Mike O'Melia wrote:
I will bet there are some DARN good reasons why the insides are not finished, or the masters of the past would have done it. No, this is another case of someone looking for a "discovery" that will give them the "big break". Like folks who "invent" braceless bodies.
Whether you like it or not, wood needs to breathe for it act "naturally". Whether or not humidity can get to the wood, temperature will. And without the buffering effect of humidity, my guess is temperature extremes will cause unexpected cracks. Cabinet makers use floating door panels. Why not just seal everything and avoid the added complexity? My guess is because you can't fool Mother Nature.
Bridge builders use expansion joints to handle temperature fluxuations. You cannot build a large steel bridge without them. Here, humidity matters not (other than in the area of heat dissipation). But natural cellulose materials have cells that can hold moisture. Each little cell filled with some minute amount of moisture will act like a spring and retain some flexability due to the moisture.
Does this not make sense? It's not about what LOOKS good, it's about what performs well.
Mike
Hi Mike,
By "the masters of the past", are you speaking about the handful of innovators that pretty much defined the most common traditionally-inspired variants of what the guitar is now, or do you include those who have mastered the art of lutherie and may have deviated from the older group? Should all innovation be discarded in favor of copying the oldest masters? If they were alive today, do you believe that they would prefer the much more difficult to use friction tuning pegs or relatively crappy early tuning machines to their modern counterparts? Tied gut fret over fretwire? Soft fretwire over hard? Would they choose to lay out each fretboard one at a time using a ruler? Would they choose modern tool steel technology with its optimum balance of brittleness and ability to take and hold an edge, or prefer the relatively crude tool steel then available to them? Would they opt for the crude shellac and hide glue of their time, rather than enjoy the consistency of the more refined modern counterparts? My point is, that in any period of history, the artifacts from that time reflect the available technology, both in terms of materials and methods - and superstitions. I have read that some early masters in the violin world crushed gemstones and added that to their varnish. I suspect they believed they were adding pixie dust or magic powder, and believed it would improve the timbre. Did it?
I do applaud those who choose to duplicate historical artifacts with historical accuracy. A standing ovation to the oldest of the old masters (in any field, not just lutherie) who created unbelievable things with what was available to them.
If these old masters created work that remained quite local to their shop, the instruments may not have had to experience the wild and extremely rapid swings in RH that a musician of the 21st century may subjects instruments to. Do a concert in Atlanta in August, then hop on a plane to Tucson for the next gig. The old masters didn't have to contend with this. Would the old masters have done an interior coating of shellac if they knew the troubadour was about to embark on a sea voyage to discover a new trade route from Europe to Asia?
We'll never know, but I suspect that these old masters, with their innovative and flexible minds, would have embraced at least some of what we have available in modern technology if it had been available to them. And, brilliant as these masters were individually, none of them knew everything, they were separated by time and space, much of lutherie was secretive, and truth be told, much of their work was derivative (from violin luthier's work) anyway. What did their instruments sound like when they were brand new? Maybe their biggest sonic boost is the natural aging of the wood, and the reality that the very best instruments, the cream of the crop of what had been made, would be greatly treasured and much more likely to survive until now. Other than the natural aging process of wood, modern luthiers should be able to blow these old farts out of the water - and I suspect that when you look with less reverence and more objectivity, they do.
200 years from now, the "old masters" we think of now will be the "ancient ones", relative Neanderthals. 200 years from now, luthiers will be dissecting the work of Howard Klepper, Dave White, Fred Carlson, Harry Fleishman, and others to find out what kind of magic dust they sprinkled on their guitars to get such a great sound, and marvelling that they were built without cellular manipulation of laboratory grown xylem tissue cut with particle beams. These will be the new "old masters" - just give 'em time.
Geez, what was the topic again?
Oh, yeah, shellac interiors. I think its a good idea.
Dennis
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