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What is intonation to you? what does it mean to you as a tech or luthier?

Can intonation be affected by internal bracing?

Taylor is making some dubious claims on the subject......I questioned them after reading ad copy claiming the new bracing greatly improved intonation. I received this in response from Matt at Taylor....

"HI Brian,

As guitar guys, it’s very common to restrict the definition of intonation to compensation, but intonation is also about the harmony and pitch of the notes. Think of how intonation would pertain to a vocalist

I’m sure there have been times you plucked a note and see the Peterson strobe tuner want to jump between 3 different notes. This is caused from all the unwanted overtones which are being created. The V Class bracing allows the top to move in a way which removes those unwanted overtones so you’ll notice when you pluck that note the tuner will focus exactly on that specific note.

In essence, what we have is Compensation + Harmony = Intonation. Or In”tune”Ness

The V class bracing creates more order, more harmony, which gives better in”tune”ness

On acoustic guitars, typically intonation issues have been addressed with saddle adjustment or compensation, or by the fretting nuances of players (to compensate for “sour” notes), but it never fully resolves the issue. Andy Powers discovered that controlling the top movement with a different bracing design could also fix intonation problems by resolving the conflict between the notes the player is trying to play and the way the top’s response interferes with them.

V-Class bracing creates purer, more orderly notes that don’t cancel each other out or sound “off”; they have a clearer, more consistent response. It brings the whole fretboard into greater sonic alignment.

Matt Wall

Service Network Representative"

Basically a cut and paste from one of taylors blogs....

So let's discuss.... Is it possible for the bracing scheme to actually effect intonation? To me the proof of that statement would have been if they had actually lessened the compensation added to the scale length to accommodate the intonation improvement from the top...So I asked that very question in my response which was politely dodged and I was directed to the latest copy of wood and wind Taylors self advertising rag.....

I know this could get messy.....but GO!

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Brian

You never know what you are capable of until you actually try.

https://www.howardguitarsdelaware.com/

I don't believe a word they say.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

But it might sell, right?

Well, I set up a number of guitars over the course of a year, and my tuner detects more overtones on a Strat than on an X-braced acoustic guitar. Maybe Taylor should take their technology to the electric side.

I use a Korg rackmount tuner, and I trust it and my ears. I'm completely happy with the results I get, as are my customers.

I kind of have to wonder- if they're eliminating all these "unwanted, out of tune" harmonics, what are the odds of eliminating some of the "wanted, complexity-producing" harmonics? Just asking. Maybe Taylor engineered that possibility out already.

My knee-jerk reaction is to congratulate Taylor on solving a problem that didn't exist, but I'd still be interested in testing a couple guitars of each bracing type to see if I'm wrong.

My thoughts as well....nothing can spin an autostrobe crazy like a set of powered EMG,s.......

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Brian

You never know what you are capable of until you actually try.

https://www.howardguitarsdelaware.com/

Haha...........bracing to improve intonation, oh boy! I believe their getting closer to that trebley flat sound they've been chasing all these years

There are some videos of pro players at Taylor’s quiet room at NAMM playing and commenting on the guitars.

Common theme seemed to be that the thirds were in much better tune than a conventionally braced instrument.

Like I said in the other thread I’ll reserve judgement until I play one.

The luthier that came up with it seems intellectual,level headed, and is an excellent player with a degree in performance guitar.

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

"V-Class bracing creates purer, more orderly notes that don’t cancel each other out or sound “off”; they have a clearer, more consistent response. It brings the whole fretboard into greater sonic alignment."

Matt Wall
-------------------

"Sonic alignment"? Sounds like astrology to me. Let me check the planets...

Maybe that's why they sound so sterile and colorless. I preferred a little color to my instrument's tonal qualities.

Consistent response? Players "accent" notes all the time. Makes the tune less sterile and boring.

Got to love that "V Class bracing". I guess that's opposed to Ladder Class bracing, or X Class bracing or Laminated X Class bracing or...

Maybe it's the unadulterated hype that disturbs me the most. If it was so revolutionary, it would sell itself.

I think like any other decent bracing pattern it won't sound better, just different and like every other type of guitar there will be some that prefer it and some that don't. Their claims of intonation may make some sense for a single note but that's not how music is played.

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"I've been had again"
Tim Benware
Creedmoor, NC

Brings another question to mind. If I remember my vibrational theory correctly vibrational higher partials do not coincide with the even tempered scale thus meaning any fretted instrument can only ever be completely intune to a specific key or it's direct relative. This phenomena is well known to piano tuners and a stretched tuning is used to close the gap.

So which key did they improve this in?? That could make a big difference to players (specifically which players love or hate it) perceptions that intonation itself has been improved.

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Brian

You never know what you are capable of until you actually try.

https://www.howardguitarsdelaware.com/

Every sci-fi movie ever has to, at some point, have some silly dialog explaining how a concept works so that we, as an audience, can suspend disbelief and enjoy the show. This sounds just like that. Words that sound like an explanation but don't actually say anything. I can see how it feels insulting to some, but Taylor will find customers who enjoy the show. That doesn't meant that the show is necesarily bad, just that "reversing the polarity" is not the reason you happen to like it.

I don't have enough experience to know much about how to shape my tone. I will probably never make enough guitars to get to that point either. When I first started reading about this craft, there were a lot of concepts passed around that I assumed were fairly true. Soon I started to realize that just because everyone repeats the same "conventional wisdom" doesn't mean it is true. You have to figure out for yourself whom you feel has enough knowledge, experience and systematic analysis to listen to. Marketing hype like this is a big reason for why the water is so muddy.

A few years ago, I went to a presentation at the Guitar Center about tone woods. The manager of the store was discussing the tonal impact different tops and back and sides had. There was a martin rep there who was half listening and answering questions as well. The presenter would talk about the differences between cedar and the spruces and what different tones you would hear from them. Then he would demonstrate the differences by playing guitars with those woods that were pulled off the wall. They were all different size, styles, makers and price points but of course it was the type of spruce that we were listening to. Everyone (including the Martin rep.) sat and nodded as they heard what they were primed to hear. I waited patiently for it to all end so I could go about my business. But when he began to demonstrate the differences between rosewood and mahogany back and side sets I couldn't take it anymore. He told us what we would hear form both them, he played a rosewood guitar, we listened, he played a mahogany guitar, we listened, he pointed out how the tone was different, I raised my hand and pointed out that the second guitar was also rosewood. . .

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Bryan Bear PMoMC

Take care of your feet, and your feet will take care of you.

Sometimes those silly facts get in the way.

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Say what you do, Do what you say.

I wonder if the player was told the 3rds were better in tune prior to playing? I'm no rocket doctor but logic would dictate that there would be some physical impossibility to this claim. It would be a bit of a magic pill fit's true!

One purpose of advertising is to precondition the consumer to the point that we will hear/feel/taste/smell/experience the attributes of the product that they are touting.

Alex

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"Indecision is the key to flexibility" .... Bumper sticker

I can't speak for Trevor Gore, he might come in here who knows, but I did just read in one of his chapters about intonation problems due to "body resonance." The point being that intonation error can occur when string resonance couples with body resonance and the body resonance is close to a scale tone. It only happens with very responsive guitars and is one reason to try and get a guitars natural frequency on an off note to common scales or even better, right between notes. Of course I happen to love one of my classical guitars that resonates right on A.

For anyone interested who has the book its in section 4.7.

So I suppose it could be possible to use bracing to alter the guitars resonant frequency but as we all know there is a lot more to it then that. And, i would think a guitar that does have such problems which indicate that it happens to be a very responsive guitar would be a good problem to have. Is Taylor saying they overbuild guitars to solve intonation problems? :p

I read the Wood and Steel article three times and still don't understand it. First, Andy is out surfing and has this "epiphany" - ocean waves breaking around a jetty are just like sound waves on a guitar top. (Only in California...) He goes home and makes a sketch.

Next is a fairly long explanation of what we (and Taylor) calls intonation. A guitar wants to play out of tune for two reasons - our musical system is basically flawed (or tempered) by having fixed frets in mathematically determined locations (we all know that) and that guitar strings have characteristics that makes them not play in tune as they are fretted. They talk about tempering scales and compensating bridges and all those things that we deal with every day. I tune my guitar with an electronic tuner, play an E chord and it sounds wonderful, play a first position D and I reach for the tuners.

Taylor calls this "beating" and "sour notes" - and I agree, its one of the limitations of our little boxes. Andy says "basically the guitar body is not in tune with the strings".

But then the magic, somehow this new V-Class bracing "tames the turbulence". its "a more fluent translator", "a new sonic engine". Somehow without changing fret location or compensation it "gives the guitar top a more complete vocabulary"..... There is another page and a half of superlatives that I didn't understand, but its pretty obvious that if V-Class is that good it should be patented.

I obviously haven't played one or seen one in the flesh, but I did listen to the clips. Sounds like a guitar to me, actually sounds kind of like a Taylor guitar to me. I guess I'll just have to wait until one comes to a music store near me.

From a Gibson Patent.....
"The six-string acoustic guitar has survived many centuries without much alteration to its original design. Prior to the present invention, one very important aspect of acoustic guitars that has been overlooked is providing proper intonation of each string--which is defined as adjusting the saddle longitudinally with the string until all of the notes on the instrument are relatively in tune with each other."

Seems to me they are really stretching that last 6 words......

_________________
Brian

You never know what you are capable of until you actually try.

https://www.howardguitarsdelaware.com/

This really nails a big part of the problem for me. This approach runs rampant throughout Taylor's marketing copy and Andy Powers' interviews.

What exactly do these few examples of terms/phrases that Taylor is using actually mean:
"more orderly notes"
"sonic alignment"
"orderly response from the soundboard"
"design that bring's the guitar's strings in tune with the top and body"
"puts the guitar in tune with the surrounding musical landscape"

One thing all of these have in common is that they are non-specific and ambiguous enough to be open to interpretation which I am quite sure is by design. People who want to believe will interpret those phrases in the way that the marketing people are directing them to.

I'm a little surprised they didn't mention the beneficial effects of using hide glue made from unicorn hides.

I think they are modifying and corrupting the meaning of the word "intonation" as it applies to guitars and coopting it to suit their purposes. "Compensation + Harmony = Intonation. Or In”tune”Ness"

An underlying premise/assumption of their claims is that the vibration of non-v-braced tops is "chaotic", that this needs to be corrected, and that this "correction" improves "intonation". This series of stacked claims seems like a house of cards to me. What exactly does Powers mean when he claims that standard top vibration is chaotic and what is the proof for that assertion? One look at Chladni patterns says to me that top vibration is anything but chaotic.

I would really like to know how they get this bracing system to work its magic across all the individual guitars coming through a mass production system. Is v-bracing so magical that it automatically corrects "intonation" without needing to compensate for different physical properties of the different pieces of wood going in to the tops and braces of individual guitars so that "the strings are in tune with the top"? Even if v-bracing could produce the claimed effects on "intonation" in an individual guitar, I really doubt that their production level would allow for individual fine tuning of the parts of each guitar to get the claimed effect across the board.

In the end, these guitars will probably sound fine. Fine enough to justify all the verbal nonsense? I doubt it.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

They can't say that. Everyone knows that unicorns were hunted into extinction in the 1740s. At least that's the rumor I'm trying to get started.

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Bryan Bear PMoMC

Take care of your feet, and your feet will take care of you.

1922 version of this kind of hype...many of us called them "tone reducers".



http://www.gibson-prewar.com/virzi-tone ... loyd-loar/

Many Loars were "coat-hangered" to get the dang things out. I remember putting one in an F4 I built and it lasted just long enough for me to firmly implant in my head how bad the F4 sounded with the gizmo in it.
They put them in L-5's too.

So, owning a Taylor guitar with V-class bracing is sort of like owning a flux capacitor. Or some dilithium crystals.

Well, now I just HAVE to get one.

Maybe it will sound right in the Upside Down.

Be careful, the Taylor marketing people might be reading and you could be giving them ideas....

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

So, it's like an old Gibson?

My response back to Matt at Taylor and my thoughts in general.

"Well from the front lines of Taylor customer relations, IMHO, Taylor is not doing their customers a service with this novel idea of intonation. You are clouding up an area of guitar set up work that most players barely comprehend as it is......And thereby complicating every techs life who has to enter into any actual technical discussion with one of these customers with regards to any instrument."

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Brian

You never know what you are capable of until you actually try.

https://www.howardguitarsdelaware.com/

Now the question is.... Do they give a crap what Brian Howard says?

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince