Official Luthiers Forum!

I am diving in the scientifics and tap tuning, namely the Gore/Gillet and Siminoff books.
Siminoff mentioned that the Mandolines build by Loar have their unike sound because Loar tuned the parts with concert pitch C=256 hz and then strung up with the modern concert pitch A=440 hz.
Has anyone tried this for a guitar? And if so with which results?
Thanks for all advices!
Juergen

Respectfully I would mostly disregard Siminoff and stick with the Gore/Gilet data. Everything you need is already in those books.

Juergen, when I built my F5 mandolin I tried to follow Siminoff's ideas of what Loar was doing. I even sat in a seminar by Roger at the 2006 GAL conference where he showed how he used a strobe tuner to try to isolate these tones.

I was never able to duplicate what he was doing, actually I found the idea of tuning the treble bar to one note, the bass bar to another, back to another still a bit daunting. I did my best and ended up with a nicely playable and sounding mandolin but I would say I failed at Loar voicing.

Fast forward, I recently built a carved topped archtop guitar, basically following Bob Benedetto's book but also using Alain Lambert's spectrum analyzing software as I tapped and shaved and worked with the top. I'm not smart enough to say that it helped me get the optimum response but the results (changes in frequency of the tap tones) followed Benedetto's predictions which gave me a lot of confidence in what I was doing.

There is the added little complication that, as you say, the frequency of concert A has changed from Loar's day. Siminoff has a nice little discussion about this in his article "What was Loar hearing" which was posted on his website and is in his book on building F5 mandolins.