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Techno-babble

"I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."
  - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

There is widespread ignorance and misunderstanding of how guitars actually vibrate and what things are actually important in shaping the sound qualities of each instrument. This void has been filled with myth, mystery, marketing hype and a few good books and articles.

 It's understandable that the largely intuitive musician or instrument builder might find a scientific approach to sound a bit tedious, but a basic understanding is important to avoid acting based on false information and assumptions. In this series of articles I hope to present a straight forward approach to understanding how guitars work. I know that some of this information is repeated in various articles, but repetition is key to learning and you probably won't read all the articles anyway.  

While I do have a degree in science, I do not represent this work to be on the level published in scientific research publications. However, it does represent a significant amount of time spent pursuing how things work from the perspective of an experienced guitar maker. I believe this approach gives me a far greater knowledge of the wood I work with than just flexing and tapping. In the end I believe I build louder, more responsive and better sounding guitars because of this approach.

• NEW: A tone and volume comparison of two guitars [Adobe Acrobat PDF - 559.48 KB]
  
• How I test guitars
• The Harmonic series - The basis of tone
• A study of free back modes [Adobe Acrobat PDF - 1.04 MB]
• Free and bound back modes compared [Adobe Acrobat PDF - 933.57 KB]
  
• What does bracing do anyway ? - A series of articles about how bracing impacts the harmonic modes of soundboards. These are intended to show the progression of modes from raw wood to finished guitar. Mostly photos with minor commentary. I include plots of taps for each part separately so they are large enough to be useful.

• 0) Photos of top modes before cutting the sound hole (pdf) [Adobe Acrobat PDF - 785.37 KB]
• Includes the plot of the tap tone in the pdf
• @#!! computer people anyway, always start counting with "0" 
  
• 1) Photos of top modes without bracing (pdf) [Adobe Acrobat PDF - 2.07 MB]
• Plot of tap analysis to go with 1: [PNG Image - 36.68 KB]
  
• 2) Photos of top modes with 1 transverse brace (pdf) [Adobe Acrobat PDF - 2.15 MB]
• plot of tap analysis to go with 2: [PNG Image - 35.59 KB]
• Combined plots of 1 & 2:  [PNG Image - 14.63 KB]
  
• 3) Photos of top modes with 2 transverse braces (pdf) [Adobe Acrobat PDF - 2.52 MB]
• plot of tap analysis for 3: [PNG Image - 22.19 KB]
• combined plots of 2 & 3: [PNG Image - 17.73 KB]
  
• 4) Adding a central fan brace (pdf) [Adobe Acrobat PDF - 1.71 MB]
• Shows the effect of adding and then shaping the brace on modes and frequencies
  
• Adding some lattice bracing
• Coming soon ...
• Bracing along existing modal boundaries
• Coming soon ...
• Top modes of a fan braced top  
  
• Talkin' Tone In which I define terms and present a few heretical ideas.
• Bass or treble - take your pick - Listening to a potential new guitar ?
• About Strings  My very basic take on selecting strings.
  
• What is damping and should I care, or not ? - coming soon
  
• Ring Bridges and how they differ (sound wise) from standard bridges - coming soon
• Fractal Bracing ? - coming soon

Take the quiz: The frequency graph below shows a plot of the low E string played on two guitars. They are considerably different in construction and materials but the difference in sound is subtle. Given the graph, what do you think that difference is ?