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Links to Other Lutherie Resources
In the true spirit of HTML, context dependent links to resources for builders of stringed musical instruments are scattered throughout this website. This page contains some general links or links that don’t fit well anywhere else on the site. They are grouped roughly by type and are in no particular order. There aren’t a lot of links here and there probably never will be, as I don’t have either the time or the inclination to build and maintain a comprehensive site of lutherie links. Besides, it’s already been done on the Guild of American Luthiers website. What I’m trying to focus on here are links to high content sites sites that provide a lot of free lutherie information in one spot, and that contain no popups or other advertising, or require “membership” that will be used to try to sell you something. There aren’t a lot. Please let me know if I’ve missed anything and if any of these links are dead.
Last updated: Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Contents
Comprehensive Links Sites
Information for beginners and a comprehensive list of resources can be found here. Plus, the GAL is the single best source of lutherie info on the planet!
Bob Gollihur's Double Bass Links Page
Bob sells upright basses and accessories, but he also has the most comprehensive info page imaginable on all things (double) bass. Check out the listings of bass luthiers and repair people, and those for instrument plans and instructions. This is a great example of a commercial site that does a lot more than just try to sell you something.
Gregg Miner, the pope of the harp guitar, maintains this great website of everything you'd ever want to know about harp guitars and related instruments.
Forums
The Musical Instrument Makers' Forum
An online forum for luthiers and other musical instrument makers. There is considerably less chatter here than in similar discussion groups and enough critical mass of subscribers to attract knowledgeable posters. This one is very well moderated and maintains a very good archive of useful postings and a large collection of useful links. The searching facilities are, ah, basic, but there is a tremendous quantity of good stuff in the archives so persistence in reformulating search terms will pay off.
Another forum that is developing quite a lot of good information in its archives. It often features postings by some of the brightest bulbs in lutherie.
A friend introduced me to this one, telling me that something I wrote on the topic of string tension in the Lutherie Myth/Science section started the equivalent of a forum fistfight there. But when I checked it out I found a very thorough (albeit enjoyably rough and tumble) working over of the topic, with everyone remaining friends in the end. Very un-forum-like! Lots of electric guitar and bass info here.
Luthiers' Websites
There are a number of sources for information on how to build instruments, but there are few if any that provide information on how to do it as an instrument building business. Dana's site has a wealth of info on what it takes to be able to produce instruments on a small scale commercial basis. If you intend to build instruments for a living there is no better advice than to heed what Dana has so say.
The home page of one of my fellow American Lutherie contributing editors. John has an overactive curiosity and has researched many aspects of lutherie during his career. One could hardly go wrong by following in John’s footsteps. The site has lots of pictures of a variety of instruments.
The home page of luthier Sylvan Wells has an Articles section containing nice tools and techniques which should be of interest to anyone building stringed instruments.
Charles Hoffman's Step by Step Guitar Construction
Guitar builder Charles Hoffman has really nice step by step instructions showing how he builds guitars. There are a lot of very good pictures here, and the text is very clear and easy to follow.
Classical guitar builder Neil Ostberg teamed up with Ross Kowalski to put together this great site on the construction of classical guitars using the building techniques of Torres. Very well done with plenty of pictures. They even show you how to build historically accurate guitar cases!
Mike Doolin's Lutherie Directory
Mike Doolin builds fantastic instruments and he is kind enough to write down and make available a substantial amount of information about lutherie, tools, and techniques. His directory of lutherie articles is kind of hidden, insofar as it is not directly available from his commercial home page, but you can get to it from the link to the left. The file names may be somewhat cryptic but take a look at them all. There is great info here.
Alexander Batov's Vihuela de Mano page
Pretty much everything you've ever wanted to know (actually, pretty much everything there is to know) about the vihuela, the predecessor to the guitar.
Acoustics and Physics of Stringed Instruments
The physics department of the University of New South Wales puts up this excellent site. It includes very accessible descriptions of the acoustics of guitars and violins.
Acoustics for Violin and Guitar Makers
Here’s a very comprehensive introduction to the subject of acoustics by Eric Jansson, available as downloadable .PDFs.
This very nice site is put up by Robert A. O'Rourke. It contains animations which demonstrate many aspects of the physics of vibrating strings.
Modal Analysis of an Acoustic Folk Guitar
Dr. Daniel A. Russell of the Science and Mathematics Department at Kettering University in Flint, MI maintains this site which includes great animations of some of the modes of vibration of an acoustic guitar. Also check out some of the other animations on this site - there is a lot of good basic physics here, and the animations make it easy to understand what is going on.
Dr. Wright’s PhD thesis is on the acoustics and psychoacoustics of the classical guitar and it is available for download on his site. There is fascinating research here on possible relationships of construction details to the tone of an instrument. Yeah, unlike me, your idea of a good time probably isn’t curling up with a good PhD thesis, but this paper has the single best description of how guitars actually produce sound I’ve ever seen. Its introductory sections are highly readable.
Geometry and Structural Engineering of Stringed Instruments
Don’t skip this site just because you have no interest in ukes. There is lots of info here for luthiers. David Hurd has a number of pages on technical topics in lutherie that are easy for non-technical folks to understand.
Computer science prof Jon Sevy has some great info and some useful software for designers and builders of stringed instruments. There are also how-to sections with very good photographs.
Classic Guitar Intonation (pdf)
Classical guitar maker Gregory Byers did a lot of research and wrote a great paper on the subject of intonation and compensation. Of all the potential factors that can lead to intonation problems in fretted instruments this paper identifies and quantifies the two that both have the most potential to cause problems and that the instrument builder can actually do something about. Real compensation values for typical classical guitars are provided. The file is a very big PDF. If you want to see a shorter and simpler version of the paper in HTML, look here.
Mike Doolin's Intonation Article
Here's a very nice series of articles on the subject of intonation of stringed instruments by Mike Doolin. It is highly accessible – even non-technical folks should be able to understand the issues from this series.
Materials
Wood Handbook - Wood as an Engineering Material
The most frequently cited reference on the properties of wood, this entire book is available for download at this site. Your (USA) tax dollars at work for good.
Specific Construction Techniques
Bill Pentz's Dust Collector Website
This site has everything you ever wanted to know about dust collection in the small to medium wood shop. Actually, Bill has much more info on this subject than you'd probably ever care to try to get through! He puts an amazing amount of information, here including plans for making dust collectors from scratch and improving off the shelf models.
Making Decals for Electric Guitars
Sometimes it's the littlest things that are the toughest. Although there are lots of resources available with instructions for, say, carving a neck, there isn't a lot of info on how to make/fake a headstock decal. Bill Jehle provides instructions for an excellent method of doing just that. This is a sub page from a site called Project Guitar which is full of construction information of all sorts.
Photographing Stringed Instruments
So now that you've built some nice instruments you want to take pictures of them right? Jon Shishido, one of the original owners of the BunnyBass online bass store (sadly now defunct) put together this great tutorial on how to photograph your instruments. This page greatly improved my own modest photography skills in a matter of minutes. One very nice thing about the tutorial is that it describes how to work with no special equipment other than a camera and tripod. But the greatest thing to me is that the photo tips are presented in order of their effectiveness. So simply mastering the first tip (hint: don't use the flash) can improve your photographs dramatically.
Photographing Stringed Instruments (.pdf)
If you're ready to move beyond the basic photography techniques and are ready for more serious work, check out Terry M. Borman and Scott Rawley's article, originally published in VSA Papers and reprinted on Terry Borman's website.
Technical Research Papers
Stringed Musical Instrument Technology
A site dedicated to providing open access to research papers on all technical topics of stringed musical instruments. The featured journal is the Research Repository of Stringed Musical Instrument Technology (rrSMITech) an open access repository of previously published research articles on all aspects of stringed musical instrument technology. This is the first place to go if you are looking for research articles on this topic.
Downloads
I don't use spreadsheets too much myself, but there are a number of folks behind the links above that make all sorts of lutherie calculations available in spreadsheet form. Don't have Microsoft Excel and don't want to buy it? You can download the Open Office software package from OpenOffice.org. It includes word processing, graphics, and spreadsheet tools. The spreadsheet tool will read, write and create spreadsheets in Excel format.
Hot Sauce
Sorry, I couldn't resist giving a plug for this company's Sriracha hot sauce. This stuff is killer!