Notes and observations

It is always fun, and sometimes gratifying, to hear a new instrument for the first time. Here is #39, a flamenco guitar in cypress and spruce. I strung it with a set of Hannabach mediums yesterday and I'm top tuning it now.

This is the second guitar i've built in the style of the Spanish master luthier Manuel Reyes. Construction details are taken from a drawing by Tom Blackshear of a 2003 Reyes published by the Guild of American Luthiers.

All the clips were done with a Zoom H4 using the built in stereo microphones, in the living room, sitting on the sofa. The wav files were imported into Audacity, trimmed and normalized, and converted to mp3s using the LAME encoder. No compression or EQ has been used. I added a bit of plate reverb to Andalucian Evening.

Apologies for my playing - i enjoy it a lot but i'm not really a Player. With that warning, here is Andalucian Evening and a Doodle in E minor. Dark and sweet.

Flamenco guitar neck blank, 650mm scale length. Soprano ukulele, 344mm scale length.

A Spanish cedar neck for a flamenco guitar. The cypress faceplate matches the cypress back and sides of the guitar. With time the cypress will go a nice golden brown.

Here is a tenor ukulele I just finished. It features a 14 fret Honduras mahogany neck, a slotted headstock with Waverly geared tuners, Honduras rosewood back and sides, an Adirondack spruce soundboard with abalone rosette, curly maple bindings, top purfling, and a B-Band XOM pickup system with a UST, AST (under soundboard transducer) and soundhole mounted loudness and balance controls. This tenor is finished in lacquer and it has a very sweet and clear tone.

FujiFilm FinePix F30, 6.5 f5, tripod mounted
dark room with indirect indoor light

I spent part of yesterday and today polishing and setting up Minoru's tenor. Here you can see the Waverly tuners i just installed. I'm preparing to finish the nut. The B-Band installation is quite complex, with an under saddle transducer, another transducer under the soundboard, a preamp, a battery system, a set of controls just inside the soundhole and an endpin jack. I've got it all fitting nicely. I'm looking forward to tuning it up and giving it a whirl this weekend before i ship it off early next week. Its very pretty. Adirondack spruce, also called Red Spruce, has a slight reddish tinge to it that distinguishes it in appearance from the very white Swiss spruce. Adirondack and Swiss spruce also sound a bit different. They're both very nice choices for a soundboard.



Here it is a few hours later in its custom fit Ameritage case. I just strung it with Worth fluorocarbon strings. I've tuned it up and am letting the strings settle overnight. Over the weekend i'll set up the B-Band and give it a whirl. First impressions ? It has a sweet and clear voice !

Here are some photos of a concert ukulele i've finished today. This ukulele is constructed with fine golden curly koa from Hawaii and spruce from the Swiss alps. It has ebony binding, fingerboard, bridge, nut and saddle and a paua abalone rosette. It is fitted with PegHed™ geared tuning pegs and Worth strings and its finished in lacquer. This ukulele has a very expressive, sweet and rich tone that will go perfectly with Masako's wonderful voice.

I've been playing around with the Zoom H4 and Audacity a little bit more today. This is addictive and very time consuming fun but very frustrating too. I've found it pretty easy to navigate around the H4 menus even with the little screen and small controls, but i must say that they should have made it easier to delete takes quickly.

Why does this matter ? It is infinitely harder to be a musician than a luthier ( which is why they get paid better ). If you can't lay down a track perfectly and aren't into spending many many hours in front of a digital audio workstation fixing things up, you end up doing take after take after take until you get one thats close. And let me tell you, as a plunker rather than a musician my chops are so irregular and fumbly that I end up doings lots of takes to get one that is moderately unembarrassing to post, especially on a concert ukulele sized fingerboard.

My H4 came with a 128MB SD card and that doesn't hold a lot of data at a 44.1khz/16bit PCM encoding rate. I have a 2GB card on the way and that will help a lot but meanwhile I wish it was just a little easier to delete a full card and restart recording None-the-less i think the H4 is a sweet little product and well worth its price. Sweetwater has 'em, and great customer support too.

In any case, i wanted to get a little strumming on the new koa concert down. Here is a short take of The Working Man's Blues. Its recorded using the H4 built in mics, medium gain, the U87 mic model, no effects. I imported the PCM file into Audacity, normalized it, added a tiny bit of plate reverb and converted it to mp3 format.

The lacquer finish on Minoru's tenor (Honduras rosewood/Adirondack spruce) and Misako's concert (koa and Swiss spruce) is nice and dry so today I levelled the finish with 1200 wet and dry paper using a felt block and water and gave the ebony fingerboards and bridges a coat of Waterlox to seal them. Tomorrow i'll rub the finish back up to gloss with some 3M Finesse-It finishing compound and start setting them up for delivery next week.