GUITARS

Guitars are the 'second' first element in the generation of tone (the first one being your hands), followed by whatever you'll want to place in between you and the audience. Our workbench has seen lots of them, from various eras and in various stages of repair (or despair, if you wish), as well as pieces of wood soon-to-be guitars.  As a result, our tastes have changed and honed over the years, and started leaning decidedly towards those few things, able to shake us from our foundations.  To the point that when it comes to guitars, we think we have a few firm ideas.

Acoustics make sense if we relate them somehow to the "Golden Era" of American steel string guitars.  That is, from the late '20s until the end of the Second World War, and just immediately after.  A scarce twenty years, when the United States of America went through epochal changes in economy, industry, politics and culture.  As we had the chance to mention somewhere else on this website, the development of popular culture and popular music went hand in hand with the structural and design changes of  the 'spanish guitar' with mutual influence so that it's hard to tell whether the music changed because of the guitar, or vice versa.  Given its intrinsic nature of portable and relatively easy to play instrument (it doesn't take that long for the neophite to start banging 3 chords to sing along), the guitar lent itself well to being the people's instrument.  As such, it quickly superseded instruments of tradition such as the violin, mandolin and banjo, worked its way up from the background of ensemble music as an instrument for accompaniment, and took its center stage place as soloist.  This change in the way the guitar was being used called for changes in design: the guitars were requiring more power, more volume, and the ability to cut through.  The 'X' bracing, which was already around since quite some time by then, but wasn't experiencing much popularity in conjunction with those lame gut strings, turned out to be just what the doctor ordered for steel strings.  At around about the same time, a banjo player endorsing a well known German-American manufacturer, was looking for a guitar that played like a banjo. Enter the 14-fret out of the body guitar, with X-bracing, steel strings and global specs which are since then, and to this date, pretty much unchanged.  That was back in 1929, and the steel string acoustic guitar as we know it today was not only born, but also consolidated in design, construction and - most importantly - tone.  Bottom line: for anyone looking to get good tone out of a steel string acoustic guitar, he'd better start by looking at these cornerstones. The general conception of good acoustic guitar tone hasn't changed much since then, and for some good reasons.

Electric guitars are still acoustic guitars. That is, if the guitar doesn't sound good acoustically (unplugged), good chances are it will not sound good amplified.  No matter what pickups, wiring, cable, effects pedals, amplifier and cab.  All the good things of amplified guitar tone: harmonic richness, presence, complexity, clarity, dynamic range, have to be there in the guitar in first place. Good amplification will only take those qualities, emphasize them and pick it up from there.  Once again, we feel there's really nothing major to be reworked about the design of a well made bolt or set-neck guitar to make it any better. And by chance, this design and tonal excellence (because the latter ratifies the former) was already there by the early '60s.  Retro minded? Is there any need to re-invent the wheel? In truth, the only real big deal that was introduced in the electric guitar design following the humbucker pickup (1955) has been the Floyd-Rose type locking tremolo, some 25 years later.  All other aspects of electric guitars (timbers, construction, design, function) were already there and made guitars pretty satisfactory in playability and tone probably by late 1959 (bolt-on neck with rosewood fingerboard).  Likewise, our hearts gravitate around the guitars that have a soul rooted in history, and concentrate on honing and perfecting the craft where possible.