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Good quote, it puts it together rather nicely. Having reached that level of experience in a few other areas, I look forward to getting to that point as a builder of guitars. I have to say though that I'm am really enjoying the journey.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Thanks for bringing up that book, Todd. I read an essay that became the book and meant to get it when it came out, but it had slipped off my radar. Thanks for the reminder.

Mike

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Mike Lindstrom

One of the keys to the quote is "the experienced mind" does the experience have to relate to the specific craft, I don't think so. The experienced mind excels at " detecting a coherent pattern"
So how do forums affect the learning curve? From my mind's experience, it has more value for the woodworking project part then the mastery of craft. More of us can complete a guitar, forums like this improve the ratio of started projects to completed ones. My experience was starting a guitar 17 years ago that stayed a box of parts until it was revisited with the help of the internet, then it got finished. Without the internet it was just me and Cumpiano, and I needed a bit more help then a book can offer, now with the internet, in 5 months I have an Everett style bending jig, Williams binding jig, go bar deck, rosette setup, saddle slot jig, and so on, and as a result, I have a woodworking project almost done, 5 months, no way could I have done so much with just the Cumpiano book, built a guitar yes, but not with all the very useful jigs. These tools set me up to more fluently complete future woodworking project guitars, giving me at least a more solid opportunity to enter the Masters program.

But then we get back to the experienced mind detecting patterns. It is about understanding our individual learning process, I know how to teach myself stuff, a lifelong learner knows how to learn, and a big part of the process is research, part of my experience as a learner is understanding the value of research, my inexperienced mind perhaps did not grasp this as part of the building process, even without the internet, I could have dug up some help and got that guitar done years earlier.

So the forums can increase the success rate of woodworking project guitars, but then can aid in mastery by the fact that those who choose this as an educational tool are the lifelong learners and even if they are not masters of the specific craft, they have some level of mastering their individual learning process and can really benefit from the knowledge base, avoiding reinventing the wheel in each lonely shop and spending more time gaining fluency or mastery of the craft. Mastering a craft starts with mastering our individual learning process, then applying that process to the specific craft. Building a guitar without understanding an overall learning process, or assimilating the information as a "pattern" can be little or no advancement towards mastery.

Interesting quote Todd, thanks, made my coffee taste better.
Rob

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I found this video for those of you who might like to listen to Mathew Crawford.

http://fora.tv/2009/08/04/Shop_Class_as ... B_Crawford

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Wisdom is justified by her children

Todd...thanks for saying "fora".

Makes you pure science or nada guys all tingly, eh? I love the "if it can't be metric-ised and measured it can't be real crowd." Wow ...

Got that right Filippo !


Like any other work/art/craft-experience is a teacher-new tech. from outside sources helps you learn more-the rest is up to your dedication/addiction & ability to want to improve /add to your abilities & knowledge!

Mike

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Mike Collins

Thanks Todd, and Rob R, for those posts. I think they're both very much on track.

In response to Rob's comment, I've found that anyone I've ever met who is truly brilliant at something tends to be awfully good at a few other things as well. I think that ability to learn is an independent skill, not related strongly to what has been learned.

Everything real -can- be measured, it'd just that often people are incapable of communicating what they perceive. Someone with perfect pitch and no knowledge of music theory can only say 'the one that sounds like...umm...like the other one...', instead of saying it's a minor 7th interval. We shouldn't be so quick to pat ourselves on the back for being able to perceive the uncommunicable. Inability to communicate what one perceives is a handicap, not an accomplishment.

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

To me, 'fora' sounds natural and 'forums' awkward, but I usually use the latter so as not to seem overly Latinate. Glad to know that 'fora' is accepted here.

The main insight of Gestalt psychology (not to be confused with Gestalt psychotherapy) is that our perceptual apparatus initially takes in objects as wholes, and then can break them down by analysis, rather than taking them in as perceptual atoms and building them up into objects. But I think it is controversial to say that this is a skill acquired by experience; there is evidence that our brains our hard-wired to work that way.

Both experience and theoretical understanding inform our intuitions, though, which may be more of what Crawford was talking about.

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Howard Klepper
http://www.klepperguitars.com

When all else fails, clean the shop.

There are a whole bunch of studies that basically show that it takes about 10,000 hours of dedicated "Practice" to Master a skill....

Unfortunately, that means most "Amateurs" will never really get there at 1 hour per day (which is actually quite a bit for a hobby) .. 10,000 hours equates to 27+ years at Hobby levels -- or more or less a lifetime of Hobby to make it to a level of "Mastery"

The other side is that for the dedicated Pro -- 10,000 hours is 3-5 years of hard work at 8-hour days... which seems like what happens when a professional truly dedicates their efforts to mastering something... It takes 3-5 years of really working hard to get there.... and then you see this giant "Jump" in skills and ability.

One thing the studies have shown is that "Hard practice" is much more likely to yield progress than mindless repitition... Think of the Beatles -- They went to Hamburg as a decent cover band.... They came back a group of experienced performers who got the hang of "Music" -- That is what 12+ hours a day, 6 days a week for a couple of years does to you....

Thanks

John

And then there are those of us who just 'charged in.' If I had read a book or forum about building I would have been intimidated and never started. As it was I built a few guitars and then discovered the forum, which now is entirely helpful, since I now have a point of reference.

I love it.
but, as a musician gains more and more control over the variables does it become less and less artistic?
I think curiosity is the driver of skill learning. Fora, feed curiosity.
I guess fori does'nt sound quite right?

No, it's the opposite....

Look at the "Musicians" who made a name for their creativity and artistic expression....
You typically see them hit their stride after quite a long study and long, hard work... You see guys who gave up their "Real Day Job" to Go Be a Musician. The ones who don't give up and quit after 3-months play "Cover Band" duty at every place they can sneak in the door... and they are usually pretty bad for a while. Many of these guys really don't hit their stride until they have been doing it for several years... Then, they seem to get the hang of playing live and getting the audience involved and even some knocking together a couple pretty good songs... Putting compelling emotions into music that is catchy isn't natural.... It takes a lot of practice and work...

Perfect example is American Idol -- There are zillions of folks who have taken a whole bunch of years of voice lessons and music lessons... Sure, they sing pretty well -- with the church choir and maybe do a few solos, occasionally sing with their buddies in the garage.... But, they are usually obvious when they show up on the big stage -- They have no "Stage presence"... These are the ones who get nervous and pitchy and forget their songs... Sure, They "Can Sing" -- but they just don't have practice out in front of a crowd....

Same for Artists... Picasso didn't start out with Cubism... He started out drawing horizon lines and painting fruit bowls just like every one else... The "Typical" story for Artists is that they sell paintings to buy paint, canvas, and brushes for a while

This is where the "Technical" part of the craft comes in... The research seems to show there is just no substitute for hours of hard practice, no matter what the field....

Thanks

John

Ah yes ...to grock or comprehend the big picture....waste of time in me mind...
me prefer to "just do it"...it lets the mind be free, you know like clouds in the sky, to grock the big picture.

peace and carrots


Padma

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I think that to make the inference from the fact that we can use our intuitive apparatus to make valid judgments without being able to explain them in terms of quantifiable properties to the conclusion that guitars (for example) have properties that are beyond the reach of science is not justified. Guitars are physical objects, and amenable to being completely described in physical terms. We just don't yet have the reduction. No need to go woo-woo about it. There no reason why the things we listen for in tap tuning can't be identified, measured by physical apparatus, and quantified. Many builders are moving in that direction. As of now there isn't a system for doing this that improves on the extremely sensitive measuring and computing apparatus we have in our heads. We don't have good enough access to the workings of that apparatus to offer a very good physical explanation of what it does. But I don't see any reason to think we are tuning in to something extra-physical and outside the reach of science when we tap tune.

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Howard Klepper
http://www.klepperguitars.com

When all else fails, clean the shop.

I can only hope that nobody's planning to repeal the "Laws of Psycho-Acoustics".

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JJ
Napa, CA
http://www.DonohueGuitars.com

To me, art is getting the crystal clear image of something beautiful or profound from your mind out into the world with the best fidelity you can. One can have the most profound, beautiful ideas, and they'll never become art without the technical skill to put them in a medium. A lot like a person that can imagine beautiful melodies but can't sing, play, or put them to paper. See John How's Virtual String Animation thread for a really poignant example of this (their work is amazing!)

A lot of art, music, and engineering (oddly enough) schools are utterly failing at their jobs now because the faculty think that the philosophy of what they're teaching the students is more important than the technical skills. We end up with artists with brilliant ideas who can't put them on paper, musicians with beautiful songs that'll never leave their heads, and engineers who can write awesome reports, and talk your ear off about the responsibilities and ethics of the profession...but can't fix a basic machine. It's 'those who can't do, teach' at it's worst!

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

Howard Klepper wrote:
"I think that to make the inference from the fact that we can use our intuitive apparatus to make valid judgments without being able to explain them in terms of quantifiable properties to the conclusion that guitars (for example) have properties that are beyond the reach of science is not justified."

I agree (of course!).

Some folks seem to have the idea that the scientific aproach will somehow take all the 'art' out of making instruments. They imagine that we'll figure out 'The Secret' and then just put out 'perfect' instruments with suitably-programmed CNC setups, one after another. I don't think that is possible.

For one thing, my view is that, for all the 'art' we try to inject into this process, it's really the musicians who are the atrtists: we're just tool makers. Of course, there's a lot of art in a good tool, and, in particular, in a good tool for a musician. The best musicians I know are looking, in part, for a particular sound, but, more than that, they're looking for a _range_ of sounds. That's tricky.

'Way back when, Tim White put out a 'Journal of Guitar Acoustics' for a few years. He stopped when he realized that there was a paradox inherent in the sound of the guitar. On the one hand, it had become pretty clear that the differences between 'good' and 'great' instruments were mostly in the high frequency range, say, above 2000 Hz. The paradox is that, in that range, you're in the 'resonance continuum', where things overlap in such a way that you have no direct control in advance over specific resonances. So, in the face of that, how is it that some folks are able, more or less consistently, to produce better guitars than others?

I think the answer to that is going to necessarily be pretty complicated in itself, but it boils down to the notion that there are tnings you can do early in the process, such as 'tap tuning', that effect the final outcome in favorable ways. You might not be able to exactly duplicate the sound of a specific instrument, but you can set it up so that you can come 'arbitrarily close', as the mathematicians say.

Part of the way you do that is through the 'tacit knowledge' you've gained. You've made, or looked intelligently at, instruments that do more or less what the customer wants, and you know what features move you in the 'right' direction. But reductionist thinking, informed by science, can help as well, by helping you understand the principles behind the things you're doing.

But no amout of science will help you figure out what sound that customer wants: that, to me, is the real art of what we do. If there's no customer involved, there is still, as one maker says, the little angel that sings in your head; the sound you want to hear when the instrument is done.

So, yes, the instrument itself is a physical object that obeys physical laws. To the extent that you can define what you want it to do, science can help you do that. But science also tells us that this particular object is at least mildly chaotic, and won't ever do exactly what we tell it to. All we can do is set up 'attractors', limit the scope of what it will or won't do in what we hope will be helpful ways, and hand it to the real artist, who will tell us whether we've made a useful tool or not. In the pursuit of that craft, I'll take any help I can get; art, science, history, tacit knowledge, whatever.

Finally: I will make the point that science can be a great help in keeping you from doing dumb things. It's been said that the human brain is a story telling machine: when faced with a situation or object we try to make up a story to explain it. One way of looking at science is that it's a pretty efficient sorter-out of bad stories. A little research can at least eliminate the less reasonable ideas, and keep you from doing things that would end up being a complete waste of time. 'Science', of course, is not infallable, and good scientists have been known to go off in the wrong directions, particularly when faced with stuff that's as complicated as a guitar. That's why we keep doing it: trying to duplicate experiments to verify them, and extend our understanding in ways we hope will be useful.

In such a complicated field it's slow work, and difficult, but it has the big benefit of being cumulative. When Strad died, nobody really knew how he got the results he got: it was all tacit knowledge that was in his head, and didn't make it into anybody else's. My violin making teacher, Carleen Hutchins, published a lot of papers on the work she did. Some of it was really useful, if only as a starting point for further understanding, some of it was wrong, and the jury is still out on some of it. But when she died last summer, the work lived on, and we lesser mortals can hope to build on it. That's the beauty of science.

Re Bob's comments:

When my father-in-law interviewed for a job with GE back in about '40, he had an MA in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. The interviewer asked him three questions:
1) have you ever taken an alarm clock apart,
2) did you get it back together, and
3) did it run afterwards.
Math and science can be taught, engineering, OTOH...

Yo, Alan...

Now you laying out words me understand.

Umm .... just who be that maker?...Me wouldn't mind shooting the breeze with s/he.


peace and carrots


Padma

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Audiences and dispensations on Thursdays ~ by appointment only.


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The Padma asked:
"Umm .... just who be that maker?...Me wouldn't mind shooting the breeze with s/he."

Tom Blackshear.

I'd take the average magnitude of the vector difference of the desired result and the output from the 'more controlled' equation given that result as input, then divide that by the average point to point distance throughout the metric space. That should quantitatively say how much more control it gives us as a ratio.

Of course, you needn't know the equations themselves or how they interrelate to know how much better you're doing, just the range of a variable, the range in which 'good' guitars lie, and the range in which you can control it. For things like resonant frequencies, these values are known to a certain degree of accuracy. Constraining one variable which normally has a wide range, but which has a small range in 'good' guitars could make you 10X as likely to put out a good one even though you don't know how any of the other variables work.

Good guitars aren't identical, but they fall within a certain range and have a lot more in common with each other than they do with a block of wood, a banjo, or a Walmart special.

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

I dunno what science being self sufficient or the whole realm of what we do falling within science mean. I think everything we do is reducible to physical terms, but that where we do not yet have the reduction, we proceed by means that fall outside of scientific method.

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Howard Klepper
http://www.klepperguitars.com

When all else fails, clean the shop.

I think you're talking about engineering there, not science. Engineering is what you do when science is through, but the scientific method is what gets you that reduction to physical terms. You are right that we're (mostly) not using it, though. The wonderful thing about the scientific method is that you can pass on what you've learned without forcing someone else to retrace your steps.

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

-Michael Polanyi's books 'Personal Knowledge' and 'The Tacit Dimension'
are worth mentioning in this context. I wouldn't attempt a synopsis of
his work, having just a slight knowledge of it myself, but others might
be interested. The books are not light reading- his wiki entry gives a
glimpse.

Can you give an example? Philosophy *is* questioning presuppositions.
I don't think that's a bad thing. In our historical phase I don't think it's
surprising that there's a lot of questioning going on, warranted or not.

Tom Blackshear eh. Thank you Allan.

tP

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Audiences and dispensations on Thursdays ~ by appointment only.


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