Official Luthiers Forum!

While it may have been a happy accident, scalloping braces ties in with the notion that the bridge area of the top "produces" bass and the edges support treble response.
But then that could be intuition, or intellectualising.
I do know that many great sounding guitars are build without scalloping, but it is one way of trying to "shape sound", and does seem to work.
Of course, beauty is in the ear of the beholder.
Perhaps the perceived extra effort of scalloping enhances the sound.
All I can do is try with both (sorry - lots of) ways of doing things and find what pleases my ear

Just started lookin'

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

Wow, Irvin and Alan both chiming in, and I'm still as dumb as a rock.......

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It's not the miles ahead, it's the stone in your shoe


In Markham,Virginia

It's still all Voodoo to me. I've got about 50 guitars under my belt now and I have done my fair share of experimenting which essentially brings me right back to the time tested proven designs. IOW I just do as I am told

Having said that I made a very very nice sounding steel string guitar that had a dead flat top and straight uncarved braces(just rounded off and flared about one inch at the ends like a classical brace).

I also made one with the peak in the center tapering off to the ends. My thinking here was why weaken the part of the guitar top that typically bellies up in time? Strengthen it there and weaken it towards the rim and the main xbrace. After reading some responses here I think I understand the hypothesis of the loud speaker. None the less this guitar still sounded fine.

Truck John wrote "A brace section that is 25% taller is 2x stronger.... If your scallop "Peak" is 5x taller than the "Valley" (Say 0.750" vs 0.150") --the location at that peak is 125x stiffer! What does that really get you besides a heavy, stiff, lump... especially if the Stiffness of the "Valley" is actually sufficient (Which 0.150" may not be...) Wouldn't 2x or even 10x stronger be sufficiently inflexible to do the job? That really, the body of the brace should really be significantly shorter... " Although it may seem counter-intuitive, I believe that having a great deal of variance in the stiffness of a top, probably helps bring out the higher modes in a guitar.At higher frequencies,smaller areas of the top are vibrating out of phase with each other,decreasing the sound output. Introducing asymmetry to the top probably helps to bring out these higher modes.