Official Luthiers Forum!

hi all
Happy New Year to ya all and a' the best for '10.
OK here’s something I’ve been thinking about over the holidays.
What makes a guitar sound like say a Martin D28 or a Hauser, yeah I know, I know, what I’m wrestling with here is what makes up a recognisable guitar sound or timbre, the # and amount of overtones, fundamentals, partials, harmonics call them what you will but can anyone describe or explain what constitutes the sound of guitars.
I ask this partly because I have a guitar that almost everyone describes the sound as being “Dark”, now I’ve never thought of it as being “Dark”, it’s got a discernible “voice” but I really don't know what they mean, am I missing something here?. An other guitar I played a while back, a new R Taylor had a very pleasant “voice” very attractive and usable but quite different from my guitar, what in the makeup of the sound made it so different?.
best regards
Geordie

_________________
some tunes on acoustic and guitar synth.
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheGeordieAdams
http://www.myspace.com/geordieadams

Martin - Hauser = apples - oranges. Very different animals with very different bracing approaches and construction techniques to bring out the strengths of each type of instrument.

But the main question you are asking seems to be what is controlling the voice of your particular steel string vs. other steel strings. Well, that question is what we are all after here. An answer to your question (or, more accurately, a discussion of your question) would require much more detail about what you did, what you were aiming for, whether it came out as you expected, what you (and others) like about it (or don't), etc. Details, we need the details.

_________________
Jim Kirby
kirby@udel.edu

hi all
many thanks Jim for your response to my poorly worded question.
I asked a maker of £3000 + classical guitars this question recently and he said “he builds in the spanish style and occasionally changes a components position or dimension and if it works he’ll stick with it and try altering something else”, but could’nt tell me the sound components he was manipulating other than bright or rich or dull or fat / thick. Now I know if I was spending that kind of money on a “hand made” violin the maker would most likely know and be able to tell me in depth what constituted a “good” violin timbre. I know the guitar is a fairly recent instrument in comparison and that there is a lot of information on the violins timbre and it might just be that we have to start looking at the knowledge base of other instruments to start to define our own, the guitar or else we might be stuck with terms like booming bass and fat trebles.
Manipulating these components of “tone” is another quest, but is it beyond us?.
regards
Geordie

_________________
some tunes on acoustic and guitar synth.
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheGeordieAdams
http://www.myspace.com/geordieadams

It's not that manipulating tone is beyond us: good makers do it all the time. The problem is that 'tone' is both highly subjective and very complicated.

Your own post attests to the 'subjective' nature of it: other people say your guitar is 'dark' sounding, but you don't hear it as such. Now, it's possible that it would sound dark to you if you were listening to somebody else play it, but there are other possibilites too. For example, maybe you just use 'dark' to mean something else that what your friends mean. Or maybe it's all it the way you play it.

In terms of the complexity; usually, we assume something that sounds 'bright' will have a lot of high frequency in the signal. However, it can happen that, say, a mahogany Dread with very little going on in the higher part of the spectrum will still sound 'bright'. I _think_ that has to do with the sharper 'attack' of the light weight back, but it's hard to say. We might be using the same term to describe a number of different things, or maybe there's more than one thing that you need to have to get 'bright', and you can mix and match different proportions of those things to get a 'bright' guitar.

I have observed that a certain kind of 'coupling' between the vibration of the whole body of the guitar and the air in the box can yeild what I think of as a 'dark' sound. It's not simply that there is more energy i the low end, but rather that the energy is more evenly distributed: there is not one strong note with weaker ones on either side, but rather several notes in the lowest range that are moderately strong. There are other components to this as well, of course.

I make violins as well as guitars, and I would not be too sure that the violin makers would be any better than guitar makers are at defining the things that go into making the sound. I have to wonder if guitar makers are just a bit more honest about what they don't know, or can't describe. I can tell you that there's a lot of disagreement as to what goes into the 'Strad sound', and a lot of effort going into duplicating it. If those guys really knew what they were doing, don't you think they'd have solved that one after all these years?

hi there
Many thanks for your considered reply Alan, it looks like I'll have a bit of work to do to satisfy my curiosity
regards
Geordie

_________________
some tunes on acoustic and guitar synth.
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheGeordieAdams
http://www.myspace.com/geordieadams