Lutherie Demystified - The Two Jobs Of A Luthier - video Dailymotion

The Luthier Bench Knowledge Base

Lutherie Demystified is a video series hosted by Garrett Lee that explores the world of classical guitar building--from techniques and theory to commentary and perspectives about the instruments, players and lutherie profession.

Transcript

00:00Hi it's Gary and in today's concept video about what luthiers do I'm

00:04probably going to talk about something that you didn't consider and when I

00:09distill what I do in the workshop every day I can think about it in terms of two

00:15main activities that overlap in practical terms but conceptually they're

00:20very different. So the first activity is cutting and shaping the wood so that in

00:27the end it will end up looking and feeling like a guitar and the second

00:33activity is really the most challenging and that is to assess the material

00:39properties of wood and on a more microscopic level change the structure

00:47so that I can shape the sound and this can be a lifelong pursuit. But the reason

00:54for this second activity is because wood is a natural product and being a

00:59natural product it is inherently highly variable in properties such as stiffness

01:05and weight and the bad news for guitar builders is that stiffness and weight

01:11highly influence the sound the acoustic properties of any resonating instrument

01:17and so that decision-making really feeds into how the the instrument will

01:25ultimately sound and even if the material that I received is exactly the

01:32same and it is uniform from guitar to guitar I still need to make decisions on

01:38how to change the structure so that ultimately the guitar will sound the way

01:44that I want it to or maybe even on a better level exactly the way that a

01:49player wants to have it sound and so in future videos we'll spend more time

01:55discussing how I actually do that. At my workbench I have two equally important

02:02books. The first book addresses the first activity of Luthier's that is how to

02:07make something that looks and feels like a guitar. This has all the dimensions and

02:12all the methodology that I use to put together a guitar. The second book is

02:18more of a notebook a record-keeping book that has my assessment of things like

02:23flexibility and weight but more importantly what I think about those

02:27aspects how I make decisions and what decisions I made but also subjective

02:35evaluations of the sound of finished guitars so that I can draw correlations

02:40between the physical measurements during the building process and the

02:44eventual sound. If I had to have one book it would probably be this one that has

02:50the key to understanding why my guitars sound that way that they do. No doubt the

02:57builder of your guitar used some variation of these two aspects of the

03:02building process. For example he or she may have used more or less power tools

03:08however in the end the guitar looks like a guitar it feels more or less

03:14like a guitar but the decision-making process that led to the sound might be

03:19radically different. The sensibility of the measurements either by hand or by

03:27instrumentation may be different. What some people might consider scientific

03:32building is really no different than recording the information so that it

03:39can be referred to later and then you can make decisions based on these

03:43recordings. However a more intuitive builder or a more traditional builder

03:48might store this in his or her memory banks which is perfectly valid. So there

03:54is room for a lot of variety in styles of building, methodology, and thought. One is

04:01not necessarily better they're just different and that's what gives a

04:04variety that is really beautiful in classical guitar building and playing.

Lutherie Demystified - The Two Jobs Of A Luthier

Category

Transcript

Recommended