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I got talking with some of my students last night about this thread, and some interesting stuff came up. Although fretwork and setup might be the 'rice' of _guitarmaking_, the same can't apply to the larger world of lutherie. So how do we generalize?
To go to the next obvious case, the frets on lutes, early gutiars, and gambas, are tied, rather than hammered into slots. Aside from being careful about the diameter of the gut you use, about the only thing you can do is to pay a lot of attention to the shape of the fingerboard before you tie them on. The same holds true on violins, and on fretless basses, as Rick certainly knows. Rick already said this; the key to good fretwork is not the frets, any more than the key to good finish work is the finish.
But what about the harps, harpsichords, hammered dulcimers, and other things that are in the legitimate purview of the luthier, broadly speaking? Here, playability can't depend on the neck, since there isn't one!
Todd Stock made a good stab at a reasonable generalization:
"- Do things in a committed fashion
- Pay attention
- Maintain a healthy disrespect for unsubstantiated or unsupported conventional thinking
- Focus on the stuff you don't do well "
I'd have said 'healthy skepticism' rather than 'direspect'. For one thing, it's hard to think of any case where disrespect is a positive attitude. More importantly, though, we have to remember that there are plenty of things that people know in a non-rational way which are perfectly true. Folks chewed willow bark for the salicylic acid (aspirin) long before biologists and chemists figured out why it might work, and even now there are aspects of the opperation of that drug that are not well understood. In our own field, I read that Eugene Clark does not have even a radio in his shop, so that he can 'hear the wood'. He may not be able to tell you in a rational or 'scientific' way what he's hearing, but it is entirely likey that his brain is integrating a lot of subconsciously aquired data that he has learned to correlate with 'good' sound. Certainly assertions that are backed up with objectively repeatable data can be accepted with more confidence than those that are not, but I'd be loath to toss out the years of experience of somebody like Clark just because he lacks such data.
That aside, commitment, and paying attention are really important, but paying attention to what? We pay a lot of attention to our wood, for example, but Rick has rightly pointed out the current obsession with 'zoot' as something that is really secondary. Just because you mananged to score a fancy set of wood, are you a better luthier? The Hills stated that many of the finest instruments of Strad's later life are made of rather plain wood. I'd say a person who can make a great instrument out of poor wood is the better luthier. Michelangelo's 'David' was carved from a block other sculptors rejected. Maybe we're paying attention to the wrong thing there.
Given that playability is a key aspect of making a good instrument, what it it that determines playability? To answer that, we need to know how the instrument works. On a guitar, neck and fretwork are keys, while on a harp you have to think a lot about the string gauges and tension, and how that relates to their length and pitch. This will be true to some extent on a harpsichord as well, but there another critical issue is how the jack is regulated.
For the sushi maker, rice is important because it forms the basis on which all the rest is built. Our 'rice' then, has to be something basic, an understanding at some level of how the instrument works in the hands of the musician. The understanding need not be rational, and much of it probably cannot be, owing to the subjective nature of taste. Much of this will be very subtle, if only because the designs we often work with are so nearly optimised already. The difference between the best guitar and an average one are likely to be difficult to specify in any exact way, but they matter a great deal to the player.
So, yeah, be committed, pay attention, focus on improving every day, but most of all, learn what really matters, and try to understand how it all works to make something that serves the player better in the making of music. We'll leave all the stuff about getting chicks to them.
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