build each instrument to fit.
Ther is an old story of a well known luthier who has/had a "formula" that takes various components of the top system and sums their values to a certain number. So, as a brace deflection/weight changes value, some other component must change to end up at the same final summation. Well, a sitka topped instrument was built and went to the new owner. He was so impressed with the qualities of that instrument that he asked for essentially the same body style, changing only the top to red cedar. When that instrument arrive he was very dissapointed since it sound nearly identical to the sitka topped instrument...none of the cedar-esque qualities came out. Why? The other components had been "beefed up" to compensate for the cedar/sitka differences, so the cedar topped instrument was "driven" to conform to the "formula", negating the inherent characteristics of the cedar top.
So...my feeling is you should develop your "touch" for the instrument characteristics you want to build and keep the "figures" only for record purposes. Otherwise, just run all your tops through at .130" and all your backs and sides at .100"...and become a factory.

Hank said it just like I feel it. x-sept I don't have near the experance to draw on That Hank has. My todal records on tops built is at a whooping 28, kinda imish hua

[QUOTE=MichaelP] Hank said it just like I feel it. x-sept I don't have near the experance to draw on That Hank has. My todal records on tops built is at a whooping 28, kinda imish hua [/QUOTE]

But you have learned from EACH top and those tactile and aural characteristics are filed away in that marvelous human computer, the brain, ready to be called upon for future reference. No journal of statistical measurements can ever equal, much less surpass, what you already have at you fingertips, and ear lobes!

Intuition has worked well for me. I have done glitter patterns and they were also very informitive but I was treading into the "experimental" world of guitars. It takes a lot of time to dedicate yourself to this method and most of us just don't have the time! I did learn that there is a world of difference between the voice of a top with a ring and a half mode at 238 Hz. , and one at 250 Hz. At 238 Hz. the voice was distincly on the bassy side and I belive getting very close to the long term structural limits of the materials.
       I don't think I will ever stop learning, thats half the fun anyways. If it ever becomes a science I may hang up my chisels because the challenge will be gone and it won't be fun anymore. IMHO I think every guitar is a unique animal and is a sum of all of it's parts and reaches into the very heart of what it is to be a luthier.

"Someone asked Ramirez what he used to measure the thickness of his tops and he responded by showing his thumb and finger saying those where his calipers (can't remember where I read that now )"

The actual statement was by Manuel Velazquez in an article in which he was interviewed by William Cumpiano in American Lutherie #4, from 1985.

Velazquez would thickness the top to its thickest, then install the rosette and calibrate for sound by feel and deflection using his thumb as downpressure. He would then brace the top and then listen and adjust some more and then again through the soundhole once the body had been assembled. His point was that within any piece of wood there will be varying areas of density and grain so that no two tops will ever be the same tonally.

Regardless of whether you are flexing, deflection testing, using Chaldni glitter patterns or whatever other method, it always is a mixture of intuition and craft. The only thing that deflection testing and glitter pattern adds to the mix is a way to compare objectively the numbers as our intuition can vary and fool us at times.

I keep a big stash of tops and each time when I am going to build the next guitar I sort through the tops to find the right one for the right guitar.

I flex by hand and rate what I think about a top in terms of tone, sustain, and anything else that is of interest. I write in a corner of the top my little code of how I like a top. Each time I go through my tops, I test again and then compare my thoughts against what I had noted. Most of the time it is the same but sometimes a top will surprise me. What has changed is that my perception of a particular top is based on my judgement (intuition) at a point in time and that changes. Note that this is all manual so it is the most subjective/intuitive.

I now use glitter tests as I am building with a top, but that is to have a way to measure if my intuition and what I am hearing is correct.


      

[QUOTE=Shawn] "Someone asked Ramirez what he used to measure the thickness of his tops and he responded by showing his thumb and finger saying those where his calipers (can't remember where I read that now )"

The actual statement was by Manuel Velazquez in an article in which he was interviewed by William Cumpiano in American Lutherie #4, from 1985.

[/QUOTE]

That was it Sean... I read so much stuff it sometimes gets jumbled in my little brain

Thanks for correcting me, I was about to go digging today to see where I had seen that....

-Paul-

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Patriot Guitars