SKYSCAPERS OF SOUND

When was the last time you touched the ground?

And when I say that, I don’t just mean you bent over to pick something off the floor; I mean: when was the last time you walked barefoot on the earths surface? Felt sand grains squish between your toes, or luxuriated on a lawn, leaving damp green stains on your soles, or scrambled up a rugged granite outcrop on all fours, clambering to a great vantage point?

I’m sure I don’t do it enough myself. My body craves it, though it’s taken time to learn to recognize the feeling clearly. But every winter when the world freezes around me, and I hole up in my snug, well-insulated house, I feel a malaise that I know could be cured if only I could walk out the door without boots and an antarctic-grade parka. My dogs, too, probably also dream of times when they don’t have to wear an extra, human-made coat.

At least my house is a miracle of modern engineering and technology. Even when the howling wind outside blasts by at 30 degrees below zero, I can easily warm it enough to relax on the couch in a t-shirt, using no more energy than a good campfire. It is quite simply amazing; I cannot fathom how my ancestors survived before the advent of central heating, though they obviously did.

The secret to all this is plastic. Optimum energy-efficiency involves creating an airtight seal between inside and outside, using sheets of clear PVC inside every wall, ceiling, and floor. I am, for all intents and purposes, spending most of my life inside a large plastic bag.

It didn’t happen all at once. Step by small step, clever people have found way to improve on the shelters of their forebears, or at least adapt them to differing local conditions. Mud huts gave way to wattle-and-daub; plain clapboard was layered with straw, then eventually tarpaper; now oriented-strand-board and vinyl siding covers glass-fibre on the outside, vapor-barrier sheeting and gypsum-board on the inside. Natural gas piped in from distant storage domes combusts quietly in a digitally-controlled furnace that knows when I am awake or sleeping. More technologically advanced still, great steel-and-glass skyscrapers are erected from precision-manufactured modular panels, every piece fitting together within millimetres over their vast reflective expanses. They are no less than fitting monuments to the skill and inherited knowledge of civil engineers stretching in an unbroken line back to the builders of ancient Sumer itself.

The modern guitar, too, has come a long way. Every single one built today is a direct descendant of the musical bow invented by a long-forgotten ancestor from the time before time. Along the way we have adapted them to fulfill the needs of a the place or time, or improved certain qualities that were found to be lacking. New inventions allowed the guitar to extend its originally limited range; other innovations made the guitar louder, or stay in tune better. But nothing has compared to the breakneck pace of change of the past hundred years.

Not only that, but the pace of change itself has been increasing exponentially all along, just as for computing or any other technology. Even the seemingly standardized steel-string acoustic guitar is radically different than it was only one lifetime ago. The visual references have often remained; probably 80% of the millions sold in the past year strongly recall a Martin D-18 from 1938 or something.

But underneath the skin, the modern factory-build guitar is a surprisingly different animal.The modern guitar is often made of plywood, for one; a material only developed in the 20th century, it is very tough and resistant to the forces that often destroy guitars. But it behaves acoustically in a manner almost completely unrelated to natural wood. A fair tradeoff in some cases, but is it better?

The guitar as we know it is only possible because of glue. The neck is glued to the body, the top to the sides, the bridge to the soundboard: any wooden guitar is, if you boil it down to essentials, made from dozens of sticks held together by nothing but glue. For thousands of years this was a smelly, syrupy goo made from the skins and antlers of animals, but it worked shockingly well (as long as it was kept dry). Modern adhesives are typically some variety of plastic; in a factory setting perhaps cured within seconds with a judicious barrage of radio-waves. Glue joints like this should be tough and waterproof, but are they better?

The varnish of a modern guitar has undergone a huge change. Where earlier luthiers had to contend with the wildly varying qualities and costs of natural materials like shellac, or pine rosin, linseed oil, or beeswax, the invention of nitrocellulose lacquer allowed a consistently thin, glossy, clear finish that was also far more resistant than anything before. The majority of factory-made guitars have since moved on to using copious quantities of catalyzed polyester over the wood. This offers not just protection, but ease of manufacture; it fills mistakes just as well as it fills pores. But is it better?

So far I’ve been referring to the kind of mass-produced guitars that overwhelm the marketplace. The total production of modern boutique makers make up only a tiny fraction of the numbers. They are however leaders of trends and early adopters of new technologies that sometimes find their way into the mainstream, so let’s consider them:

The modern boutique acoustic guitar is perhaps not as different in fundamentals from one built 100 years ago, or even 1000. The changes are less of kind than of degree.

They’ll be made of solid wood, for starters. The choice available to a modern luthier is staggering, and we take full advantage. Locally sourced spruce or fir is only one option among many; we can get perfectly sawn slabs from trees so enormous that they would have been impossible to fell without chainsaws, or transport without railroads. Spectacular figuring is de rigeur; bending machines with silicone heating blankets make quick work of extreme grain patterns that would have defeated past masters. Species that were never used for anything other than veneer or marquetry can now be utilized for backs and sides. Sensitivity to dryness, or other instabilities can be countered with effective humidity control, either of the airtight case or the owners’ whole house. For extra insurance, laminating them using modern adhesives, or reinforcing with carbon fibre are perfectly viable options.

That old standby, hide glue, is still considered to be the best option for assembling the bits and pieces of boutique instruments. In large part this is because is is much easier to perform non-destructive repairs on hide glue joints. I think most makers of high-end guitars intend for them to become heirlooms, worthy of being passed down to future generations. Needing to get a bit of work done now and again is inevitable; best to facilitate making repairs seamless, though hopefully rare.

The finish should age as nicely as the rest of the instrument, provided the chemistry of the nitrocellulose lacquer is right. Or perhaps it is covered with the cutting-edge technology of catalyzed polyurethane, which can be not only thin and acoustically transparent, but also doesn’t break down with time the way lacquer always will. It’s like a glazing of eternal youth, rendering a masterpiece guitar timeless in a way that has never before been achieved.

Then there are the incremental physical changes that have happened over the years. Guitars initially started getting bigger quite quickly after the advent of steel strings. With more potential energy in those strings, these new instruments grew to enable a full bass response, not just extra volume. A rough consensus began to be established at around 16” width, since overly large instruments were cumbersome to play and transport, but still luthiers kept searching for ways to improve the guitar. Soundports in the sides might not always have as much sonic effect as we credit them with, but they inarguably serve the ego of the player who’s just paid extra for them. Beveled edges where corners of guitars meet bodies of players improve comfort to those who want more of it. Various varieties of adjustable-angle necks were attempted, with various results; the idea being to be able to adjust the height of the strings to the players preference with ease. The mechanisms that didn’t hold up over time were abandoned, while hope remains that newer designs will. Some are complex and require precise, dedicated machining, though my favourites are effective and elegantly simple. Carbon fibre has proliferated; its use in high-end guitars growing perhaps even faster than its misuse. One of very few man-made materials with an absolute strength superior to wood, it is tempting to find more and more ways to leverage this supermaterial. Because who wouldn’t want a guitar with superpowers?

The application of science to the study of how guitars create sound is perhaps the most dramatic change of all. Though invisible to the end user, sonic analysis can be used to grant a near-mythical level of control over the tone and volume of a given luthier’s guitars. Done right, you could never make a mediocre-sounding guitar ever again; done religiously, you can ensure that every guitar you make has a sonic signature as recognizable as your headstock shape.

The first major breakthroughs in the field began, unsurprisingly, in the violin world. Even in the 1940s, researchers were performing scientific experiments that demystified the violin and debunked a lot of the prevailing mythology. These days, the tools needed to do spectrographic analysis can be surprisingly simple: all you need is a good microphone, a 1990s-era computer with a basic soundcard (or even just a smartphone), and a simple mechanism to reliably and consistently thump a piece of wood. It is the slow but steady dissemination of information on how to interpret the results, and how to apply the findings to the building of instruments, that has really made a change. We can argue and disagree all we want about what exactly is the definition of a great-sounding guitar, but there’s no denying the power of science to reveal truths, if we ask the right questions.

The modern boutique-grade acoustic steel-string guitars that incorporate all of these developments are the skyscrapers of sound. They are the net result of conscious effort applied to each aspect of the guitar. Incremental improvements made over thousands of instruments, by hundreds of guitar builders, over only tens of years, have resulted in something quite different from anything seen before. By degree, perhaps, but what a degree.

But are they better?

I’ve never lived in a skyscraper. They are better, objectively, in any and every individual measure, than a simple mud hut: warmer, safer, cleaner, more efficient. It’s barely even worth comparing. But only one lets me keep my feet on the ground.

There’s a probably unscientific theory I heard somewhere, which states that the human organism can only operate effectively if we are electrically grounded. Think of the term for one side of a man-made electrical circuit: “ground”, or “earth”. This is not an abstraction: all the electrical wiring in my house, to which are connected everything from my TV to my toaster, is in the end directly linked by high-conductivity copper to, literally, The Earth. It is the reference point for all the electrical energy we use. Our nervous system operates on electrical impulses; and so supposedly we require this link too, through our feet.

I’m generally skeptical of hippy-dippy sounding theories like this. But the truth is that, whether it’s because of electrical charge, or a primal desire for more contact with green and growing nature, spending more time being grounded improves our moods and thus our lives. In a less literal way, being grounded also means not losing ourselves to the ever-changing winds of events or emotions. Be a rock, or a tree, not a cloud high up in the atmosphere.

That’s what worries me about much contemporary lutherie. So many of us now have very little knowledge of the history of their chosen instrument, how they have been made, and how it has changed. The best of us certainly do, and are probably more competent at fundamental woodworking skills than I’ll ever be. But do they still feel the grass between their toes up there on the 50th floor?