Clapton's Guitar by Allen St. John

Author:Allen St. John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Exactly Somewhat Between

WHAT IS HARDER, building a violin or a guitar?

I posed that question to Kerry Keane over lunch at the Sea Grill in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center, just around the corner from Christie’s New York headquarters. Keane is well qualified to speak to this question. In addition to being vice-president of musical instrument sales for Christie’s, and the man who made the Crossroads Guitar Auction a reality, he is also a classically trained violin maker and a guitar builder who worked under the pioneering luthier Augustino LoPrinzi.

“Building a guitar is a lot more difficult than a violin,” he said without hesitation. “And if the American Federation of Violin and Bow Makers ever heard me say that, I’d be dead in an alley somewhere.”

With close-cropped grey hair and an impeccable dark grey suit draped perfectly over his trim frame, Keane is the very definition of the word dapper. He is that rare individual who can wear a bow tie without affectation. But along with that polish, so necessary in his line of work, comes a sly smile and a dry, subversive wit. He took a sip of water. “Violins, violas, and cellos are carved. They’re sculpture,” he explained. “A guitar is fabricated. It’s a construction project.”

His answer went to the heart of the matter.

“You complete a guitar, you set the neck, you string it up, and the very first thing that happens is that the bridge wants to move to where the peghead is and vice versa. They want to meet in the middle, and they’re doing all they can to get there,” Keane explained. “And your job as a maker is to make sure that doesn’t happen.” Or as master guitar builder John Greven once explained to me, “Every good guitar is right on the verge of blowing itself apart.”

In the world of classical music, where instruments are narrowly defined, the guitar is considered a member of the percussion family, along with the tympani and the triangle. Indeed, guitar builders tend to think of a guitar body as a wooden drum. The guitar top is the drumhead—it vibrates and produces sound. The sides support the top, like the rims of a drum—indeed, luthiers often call them rims. But acoustically speaking, a drumhead has it much easier than a guitar top. The impact of a drumstick may be violent, but it’s also over almost before it starts. Not so with a guitar top.

It must withstand the constant pull of six steel strings. And unlike a violin or other classical stringed instruments, where the strings push down on a bridge that sits on a heavily arched top further braced by a sound post, a flattop guitar’s strings pull up on a bridge at an angle that’s designed to tear the thin spruce top right off.

On the other hand, the guitar’s none-too-simple task is to amplify the minuscule amount of acoustic energy provided by plucking a string into a sound that can fill a room. (To get an idea of how little, try plucking a string on a solid-body electric guitar.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.