by Ervin Somogyi

I've been writing a book about the guitar for the past six years. By now, the end of 2007, it's almost completed.

It's been an interesting project, which began in 2001 when the Mel Bay Publishing Company asked me about whether I'd be interested in writing a book about making the steel string guitar. Having published music books for many decades, the Company felt it was ready to expand into a line of books about musical instruments, and it was putting out feelers.

Why me? Well, I've been around for a long time. I'm known because my guitars are . . . well . . . really good. I'm also fairly well known because I've written lots of articles on various aspects of guitar making over the years. In addition, I'm one of the few guitar makers around who makes steel string, classic and flamenco guitars. In fact I've played, designed, built, bought, sold, repaired, restored, refinished, studied, loved, hated, sacrificed for, thought about, and dreamt about, as well as written about the guitar for most of my life. So, I felt ready to take on such a project -- although I had no idea how much work it would eventually entail. The initial request was for me to write a how-to-make-a-guitar manual.

As far as writing books of any kind goes I've noticed that, unless one is a professional writer and is therefore writing something all the time, the most knowledgeable people in any given field of work are generally too busy with that work to write anything about it. That effort is often left to the beginners who know a little bit about this or that, and are looking to build their careers and who actually have the time and energy to write. It also is left to the individuals who have been at the workbench, desk, laboratory, or in the field or the classroom for so long that they are ready to step back from it, and who can finally take the time to share what they know -- and who like to write. This more or less describes me.

If I had any misgivings about the Mel Bay project, they related to the fact that there are already quite a few how-to books on the market. Because of my work history over almost forty years, however, I know quite a bit about what makes both steel string and Spanish guitars tick as their respective players want and expect them to, and I felt that this kind of information would be the best thing I could offer the reader if I wanted to distinguish my book from any of the others. So, for these reasons, and with this material in mind, I agreed to the project.

A year into the writing we hit a snag. I had written more pages than the Mel Bay folks had had in mind for it. I wasn't willing to delete as much material as I'd have to if they were going to accept the manuscript; so I asked to be released from that contract.

As I continued writing and adding material,the book became more and more unwieldy. Not wishing to delete any information, I divided the book into two volumes.


VOLUME ONE: THE RESPONSIVE GUITAR

The Responsive Guitar is about the fine points of making a successful guitar. It puts forth the central and collateral ideas and concepts that are pertinent to intelligent steel string and nylon string guitar making*. This includes materials analysis, theory of guitar acoustics and dynamics, a great deal of empirical information, an explanation of vibrating plate behaviors and the acoustic functions of the guitar's principal vibrational modes, comparative and technical data, and historical perspective. Specifically, I focus on the steel string guitar and the classical guitar (and its older brother the flamenco guitar), and not their cousins: the archtop, electric, and folk guitars. The information is the fruit of four decades of hands-on work experience, observation, discussion, and thought about the responses of the soundbox to the pull of strings. There is nothing in the market or on bookshelves like this.

* For an example of a pertinent concept, see the section on A Philosophy of Guitar Making, below.

The table of contents is the following:

1. About the author
2. The differences between handmade vs. factory made guitars
3. Wood as a material
4. About data and record keeping
5. Dynamics of the guitar
6. The functions of the bracing in the modern guitar
7. Materials stiffness
8. The "X" brace and its functions
9. Other bracing systems: an overview
10. Tonewoods in guitars
11. On the selection and treatment of bracewoods
12. The basics of guitar design
13. The design and physics of the guitar's neck and head
14. The functions of the guitar back
15. On the problems of intonation
16. Twelve-fret vs. fourteen-fret guitars
17. The functions of the guitar bridge
18. A rational approach to voicing the soundbox
19. Further dimensions and concerns of voicing
20. The dynamic importance of the soundhole
21. Acoustics and electronics
22. Ornamentation
23. Guitar cutaways
24. Domed vs. flat face construction
25. Joinery, and the neck's attachment
26. Action, setup, and playability
27. On sustain
28. On projection
29. Long-term changes in a guitar and its tone: the aging, settling-in, and maturation of guitar woods.
30. Toward a common vocabulary for sound
31. Finishing
32. The specific challenges of making steel string vs. Spanish guitars
33. The flamenco guitar
34. Odds, ends, leftovers, and afterthoughts
35. The Good, the Bad, and the . . .

The Responsive Guitar will stand on its own in spite of the fact that there's not room in it to include much of the basic nuts-and-bolts hands-on information that a book on instrument making might be expected to contain. That information is found in the other half of my divided manuscript, entitled Making the Responsive Guitar. I strongly recommend it to the reader who is interested in a fuller account of the mechanics and techniques of how this remarkable instrument is, was, and can be made.



VOLUME TWO: MAKING THE RESPONSIVE GUITAR

Making the Responsive Guitar is what my original project with the Mel Bay Company was to have been. It is a book about understanding and making the guitar as I know it, practice it, think about it, and appreciate it. It is a fundamental book, and at the same time a fairly comprehensive one, with an emphasis on steel string guitars but that also touches heavily on the Spanish guitar. It is written in such a way as to be accessible and of service to beginning guitar makers and interested amateurs, as well as those intermediate and advanced level instrument makers who already have some empirical experience with the minutiae of instrument building work and who are seeking a wider and longer view within which to organize their knowledge.

Outside of the occasional cross-referencing to The Responsive Guitar that is sprinkled throughout the text and the footnote sections, and some duplicated information that acts as a bridge between these volumes, Making the Responsive Guitar is complete and will certainly help someone build a guitar as fully much as any of the other self-help books available do. And perhaps even better: it covers material that the other books stint on or skip over entirely, while covering the rest in fairly comprehensive detail. The table of contents is the following:

1. Hanging out your shingle
2. The tools
3. Tool sharpening and use
4. Molds, jigs and workboards
5. Wood treatment and storage
6. The importance of humidity control
7. Wood dust
8. Glues and adhesives
9. Constructing the face
10. The soundhole & its reinforcement
11. The rosette
12. Making the back
13. Making the head, neck and heel
14. The sides
15. The blocks and the linings
16. The rim assembly
17. Body assembly
18. The guitar's interior
19. Bindings, purflings and their channels
20. Gluing the bindings and purflings
21. Butt inlays and cutaway joinery
22. Neck alignment and attachment
23. Gluing the fingerboard and heelcap
24. Making the fingerboard, and the correct treatment of the fretboard and frets
25. Fretting
26. Making the bridge, its proper placement, and its correct setup
27. Action, setup, playability, and intonation
28. The pickguard and truss rod cover
29. French polishing
30. Fixing mistakes
31. Evaluating your guitar
32. Marketing your work


I think that for those who want a fuller understanding of how and why certain things in the guitar work as they do, and how tone is actually produced, or how one method compares to the work and methods of others, or how one kind of guitar is essentially different from another and what different areas of focus its building requires, or what the implications are likely to be from approaching the making of the guitar in various different imaginable (and imaginative) ways, The Responsive Guitar is a must-read companion to this one. For those who have already made a few guitars and have achieved a sufficient mastery of basic lutherie woodwork and are ready to make a well-crafted guitar that has better sound, that is definitely the next book for them to read.

Both of these volumes also contain bibliographies, appendices, indexes, footnotes, sources, etc.

It goes without saying that reading these books will make you a good guitar maker in exactly the same way that reading a book on martial arts will make you a good martial artist: you must actually practice the moves. But knowing which moves are the better ones is a big help.


A PHILOSOPHY OF GUITAR MAKING

For those readers who might like to know something about where I'm coming from, before rushing out and buying one or both of these books, I want to say a few things about my larger mindset about guitar making. As an example of this, I offer a perspective on impedance -- which most luthiers have never heard of, yet is fundamental to the functioning of the soundbox. To my mind, impedance is a much more interesting and useful thing to think about and understand than any specific jig or tool that will save somebody, say, twenty minutes in a given guitar making procedure or the exact-by-formula location for braces (which is, by the way, the function of every guitar making plan or blueprint you will ever see). This section will also give you a taste of my technical writing style.

Impedance is a basic concept of physics and electrical engineering. Impedance occurs, for instance, when mechanical energy becomes electrical, magnetic, acoustic, thermal, or some other energy. Or vice-versa. As far as the guitar goes, any time energy transfer such as the one between strings and a soundbox happens, impedance will be part of that process. Impedance can be defined as the mismatch of materials properties or capacities such that an efficient transfer of energies, or transformation of energies from one form to another and/or from one material to another, is hampered, prevented, or impeded. Friction, heat buildup, mechanical deformation, or just plain waste of energy (dissipation) can be consequences of impedance. Put in different words, these are all versions of a form of resistance that is innate in materials.

A simple example of impedance is one that we might all have done in a high school physics class when we suspended a small weight from a rubber band and observed the motion of this weight as a function of our jerking the rubber band up and down at different speeds and with different amounts of vigor (see fig. 1). We could move our hands up and down quickly and vigorously without moving the weight very much at all: it seemed like a total waste of energy and the weight might as well have been an anvil. But we could move our hands up and down minimally at the right frequency, and the weight would bob up and down in tandem with our hand motions: this showed an efficient coupling as a function of a frequency-to-elasticity-and-mass relationship. This is the same phenomenon observed in the behaviors of suspension bridges when, during military maneuvers, the bridges' harmonic frequencies are matched by the footsteps of soldiers marching across them and the bridges start to shake. Soldiers are supposed to not march across bridges in lock-step for this reason: in extreme cases they can bring the bridge down by simply exciting it at that particular frequency. A third example might be that of firing a gun at a parked car: the bullet would probably go through the car or smash itself against the engine block, but the car wouldn't move. On the other hand, if you stood in front of the car (and it was parked on level ground, with its parking brake off) and you pushed with the same amount of energy that the bullet had but at a different velocity (and of course pushing on a greater than bullet-hole-sized area), you would move the car a few inches: impedances will have been matched (or nullified, depending on the wording one prefers).

The principle illustrated in these examples is that, in the right frequency/harmonic relationship, a small amount of energy can move a large mass -- even when brute force fails to achieve the same result.

What does this have to do with the guitar? Everything . . . and at every level. Potential mismatches between the strings' energies and the receptivity of the guitar's various parts are easily resolved once the respective energy-receiving/exchanging capacities of these components are "lined up" with each other. When those conditions are met dramatic results/activity will result where there has been little or no impact before. Translation: a well made guitar is amazingly and dramatically more responsive than an ordinary guitar. It is possible to look at top-making and top-bracing in general as nothing other than an attempt to match the impedances of the materials so as to allow/invite/bring about the most spectacularly easy and wholehearted cooperation possible between the strings and the guitar's respective parts.

This formulation is likely to be somewhere between baffling and amusing to the novice guitar maker -- particularly as (1) this is likely to be unfamiliar language, and (2) the language that often is used makes it sound as though there's some kind of spiritual energy or Zen/metaphysical thing going on*, instead of something that happens on any practical real-world plane. But it is unproductive to worry about how "right" or "wrong" this formulation is. I think that, mumbo-jumbo aside, guitar making is an art -- but it is a real-world practical art in which knowing "the science" makes you a better artist. The bottom line is: don't worry about the language; simply do the work, pay attention, learn from everything you do . . . and you'll get better at it regardless of whether you believe you're matching impedances or speaking to the spirits of dead trees. In the process you will find that as you make the guitar lighter and lighter in construction, and its parts engage less and less in resisting and fighting the strings, it will become better and better . . .

* Indeed, guitar makers will sometimes talk about the Zen or spirituality of guitar making work