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I have been wanting to start a thread for some time now to discuss some of the legendary guitars such as pre-war Martins and some of the Gibsons built in the late 1930's.

Instead of the specifics of "how" they were built I am more interested in learning people's thoughts on this subject:  Were these guitars the product of thinking geared more toward manufacturability including the designs or were these guitars more a reflection of the skill and artistry of the individual builders?

Frank Finocchio and I had this conversation once and I thought he had an interesting take on it.

Manufacturers build guitars to be "pretty good" -- the bell curve. Most of the effort of the manufacturing tries to control the standard deviation. But there will always be a few outliers on the curve -- a few that are stellar, and a few that really suck.

Over the years the great guitars have been cherished and passed on from generation to generation, and some have acheived noteriety in the hands of prominent musicians.

So what we intrepret ~70 later is that the "pre martins were wonderful". But the reality is we are not seeing a good representation of the guitars from that era. Maybe they are as great as the lore says, but then again...

I think we need to examine these and try to figure out what made the special ones good and try to learn from that.

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Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

Wow, big subject.

Almost need to narrow it down a bit to avoid generalizations. What legendary guitar?

I think the L-00 Gibson is one.

Light bracing is one feature that made them really great guitars. Of course we know their high failure rate when too heavy of strings were used attempting to get more volume. Had they been strung only with what we call lights today, a lot more of those would be around.

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http://www.dickeyguitars.com

Bruce good point - let's narrow it down to pre-war L-OO's and pre-war D-18's and D-28's.

Brock so if I can restate your post to your satisfaction you are saying that they were built so that the law of averages would provide the largest number of acceptable units?

Can I take this as a vote for manufacturing concerns being placed first?

What I am really getting at here is were these guitars more heavily influenced in their designs, materials, and workmanship by being able to "produce" them efficiently and less expensively or where they influenced more by an obsessive desire on the part of the maker (company and craftspeople) to produce an outstanding instrument?  Or perhaps both?

I'll express a personal opinion here regarding the L-OO's since I have studied them to a fair degree - they look like they were very cheaply made and roughly put together.  The engineering/design has problems, some rather huge IMHO, and the workmanship is pretty sloppy.  But....... they sound great which brings us to the old does the end justify the means discussion.

So for me I see the ugly head reared of putting manufacturability concerns first with the L-OO but the resulting guitars clearly benefited tone wise by the far from perfect X-brace intersection, narrow, low, minimal bracing, and a weak upper bout.  Perhaps they could have sounded better to some ears and lasted longer then they typically do/did had they been built better but they sure as shootin would have sounded differently too.

Like anything new, when steel strng guitars became popular, the bigger producers were fighting to be "the best" to insure not only their survival, but that they'd forever be at the top. Imagine what would have happened if someone had come along in 1934 and built a guitar that looked not too much different than what people were used to, yet put out twice or three times more volume? Right, we'd all be playing one... These were the days before amplification; if you wanted to be heard, if you wanted to play at a "dance', you had to have the loudest instrument you could get.
  So yes, at first, they all pushed the limits. If we study a bit, we see some rather serious changes in the 30's, but then reality set in, warranty work became and issue, and since their names had already be enshrined, they started beefing things up, carefully so as to minimize the tone and power impact. But they also did so with the experience that came from having build thousands in the past decade, and seeing where they were weak, and where they weren't.

And that's where many of us are always saying that the best teachers out there are the old instruments. Study every one you can see, and look at where they failed, and where they shined.

Few completely failed, BTW...

Mario that is an excellent point that the absence of amplification created a situation where the guitar was still needing to establish itself as an instrument that was loud enough to compete with other band instruments.

So the designs needed to be powerful producers of sound.  This sounds like a vote for design and end use considerations out weighed manufacturing concerns.  This is of course pre-war and then after that as you indicated reducing risk for the makers became more of a consideration.

Yep The pre-War guitars that remain are a small cross section of those that were built. and they have had many many years of aging. So I find it really hard to compare on an equal basis the best of pre-war era to the best of today. That is not to discount any characteristic of the pre-war era guitars. Just pointing out one more thing that has to be keep in mind when making a comparison.

When studying Martins and Gibsons for the Golden Era, keep in mind that Martin strived for a higher level of workmanship and design, ad they sold for higher prices than Gibsons. Their target client was more affluent, te professional, if you may.. Gibson was targeting the beginner market, they marketed to schools and students, in the idea that you start them on a low-end Gibson, and when they get better, they'll buy a higher end Gibson, which they considered their archtops to be(this is what manufacturers and marketers call brand loyalty; if your first car was a Chevy, odds are so will your next ones, for example).

So, keep that in mind when you study the workmanship levels of older , average model(basically, all their flat tops) Gibsons.

When studying Golden Era Martins, take note of how much glue squeeze out you see inside, especially on the top bracing.   Not as bad as Weissenborns or Gibsons, but not exactly obsessive-compulsive either.   Also you'll see lots of saw mill blade burn and even saw tooth marks where they didn't plane or scrape away all tool marks.   With 19th century Martins you'll often see scorch marks from the bending process.

[QUOTE=Rick Turner]When studying Golden Era Martins, take note of how much glue squeeze out you see inside, especially on the top bracing.   Not as bad as Weissenborns or Gibsons, but not exactly obsessive-compulsive either.   Also you'll see lots of saw mill blade burn and even saw tooth marks where they didn't plane or scrape away all tool marks.   With 19th century Martins you'll often see scorch marks from the bending process.[/QUOTE]

Now this is definitely something that was done, or not done, for manufacturing reasons.

Good stuff Rick.

[QUOTE=Hesh]Brock so if I can restate your post to your satisfaction you are saying that they were built so that the law of averages would provide the largest number of acceptable units?[/QUOTE]

I think the point he was making was that no guitar got individual attention and the goal was to produce all of them within acceptable tolerances.

Once you are producing guitars (or anything for that matter) you can expect some to be better, and some to be worse. These are the ones at the far edges of the bell curve.

Over the years though, the ones that have had the biggest impact are the ones that have been the really exceptional ones. Some have found their way into very visibile hands and this has influenced much of the lore surrounding the old instruments.

I am not saying that these few guitars are not worthy of the praise they receive, but it definitely begs the question... how good was the "average" guitar from this time period?

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Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

Got it.  Thanks Brock.

Michael's point on the impact of aging is a very good point too.  What we might hear today may have taken decades to happen.

So when you guys build guitars I would imagine that you do all you can to milk the potential tone and power from an instrument - but would you agree that to some extent, either minor or major - there is a luck factor too?  How the materials will work together, how they will work in time, and the idea that a guitar is a "system" and sometimes we may or may not combine components that just compliment each other? 

I have heard some of the alpha builders describe a particular guitar that they built as being for example the best sounding guitar that they built last year.  If this guitar was built exactly as some of your other guitars were what makes this one special?  Luck?  Properties of the materials that we cannot measure prior to using them?

What I am getting at here is if we can find examples from builders here who have built many, many guitars of what Brock is describing - the exceptional ones as a natural occurance of building many guitars.

Maybe someone who has done some repair work on these guitars will chime in with something I wonder about - How consistent was the bracing pattern and shaping on pre-war guitars? I have a friend here in North Carolina who has a D-28 that is one serial number from Tony Rice's famous guitar. I've played it but have never looked inside. Next time I see him I need to take a mirror. The top is caved in by the pick guard and cracked in a couple of places, but the tone will make you cry.

                            Peace, Paul

Old Growth first growth wood, and scalloped braces, and the basic fact that Martin designed the current dreadnaught (from a musicians request), experimented with different shapes ect, and typical German engineering of that era. Germans also built most of the lutes in the 15th century,  and some of the top woodcarvers were from Germany. But they were not build to be masterpieces, or decorative objects.

 

Give some people sopme old growth wood of that era and the same design, and you would get the same guitars. Maybe even better.

It's the glue squeeze out, saw marks on the braces, and burns from the resaw that give those old guitars their mojo, and without mojo there can be no magical tone. The only way to reproduce their sound is to stop cleaning them up so much, especially on the inside. It would also help to use a circular saw mill with a slightly dull blade to resaw the backs and sides; that would put the burn marks on the BR, like many of the NY Martins have. I think the burning does something to the resins of old growth BR that you can't get any other way. Squeeze out, saw marks, and saw burn will do it. Then you wait maybe 40 years. I guarantee it. Also helps if you get old German immigrants to build them somewhere in Pennsylvania.

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Howard Klepper
http://www.klepperguitars.com

When all else fails, clean the shop.

Here's another data point for the discussion:

I've got a '37 L-OO that my grandfather bought new.
It sounds like crap.

All of the prewar makers were either German, or from Europe. The level of craftsmanship brought to the US by these cabinetmakers, with many years of tradition behind them must be an important factor. However, it should be pointed out that many instrument makers were shabby and creative persons who neither fit with the old world bowed instrument makers nor cabinetmakers of the era.

I think also one of the important factors is the changeover from gut to steel strings. The golden era steel string guitars are lightly built, in a transitional period between gut strings and manufacturing realitys.

I guess in the 20's and 30's no one was asking for better guitars. This allowed the factorys to build more economically. And so things went from the level of craftsmanship then, to the 80's at an all time low, untill now, the renaissance.

Gibsons and Weissenborns (Martins to an extent) were a little rough inside. But that is not a bad thing... if you just listen to them! If you take too long with anything it can loose its effectivness. These makers took the right amount of time.

 

"I guess in the 20's and 30's no one was asking for better guitars."   Would you like perhaps to reconsider that statement?

The archtop guitar was developed to an incredibly high point between 1923 (Loar L-5) and 1934 (Super 400) by
Gibson, and I don't think that any aficionados of archtops would say that those didn't represent a high point for acoustics for that style of instrument.   Then there's the work of Ramirez and Hauser in Spain in reaction to the rising star of Segovia.   Then there is the development of the modern Orchestra Model guitar and then the Dreadnaught.    It is precisely the '20s and '30s that we are all trying to better now.   

The decline, if it can be seen as such, happens to coincide with the rise of amplification.   Archtops were made heavier and equipped with pickups. Flattops became props, often covered in leather (Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley) while the players played Telecasters, Strats, and Les Pauls.   It wasn't 'til the folk scare of the late 1950s and '60s that some of us started to think in terms of how great the "golden era" guitars sounded and sought to uncover the secrets that went into them.   Now here we are making instruments in the Platinum Era...

Perhaps you miss-understand me, Rick.

What I mean by that comment is, In my oppinion the best hawaiian and roundbneck flattops were from the 20's and 30's. Guitar players of that era had a great selection of fine guitars to play, and no-one was asking for better guitars (than what they had already), so I dont think any of the guitar makers were trying to make better sounding guitars. As the war hit and factorys upsized, many of the smaller makers were gone and the factorys turned to making their guitars more economically viable.

There are few makers today reaching the quality level of musical mojo those old guitars have.

 

Tony I think that you make a good point about the contributions of some of the German immigrants who built guitars here in the states.

But I am having trouble pigeon holing their participation into the manufacturability or the skill and artistry of these builders camp.  German craftspeople were well known to be both superb at manufacturing and excellent artisans and engineers.  Perhaps the "net net" here is they contributed to either argument?

Workshops and Factorys were different to how we think of them now. Martin was big. They had a crew of 10 or more main builders. Gibson was bigger again. Weissenborn during the main years of production was just himself, Rudie Dopyera and maybe a few other workers. Larson; Brothers.

I know for sure they worked longer and harder than we do now. They seemed to be very efficent with what they did which is where the glue squeeze out and rough marks come in.

 

[QUOTE=BruceH] Here's another data point for the discussion:

I've got a '37 L-OO that my grandfather bought new.
It sounds like crap. [/QUOTE]

Bruce, You have such a gift of communication.

We get it, you don't like it ay?

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http://www.dickeyguitars.com

Tony, I think there are a lot of guitars being made today that will, in fifty to seventy years, prove to have the mojo of the guitars of the late '20s and 30's, and I'd include some of the familiar names in that.   Martin may have shifted their bell curve, but at the top they still make very fine guitars; Gibson is hit or miss as always, but I've played some very fine modern Bozeman guitars, and the offerings from boutique companies like SCGC, Collings, Bourgeois, etc. will prove to be very fine in the long run. And that doesn't even get to the output from all the very small shops as represented here on OLF.   I do not believe that the Mojo is gone.

Just a thought. I built the best sounding guitar. It's so amazing right after being built how could 75 years of aging inprove on it. Since this guitar sounds so amazing now will it improve in the future or can it end up sounding like crap. Did a Stradavarius sound good when he built it or was it the few hundred years of aging. How about the prewar martin? So can there be a reverse theory where a great sounding instrument can end up sounding like crap?

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Guitars, guitars and more guitars.

Yes.