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Here is another one, driven more by players than by builders, but there are certainly some enablers among the builders:

Assigning specific tonal aspects to species of wood, as if every piece of Sitka spruce adds the same element to the sound of the guitar, and every piece of East Indian Rosewood adds the same element to the sound of a guitar. Some players act like the species of the wood is like adding salt or pepper or paprika to a recipe: If you use Sitka, you get this, and if you use Honduran Mahogany, you get that.

I call it malarkey. The truth is a lot more complicated, due to the fact that different pieces of Sitka Spruce have different tonal characteristics from each other, and the same is true for different pieces of every other species of tonewood. Wood varies, a lot. If you are expecting the species alone to tell you what a piece of wood is going to do to the sound of a guitar, you are not paying attention to what really matters: The tonal characteristics of the actual pieces of wood you are using, regardless of their species.

Yep, very true. Wood is a guessing game and what we do with it adds even more variables.

Great example!

. David cork would not have been my choice of words especially today

You probably know what I think about truss rods. It's kind of ironic that I have worked with one of the very first ones ever made! Gibson has the first patent 1923, but it was P. A. Anderberg, a Swedish immigrant, that was the real inventor. He was a skilled luthier, making many of the finest instruments under many different labels in USA around 1900. Here are some slides from a guitar dated 1905, one of the few with his name on the label.





The whole restoration process can be found here
https://en.gammelgura.se/wordpress/?p=4780

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turn to ashes or gold

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Silly me I thought all along that the credit for the invention of the truss rod went to both Gibson and an Irishman not a Sweed.... and two years earlier than your tale...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truss_rod

I had an Anderberg guitar. It was nicely made with a rosewood body but didn't have a truss rod that I could see. It's possible he came up with the idea but never patented it. There have been a lot of things tried, never patented, and the inventers never given credit for them- fanned frets and the Manzer (Smith patented) wedge.

We have a Levin in the shop another interesting story, for another thread. Martin eventually bought him out likely to dispense of the competition.

I Have had people say it , but thats ok . And as far as Adjustment , I dont disagree with your thoughts . MY point is Peoples Inability to see past what they are doing long enough to test it , try and see what happens . In effect brushing off ideas , Lack of willingness to "Try something new" as it were .. I didnt say it was here either was just an observation of what people have said in general . Hesh I have done several thus far and the sound is better for sure , More projection. Is it going to sweep the world ? lol Noooo but Im having Fun experimenting

PS I still use truss rods in alot of my builds

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The Taking Of Offense Is the Life Course Of The Stupid One !
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Forgiveness is the ability to accept an apology that you will probably NEVER GET
The truth will set you free , But FIRST, it will probably Piss you Off !
Creativity is allowing yourself to make Mistakes, Art is knowing which ones to Keep !
The Saddest thing anyone can do , is push a Loyal Person to the point that they Dont Care Anymore
Never met a STRONG person who had an EASY past !
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Looking at the Gibson patent again, it was filed April 5 1921 and dated Feb 27 1923. Andenberg actually have a patent dated Mars 20 1894. In the patent, the truss rod is actually a wire. I think he quickly realized that a solid rod is the better alternative, the 1905 guitar do have a working trussrod as shown in the slides from my restoration.

_________________
New will change the old,
turn to ashes or gold

http://www.gammelgura.se

His patent is not for the same rod that Gibson patented.

Roger perhaps start another thread if you want to talk about who invented the truss rod that's not what this thread is intended to be about.

Im Scratchin My head trying to figure out how that thing even worked lol Im sure it did . But this kinda drives home my point about experimenting , we build diff now because someone tried something new. How would we be doing if that was todays truss rod ?

_________________
The Shallower the depth of the stream , The Louder the Babble !
The Taking Of Offense Is the Life Course Of The Stupid One !
Wanna Leave a Better Planet for our Kids? How about Working on BETTER KIDS for our Planet !
Forgiveness is the ability to accept an apology that you will probably NEVER GET
The truth will set you free , But FIRST, it will probably Piss you Off !
Creativity is allowing yourself to make Mistakes, Art is knowing which ones to Keep !
The Saddest thing anyone can do , is push a Loyal Person to the point that they Dont Care Anymore
Never met a STRONG person who had an EASY past !
http://wiksnwudwerks.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/groups/GatewayA ... rAssembly/

For once I agree with you, I just thought it was an interesting side topic.

_________________
New will change the old,
turn to ashes or gold

http://www.gammelgura.se

I hear ya and I get ya Wud . I'm not the best one to discuss innovation with because in my own experience building the 50ish that I produced and sold 45 of the more I tried to venture away from the typical Martin style of guitar the more my intellectual honesty over the results of my trials brought me back to the Martin style of building guitars.

But of course this was my experience and my journey your mileage may and does vary and that's pretty cool too.

Glad you realize that the difference between good and perfect may be a slight twist of a truss rod and not having a truss rod takes that possibility out of play. That's my point.

Or nerdy girls who did those things too…

Start another thread if you can't stay on this thread's topic.

My pet peeve is the whole 'Magic Wood' argument, in all of it's variations, but particularly the one that insists you must use X top with Y back and sides. This is not to say that the wood doesn't affect the tone; only that thinking in terms of species, and dismissing the skill of the maker and the chance variation from piece is wrong.

I take issue with Hesh about nut compensation, though. Gore's reasoning is pretty clear and well backed up. I've been using nut compensation for some time now. One of the best examples I've seen of how well this can work was on a replica of an Elizabethan 'Bandora'; a wire strung bass cittern. It was very popular during the life time of the inventor, and a fair amount of good music was written for it, but it died out rapidly thereafter. There are no extant early ones. One of my students got a modern reproduction that, as with all of the ones he'd ever seen, had terrible intonation. The saddle slot had already been re-cut almost back to the pins, and the low string, in particular, was very far off. We tried shimming the contact point forward at the nut end, and got it to work well with a set-forward of about 6mm, iirc. Since the rest of the low strings also shared at least some of the problem we shimmed up the slot and re-cut the end of the fingerboard at a slant, expecting to cut the nut back as needed afterward. Surprisingly, that did the trick with no further mods.

When he came back for class a couple of weeks later the student brought a number of wood cuts from Elizabethan Bandora tutors, and all showed a slanted nut. Presumably the modern copyists have discounted that, as an artistic error, since we know better... He has used that instrument in a number of concerts since, accompanying viols and other instruments in original music, and those in the know have been very complimentary about the sound and intonation of his instrument. Perhaps that bit of empirical knowledge was the inventor's 'secret'?

Moon spruce? I like my trees cut down in the daytime so nobody gets hurt.


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If I have my Grand Kid drop his pants and sit on the Spruce , Does that make it "mooned spruce" ? I agree with your ? First time I saw that I was like "ok" But if people wanna try it ..... Go forr it, Experiment as I say

_________________
The Shallower the depth of the stream , The Louder the Babble !
The Taking Of Offense Is the Life Course Of The Stupid One !
Wanna Leave a Better Planet for our Kids? How about Working on BETTER KIDS for our Planet !
Forgiveness is the ability to accept an apology that you will probably NEVER GET
The truth will set you free , But FIRST, it will probably Piss you Off !
Creativity is allowing yourself to make Mistakes, Art is knowing which ones to Keep !
The Saddest thing anyone can do , is push a Loyal Person to the point that they Dont Care Anymore
Never met a STRONG person who had an EASY past !
http://wiksnwudwerks.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/groups/GatewayA ... rAssembly/

Al my dislike of nut compensation is not for Bandoras and as I mentioned classical guitars it is for steel string conventional, modern guitars. We can make the vast majority of intonation problems go away if the scale length is correct, the nut slots are cut very low and the saddle(s) have sufficient range and movement for the strings and tunings desired.

90% of compensation problems in a modern, steel string guitar with an accurate scale length is string stretch, unnecessary string stretch because of excessive effort required to play a poorly set-up instrument. Again I am not speaking of poorly located frets, bridge or a poorly built guitar. Bring the action down, set the relief correctly and most of all cut the nut slots so you are not stretching the hell out of a fretted note and in our considerable experience we have yet to not be able to satisfy the most demanding clients some of which are A-list sorts.

This seems to rub some here the wrong way and I wish we were in the same room because it's very easy to demonstrate and even easier to quantify with a strobe tuner and recorded before and after numbers.

Now intonation is also a function of we human bags of mostly water who all may press harder or not than the next guy and that can cause intonation issues too. That's why I used 90%. If we are correct that it's mostly string stretch, unnecessary string stretch for the specific instruments that I cited here that means individual players will suffer from this more and less depending on how hard they fret. So some of this can't be successfully always addressed but the vast majority of it can be vastly improved nearly at once by simply cutting the nut slots very low.

Al you have an open invitation to visit our shop and we would love to meet you and show you want we do. A lot of instruments including ethnic instrument used to be built in our shop and it's still all jigged up to build everything from that long harp that the slave drivers who used to play and beat the people rowing the boat to the rhythm to lutes. We inherited all this stuff that I am sure you would get a kick out of.

Regarding magic wood the whole notion of "tone wood" is laughable to me and always has been. You were here when someone built the MDF guitar and then brought it to our gathering in Ann Arbor. It sounded as good or better than some of the rosewood guitars..... Any wood is tone wood in the right hands and even Martin has proved that counter top can be tone wood, oh the horror... in the right machines....

I hate it when some people have better pot than I do....

Yes, I remember the set! I still have a classical I made with the sister to that set.

My wife says that I never forget a meal...Same goes for sets of wood I have sold-lol

Interesting what Dave says about ebony vs. rosewood boards.

My experience has been that ebony "holds" a fret better because it is harder.

Here's three more from me.

The notion that fossilized Mastiff poop bridge pins makes a better guitar..... More specifically the fossilized stuff that sells for pretty high prices billed as tone enhancing, that's BS.

Or ivory as tone enhancing... not to mention both banned and dang unethical in many applications and possibly more.

AND the notion that certain bridge pins "sound" better than others being because of the pins someone purchased or made.

We find ourselves having to explain to our clients nearly weekly when it comes up that there is a change of mass because of the difference in pin material mass and in the sweet spot of the guitar too being responsible for any "change" for better or worse in the tone of the instrument. It's NOT the pin material it's it's mass. Some get it, some don't, some act like that dog on the back deck of the car in front of you bobbing it's head up and down.

Great wood and you let me have a matching head plate, bridge blank and binding material too so the gutiar, my 10th I think is dipped in BRW and I love it!!

Regarding ebony he speaks of old, vintage stuff mostly although modern ebony can chip too. We do a lot of refrets and he's considered an authority on fret work so he's doing it nearly every day these days. We've developed methods to reduce chipping from ebony such as the bead of water next to the fret and the then the Weller soldering gun with notch filed in business end. We hear the water sizzle and when the fret starts to "lift" the chip wanna be doesn't fly across the room because of the water. Then we capture it, dry the board and glue it back down with thin CA.

But it's the chippy (is that a word) nature of the older ebony mostly that gives him fits.

I would agree with you that it is harder and I think it holds frets better too. It's when removing them that it's still holding them when we don't want it to.

Agreed People hear stuff and then when you try and explain they do that jelly neck head bob , I dont have near your experience Hesh . however i have met several of those people too . Btw wouldnt that foss Mastiff poop be MS not BS Actually as long as Im here Im gonna say The Fossilized BS is much better at tone than the Fossilized MS

_________________
The Shallower the depth of the stream , The Louder the Babble !
The Taking Of Offense Is the Life Course Of The Stupid One !
Wanna Leave a Better Planet for our Kids? How about Working on BETTER KIDS for our Planet !
Forgiveness is the ability to accept an apology that you will probably NEVER GET
The truth will set you free , But FIRST, it will probably Piss you Off !
Creativity is allowing yourself to make Mistakes, Art is knowing which ones to Keep !
The Saddest thing anyone can do , is push a Loyal Person to the point that they Dont Care Anymore
Never met a STRONG person who had an EASY past !
http://wiksnwudwerks.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/groups/GatewayA ... rAssembly/