Originally Posted by
j. condino
Well.....thx for the interest.
I regularly see absolutely dead instruments built by people with mediocre skills but made from what I would call extraordinary elite tonewoods. I also see amazing instruments made from mediocre materials by very skilled builders.
As a child I grew up in the Adirondacks surrounded by beautiful picea rubens (red spruce). My family owns several hundred acres loaded with red spruce that I can harvest from. When I built my first guitar using David Russel Young's book, it had to be redwood...because that's what David said was the good stuff. I completely disregarded the plentiful amazing local red spruce. It took almost a year to find a board and get it shipped to me and useable. My inexperienced results sucked, complete with every beginner mistake you can think of.
When I lived in Japan for three years, I found some local Japanese spruce and built a bit using that. They still sounded like beginner guitars.
When I lived in California, I made all of my instruments from "The Lucky Strike" redwood tree, because I liked its characteristics, it was local, & readily available to me. There was no magic voodoo; they sounded like guitars made by someone who was still learning, but making progress. It was more fun to hang out with the Carters and fill the back of my pickup with redwood, and hang out with my carefree beautiful girlfriend in Arcata.
When I moved to Oregon, I made all of my instruments from sitka spruce (and occasionally Douglas fir or red cedar), because I liked its characteristics, it was local, & readily available to me....and my neighbor John Sullivan said it was the good stuff. The sitka was also one of the only spruce trees around that grows large enough to make double basses. They all sounded like very nice intermediate instruments by someone who was still learning, but had progressed through a couple of hundred.
When I lived in Idaho, I used engleman spruce, because I liked its characteristics, it was local, & readily available to me.....and my friend Lawrence said it was good stuff. For a $20 US forest service harvesting permit I could fill the back of the old truck with engleman spruce form the fire burns north of McCall in the Sawtooths. The instruments were getting better. That was also the period where I first got to play and analyze "The Griffith" Lloyd Loar signed A5. THAT had a whole lot more impact on my mandolin building than just wood selection.
Since I have been living in North Carolina, I used red spruce, because I like its characteristics, it is local, & readily available to me.....and my friend Ted Davis said it was the good stuff. I've recently acquired local red spruce large enough to make double basses and also a very interesting urban Norway spruce gigantic billet that was planted in 1959, cut down 7 years ago, and mysteriously air dried into gigantic bass wedges. This one will go in my 2022 Quartet for the North Carolina Arts Council.
About the time I moved to North Carolina, I also got a hacklinger guage and started using it daily and I started working for Dream Guitars. Five years of every day taking meticulous measurements of every aspect of my builds along with handling hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of the best historic instruments ever made along with exacting details in my personal builds made a HUGE difference in my builds. For the mandolins, that is also the period when I developed my live testing rig for voicing the plates. Add in a bunch of Oberlin Acoustics seminars and a dozen other nerdfests, and spending time with several of my favorite mandolin builders in the world. Now the instruments consistently sound the way I'm targeting their voice, with reproduceable accuracy. That has always been the goal.
I tend to emphasize & enjoy seasoned local woods that have grown up in the same climate I work in. I'm not sure any of it equates to unicorns and fairy dust in the end, but it is a lot easier to rationalize those characteristics. I'd like to move back to my family village in northern Italy. I'll definitely be using local spruce there!
Build with what you have, try to do your best, & keep excellent notes on the details. The rest will happen as it is supposed to....
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