Rick: You should be very proud of what you accomplished, especially considering that it was your first guitar build. Keep up the great work & I hope we get to see more of your projects.

Steve

I’m currently working on my second steel string acoustic and I can totally empathise with the character building effects of making mistakes and living in that growth space between making it and rectifying it :-)

One thing that has been re-enforced for me through woodworking and especially guitar building is that there is a million ways to skin a cat (apologies to cat lovers :-) For example your method of inserting the back braces into the linings and then attaching the backplate later was totally new to me and I marveled at how it would never have occurred to me to do it that way but we can both get to a happy end result – wonderful!

I’m not sure if you had this book as a resource during your building:

http://www.cumpiano.com/Home/Book/textbook.html

It was published in 1980 and as far as I know has never been updated yet 30 years later it remains the absolute go-to book for aspiring guitar builders, I recommend it to any body consider taking on this extremely rewarding project.

Best to all and thanks again!

Thank you so much. My 14 year old son and I watch videos on the TWW often. We were fascinated by your effort and patience, as well as your humbleness. You did an excellent job and we hope to tackle a guitar once we have better honed our word working skills.

Thank you for the inspiration and we hope if you build a second one you will video the effort as well and share it with all of us again.

I gave it some thought and concluded that the increased resonance most likely resulted from “eyeballing” the radius on the back. I don’t remember you saying it but I believe you did the same thing on the top.

Those radiuses were probably one of the more crucial elements determining the tone and resonance of the guitar. Depending on how the top and bottom radiuses are oriented to each other your guitar likely ended up with an excessive amount of what you could call “rogue” sound waves bouncing against each other inside the guitar canceling, or attenuating, some frequences and multiplying others.

Just about all acoustic guitars will end up with at least one note that resonates to some degree. The least possible is what you’re shooting for of course. Once an instrument is completed unfortunately you’re pretty much stuck with it if you end up with a severe resonance problem. But there are ways of minimizing them as others have indicated. Softening (or avoiding if it’s that bad) the G notes while playing will probably give you the most immediate remedy.

I’m quite certain your video, complete with the problems you encountered, will be a big help in the future to anyone thinking about attempting an acoustic guitar of their own. I definitely got a great deal out of it. Many thanks to you and Marc for making them available to us.

I think you’re referring to my reply to Gary Bell… that reply was submitted accidentally as a reply to my post above it before I realized the posts have ‘edit’ buttons. The wolf-note is still there, ringing like a bell :(

Sorry to confuse!