Australian/New Zealand Luthiers Forum

This must be getting monotonous for you guys. Here is my 5th guitar, once again an OM. I do have an 00 in the works just to do something different, but that will be a while.

Woods are Carpathian Spruce top, EIR Rosewood back and sides, African Mahogany neck, Blackwood bindings, Myrtle Rosette, Myrtle end strip, BRW bridge, Ebony fingerboard.

This one is my favourite so far. Exceptionally nice sounding guitar, and no significant boo boos. Very resonant, it rings if you make any noise in the same room. Different sound from #4 becasue of the different woods, but I think I do prefer this one. For some reason that baffles me it is also by far the most stable. Was still in tune 24hrs after stringing it up, and has stayed pretty close for the last 2 weeks. I put a saddle on to give a low action at first expecting the usual movement of the bridge to bring it up to about right, but nothing happened. 2 weeks later and it has still not budged. Ended up putting on a taller saddle, so the saddle is a bit higher that I would like, but I guess it is much better to start with a tall saddle than one that is too low. Have not done anything different so don't know what is going on, but can't complain about the sound. Whatever I did with this one worked beautifully.

Photographing the dark Rosewood back was a challenge. You can see my first attempt shows a nice reflected picture of the garden.

Peter

Well here is the proof of the pudding. Short sound clip.

http://petercoombe.com/Guitar%20sound/G ... 2weeks.mp3

Peter

Beautiful, understated, classy work as usual, and that guitar has a beautiful tone. Most impressed!

Very nice Peter. That spuce top looks exceptional!!

Oh yeah thats nice.

Steve

The Guitar and the garden looks great peter.

How do you find the open tuners ? and also are you moving toward any of the Trevor Gore technology ?

Very classy

I really like those tuners. Mandolin tuners are all open tuners, so I am used to open tuners. I just wish Scherter would make mandolin tuners similar to their guitar tuners. Have not had much time to read the Gore/Gilet books properly yet, I have been cherry picking bits and pieces, it is damn interesting stuff, but am now slowly wading through the design book. So, the intention is to start implementing some of the Trevor Gore technology later.

I am so far the only one to have played this guitar, so I don't know what the guitar players think of it, but it is showing up deficiencies in my reference guitar I never knew existed, and it is only 2 weeks old. I can't put it down, so I am getting good at playing the dozen or so chords I know. Probably should try to learn to play the damn thing properly. Is very tempting to keep it as a new reference, but I am running out of room and money, they are accumulating. I'm a nobody in the guitar world, but hopefully the last two or three guitars will start to change that.

Hi Peter, Another beautiful guitar! 5 in such a short space of time is certainly impressive. Your woodwork is top shelf and I like your eye for design with the mixing of woods and bindings, rosettes etc.
Re the TG book...I have put the technology into my last 5 builds and they are definitely richer for it. Do you have visual analyser yet and are you producing frequency response curves curves to see where the main peaks are? I know you do chladni patterns but this is a good adjunct to that as you can see things like attenuation of a mode and split peaks and the like. I recommend you marry the two together, It doesn't take any time at all once your up and running.
The combination of the basic principles of the book like 2 deg bridge rotation + the placement of the peaks in the relationships (90,170,214 or 95,180,226) is very good information to have in ones armory.
Are you going to the National? If you are I will see you there:)

Cheers

John

I will be at the National, see you there.

Peter