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Well I would not wish that on you David my friend......

My apologies.......

I do have to agree with Hesh. Successful building is a matter of making intelligent choices which does translate to choices made from experience. Choices made from experience will help to eliminate prior mistakes and cause a better flow both technically and creatively. Which is exactly what I'm doing here. When one with more experience is willing to share their intelligence it drastically cuts down the time one has to spend hacking through it on their own. We will never eliminate the guessing part but we can cut it down to managable levels. It certainly makes the process much more fun.
By the way, philosophy, in my humble opinion is never useless. It at least gets some lazy brain cells firing off. That's something I can always use!

"Everything in lutherie is intelligent guesses."

The entire world around us that we experience is a combination of guesses that we make on the basis of our human perception to begin with. I can guess that something exists because I either directly or indirectly perceive it through my senses. However, the fact that I perceive it doesn't necessarily mean it exists or if it does, it doesn't mean that the true properties of the object are what I believe them to be. It is ultimately an estimation the is drawn from the information I have. Even at the quantum level in science, things are all probability. For instance, we don't know that a sub-atomic particle is there, but there is a high probability that it exists in that general area.

When the very way we perceive the world on a daily basis is relative and uncertain, what can we say about anything else with certainty? Of course there is a degree of consistency in the human experience and most of our interaction and knowledge is based on this common ground. We have an understanding that something is red as opposed to blue or sweet as opposed to salty. Based on the sum of our perceptions, we can come to an intelligent guess that a cinder block is heavier than a feather, but it's not a certainty. It's a very very high probability.

The craft of lutherie, then, is nothing more than making intelligent guesses as is cooking or rocket science. It's taking one guess with another guess, guessing how the two guesses will interact, and producing an outcome with properties we make guesses about. What exactly is a "warm" tone as opposed to a "bright" tone? Does everyone hear or experience the resulting instrument in the same way? The instrument itself has a universal truth to it, but we don't hear the universal truth. What we hear is a truth relative to our own anatomy and experience, which is a truth that nobody else will hear.

So then if our intelligence is based on probability and experience limited to our own perceptions, how intelligent really is an "intelligent guess"?

Given that everything we experience in life is an intelligent guess, I would think the guesses made in lutherie are infinitely less intelligent the the vast majority of the other guesses me make in life. Blast me for my inexperience, but seeing as how I've absolutely no idea what the instrument I'm working will sound like until there are strings on it, I don't see a whole lot of intelligence at work there. That's because there is even less consistency in the materials we're working with than other crafts. The wood we use one day isn't the same wood we use the other day. Even if it's the same piece of wood, its properties change a little bit from moment to moment. Even the glue that we use isn't exactly the same from batch to batch and we've little real control in the consistency of its application from part to part or instrument to instrument. So aside from perhaps the issue of structural stability (something far more easily ensured than sonic properties) I'd have to question how much intelligence actually goes into building a guitar. It seems to me most people simply build to a plan and hope for a good outcome. Personally I don't really see anything wrong with that... I just think people don't want to admit that their life's pursuit or passion is a roll of the dice as opposed to something they actually have some degree of control over.

You could even take it to a more basic level and first ask, "What exactly is intelligence?". Depending on the answer, perhaps there's no such thing as an "intelligent guess" to begin with.

So very eloquently put, Michael. How would you, then, explain the fact that someone like Mr. Somogyi consistently gets the result of superior sounding guitars as complared to someone such as myself or even a more experienced luthier?

I've not heard any of Somogyi's guitars personally, but let me ask a few questions first:

1. What exactly are the properties of a "superior" sound?
2. Are Somogyi's guitar always "superior" in every instance and in everyone's opinion to that of less experienced luthiers?
3. Can Somogyi consistently recreate the sound (or come reasonably close) of a previously built guitar?

This is what I mean when I ask, "How intelligent is intelligent?". In my opinion, consistently ending up with a "good" instrument isn't the same as intelligently designing or constructing the instrument. If you were intelligently constructing something, you construct it with a clear vision of the end product already in your mind. To that extent, an intelligent builder should be able to make a guitar that sounds horrible, but horrible in a specific predetermined way, if he so chose. Intelligence denotes knowledge. I doubt Somogyi (or anyone, for the matter) would be able to tell you exactly why an instrument sounds the way it does. If he could, then it should theoretically be possible to recreate the sound or at least come reasonably close to it. If he could do this, I'm sure there would be a lot less talk in the lutherie community about how no two sets of wood are the same.

The fact is that when we evaluate a guitar, many things come into play. There is first our idea of what a guitar should look or sound like. Each of us has various ideals in our head regarding the instrument and a "superior" instrument is nothing more than one that most closely approaches these ideals. In addition to this, we also take into consideration the builder or the brand name. I can guarantee you that someone who doesn't know who Somogyi is at all would be a lot less excited in most instances about the guitar than someone who does know. Superiority or desirability is a matter of personal preference, not fact. It's really important to keep that in mind.

The only thing you can judge in reality are the actual physical properties (AKA: craftsmanship) of the instrument. How close to its intended design is the instrument? How symmetrical is it (if it's supposed to be)? Are there any dents or physical imperfections? Are all the measurements correct? Aside from these things, there's really not much else on the guitar that can be evaluated objectively... So if there's little to no objective truth in an instrument's evaluation, what real knowledge is there to derive intelligence from?

That's just how I look at it. Others, will obviously feel differently, but I think people will agree that lutherie isn't a science. It's a lot more about having an almost artistic gut feeling or experience about the craft than it is about hard facts and REAL consistency. This isn't to say that Somogyi builds bad guitars. I'm sure he builds fine guitars. From what I hear about him, he just comes off as a person enveloped in pseudo-science that ultimately has little serious application in terms of creating a predictable instrument. And by predictable, I don't mean making a "good guitar" because that's a very big target to hit. I mean making a guitar that sounds something close to what it did in your head before you even began construction.

I have yet to take his class or hear any one of his instruments so perhaps my opinion may change if I ever do, but this is just the impression I have right now. If you believe that being able to hit the very broad target of what we consider to be a "good" or "above average" guitar as intelligence, then most certainly, there is a lot of "intelligent guessing" in lutherie. If you believe that intelligence requires some sort of real factual understanding of the instrument, I would argue that there really isn't anywhere near as much intelligence as many people would like to believe...

I would like to add that I hope nobody takes offense when I say this because I don't believe there's anything wrong with there being a lack of intelligence. It just means there's a lack of understanding because of the nature of the materials we work with and the limits of human capacity, not because luthiers themselves are somehow lacking in any way. It's not so different from saying that scientists don't fully understand the nature of black holes.

Ok, so I agree with you on this one. I like the way you think. I don't think in an ultimate sense that one could evaluate anything truly objectively. In this sense whatever is intelligent or whatever we percieve to be intelligent would only be in reference to what we contrast it to. In other words anything could be intelligent or nothing at all is intelligent.
Where I was looking from was that there is, from my perspective, a change over time in one's relationship to something (ie..luthiery). One would tend to be able get more consistent results or get closer to building a guitar that had a desired sound over time. From what I've read about Ervin, and this is purely an intellectual take on it (I, also have not taken his class or heard one of his guitars) he takes many more things into consideration than most people do. He is diligent about making his students answer their own questions by thinking it through. What people say about him is that he does things with a reason for doing them in that way. The same sort of thinking put us on the moon where that was only a dream before. Is this intelligence? I don't know (because we can't really know anything either) But it's truly awesome. I think as humans we are characterized by pushing beyond limits that were previously in place. Who knows maybe we will some day be able to push into another lever where it is possible to say that we are intelligent for real.
By the way if you go to www.dreamguitars.com there are some pretty clear sound bytes on some Somogyi guitars. From where I stand they sound incredible. So do a lot of others there.

One of the things that I tell my wife is that the building process is technically challenging and demands a considerable amount of skill as well as finesse. (She believes most things I tell her. ) A big "unknown or, guess if you will, comes at the end with how the guitar will sound. That end/goal is carried by a vision and an intuition that is birthed in the builder and guides the crafting of the instrument. It can only be realized when all is said and done. It is motivating in at least two ways. It is this part of the building process that causes me to learn and work to improve my skills. It can also create a unique since of accomplishment not unlike an artist might feel after finishing a piece that originated in the mind/soul of the artist. That is the human side.

The other unknown/mysterious (guessing) part of building wooden instruments is the wood and how it will behave. Choose wisely, work with as much skill as you can afford and hope it does not rattle to much.

_________________
Mark Ewing
Columbus Ohio
"Trees are an important and precious thing. We should build good things with them. Building good guitars with heart are the best use for them." K. Yairi.

Yeah... I've heard sound bytes, but a sound byte is only a reflection of the equipment and processing involved in recording and playback. This is why I don't ever attempt to evaluate a guitar from what I hear through my computer. Even if I got two different sets of speakers and listened to the same audio file, they would sound very different. Then you wonder if there were any effects added or if the audio was enhanced at all after recording and in the end, you've still no idea what the guitar sounds like...

But yeah.. Another thing to keep in mind is that regardless of the level of actual knowledge involved, there is bound to be at least a degree of consistency when you continuously follow a pattern or build in a similar fashion. Though we may not be talking about laser accuracy, builders do tend to fall into general patterns when building and it could explain why their builds come out a certain way if you take an overall look at their instruments. I think someone at Somogyi's level of experience would begin to recognize various patterns be it through observation or trial and error over time and therefore, he naturally has a better chance than a less experienced builder at coming closer to what he wants. But I think with enough building and observation, one could begin to build in the right general direction based on natural experience gained without any real knowledge in regard to the dynamics governing the properties of the resulting instrument. Before you go on to argue that this is intelligence, I would like to state that an animal has the level of intelligence to try out different somewhat random things and learn to keep doing what works...

But then given the fact that all of our knowledge and science is based on trial and error experiments leading to whatever understanding of the world we now have, is there a difference either way? In the end, we still don't understand the very nature of space, time, and matter and that's the basis for everything... So what do we "know" to begin with? Maybe we all know NOTHING.

I love it! I can't think of a better way than luthiery to engage the great mystery and be co-creative.

I'll separate my response from those of the serious and dedicated builders, because I am just a hobby guy who wants to do well, but who is blessed/cursed with an inquisitive mind. All I can say is there are a lot of guesses that show up in all of the work I do--in my career, as well as in my shop. I'd like to imagine that many of them are intelligent guesses. I'll admit that some of them are uninformed guesses. A few of them are just plain hunches. (is that the same?) And once in a while, I pepper things with an attitude of: "This oughtta work...." (and once in a while, it DOES work). I'll bet I'm not the only one.

Neat topic, and good responses from all.

Patrick

Whats the point of intelligent guesses....hmmm

I look at building like this...

"Do the best you can
with what you got,
when its going down.

Don't take no credit
Don't pass out no blame
Just do it."


blessings
the
Padma

_________________
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Audiences and dispensations on Thursdays ~ by appointment only.


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Michael, I don't think it would be a stretch to compare making a guitar to making a fine art print. Experience is guiding your process, but your intuition is playing a role, too. Your choice of process, your paper, exposure techniques . . . everything swirling together to make up your intuition might make you lean one way with your print making, but you don't know what the outcome will be. You might have a very good sense, but you won't know until it's a finished product.

I completely agree. I was just poking fun at what I felt to be the pointlessness of the quote. It's the same with everything in life. A photographer doesn't know what he really shot until he sees the print, A cook doesn't know what his food really tastes like until he eats it. A scientist doesn't really know the outcome of a reaction until he actually does it. Everything we do is a series of guesses based on varying levels of intelligence or knowledge. So what's the point in stating the obvious? I'm pretty curious to see the actual context of the discussion or interview he said this in.

Gotcha. What I think the quote does is show us his reflective process, and hopefully tempt us to open our own. I don't sense that he's trying to sound wise or tell us something insomuch as he's using the opportunity to reflect on his craft.

My interactions with Ervin have been very positive. He's been very kind to me and non-indulgent with himself. His article, "Why Luthiery," was a great read for me when I found it on his website.

Michael Jin wrote:
"I doubt Somogyi (or anyone, for the matter) would be able to tell you exactly why an instrument sounds the way it does. If he could, then it should theoretically be possible to recreate the sound or at least come reasonably close to it. If he could do this, I'm sure there would be a lot less talk in the lutherie community about how no two sets of wood are the same."

We need to be clear about a couple of things:
1) Although we know a lot about why any given guitar sounds the way it does, there is still a lot we don't know, and a certain amount we can't know, and
2) the variability of wood is much less of a factor, for the most part, than is our lack of knowledge, and inability to control the process.

Guitar sound is a tricky problem, even aside from the matter of subjective judgments. If somebody has a guitar that they deem 'good' it's quite possible to measure various aspects of it and use that data to construct an instrument that is 'arbitrarily close'. It won't be 'identical', but it will have many of the same features of sound, and, unless the person is pretty finicky, be an acceptible substitute. Surprisingly enough, the replacement need not be physically identical to the original: it's likely that you'd need to keep to the same general size and shape, and using wood of the same species is most likely a good idea, but you can depert quite widely from some of the details and still be 'close enough'. The trick is that, even with 'the same' wood (cut,say, in flitch), it is very difficult to get 'the same' sound.

The reason 'similar' is easy and 'the same' is very hard has to do in part, I think, with the way our hearing works. We're not very sensitive to fairly large changes in loudness of a tone, but we are very aware of the addition or loss of quite small amounts of energy in harmonics. For a pure tone to sound noticably louder you have to just about double the amount of power in it (+3dB), and ten times the power (+10 dB) sounds approximately twice as loud. however, one study I've seen found that adding in a single harmonic as much as 20 dB down (1/100th the power) from the fundamental makes a noticable difference in timbre.

It's not too hard to get the big things that produce the fundamentals of most of the notes to match up reasonably well from one guitar to another. A lot of that is simply built into the designs; that's one reason Dreads sound different from OMs; the major resonances tend to fall into certain relationships. But once you get up into the higher frequency end of things it becomes much more difficult.

The main reason is that the guitar is made up of a lot of more or less strongly coupled, highly distributed complex oscillating systems. What that means is that every part of the thing can vibrate in a lot of different ways, that the way each part can vibrate is quite dependant on details of wood and structure, and that all of the parts are tied together and, thus, influence each other more or less strongly. In physical terms, once you get up to about 600-800 Hz you're in a 'resonance continuum', where the vibration mode frequencies of the different parts are closer together than their half power band widths. In this range it's simply not possible to seperate things out, and say that a particular peak in the spectrum comes from, say, a certain mode of the top. Most of the motion, and sound, may be in the top, but it's entirely likely that you'd change it more by, say, shaving a back brace than a top brace.

In short, this is a mildly chaotic system. It's not so bad that you can't pretty much make it do what you want most of the time, but it is such that nobody is ever going to get a total handle on all of the details, IMO. And that, as we all know, is where the devil lives.

I'm firmly of the opinion that we can measure most, if not all, of the properties of wood that matter in producing sound well enough to be able to control the stuff that's theoretically within our control pretty well. I think any decent luthier (and Ervin is far better than just 'decent') will be able to get reasonably consistent results by whatever means they have adopted. Naturally better testing methods will be more likely to produce more consistent results, but, as I said, there are limits to how far even the best testing methods will get you. And even the best testing and most exacting construction QC will probably never enable you to make 'the same' guitar more than a couple of times, if that.

Is like this dudes...

No 2 cabbages role down the hill the same way.


the
Padma

_________________
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Audiences and dispensations on Thursdays ~ by appointment only.


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Very true Padma my friend - very true!

It's amazing !
both Alan & Padma are on target !
There is so much info on "WHY" a guitar sounds the way it does !
It's overwhelming -even to veteran guitarmaking dummies like me !
But there is never a -do it this way-or not !

That's because we work with wood & imagination !

Mike

_________________
Mike Collins

Yo, Mike

And why shouldn't we be....everything I've read by him is right on the money
...kind long winded for me but right on.

blessings
the
Padma

_________________
.

Audiences and dispensations on Thursdays ~ by appointment only.


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I guess (intelligently or not) people have made Ervin the Aristotle of lutherie. Now we will hang on his every word and analize every utterance to find it's deeper meaning. Because he has been willing to share his knowledge we have put him on a pedestal, which often is not the most comfortable place to be.