I am hardly a musician and I am certainly not a musicologist but at least (and probably at most) I have acquired through osmosis, some basic music theory as well as a basic idea of how instruments work. I have also inadvertently caught the virus of basic luthiery (thanks to Mrs Rollo); which is why I have built my own three string guitar(s).
I like to think that this is part of a very small rebellion, which is standing tall but still only managing to spit on the ankle of modern music; which is produced, polished, and pointless. If you have a string which passes over a nut and a bridge and the noise is then amplified either acoustically or electrically, then you have an instrument. Typically cigar box guitars tend to be 1, 2, 3, or 4 strings because although you can build 5 and 6, that generally also needs more fine skills and tooling; which moves the process out of the shed and into a more sophisticated workshop. That's boring.
I don't know if anyone could guess how 2020 was going to turn out but if you've spent this year in a state of voiceless paralysis then don't feel bad about it. Take all of the bits that you like and maybe the bits that you are forced to reuse and build 2021 into a new thing. 2020 could very well have been voiceless but with some new parts and a new set of strings, 2021 will be singing again albeit differently. Yeah okay, that's stretching the metaphor beyond sensibility but it is still true.
The biggest rule in building a three string guitar is that there are no rules. When you have no rules then it's impossible to predict what the results are going to be. After I've done surgery and restrung the guitar, it's going to have a different voice and that's okay.
If you want something that doesn't buzz and has lovely tones, buy a Taylor, Hoffner, Les Paul, or Fender. If you get weird tones and buzzes coming out of a cigar box guitar then that's the sound of the instrument, that's the sound of its unique voice; that's the sound of humanity messing about in a shed.
How many people have you heard say that they are going to write a book and then they never write the book? Look, just write the book. Do it. If you want to go out and build a guitar, just build it. I don't have a proper workshop and have to make my own makeshift drill tables from small logs and scraps, and do it outside. I am sure that you will probably have a better working space.
My black number 5 has had a problem for a while where one of the machine heads was stripping the worm gear. I could tune it to some chord (usually 1-5-1) and then the tension on the strings would cheese the worm gear up even further. It got to the point where it won't hold a sensible tuning and so I have had to replace the machine head.
After starting out with E-B-E on this guitar because I like the whine of a top E string at the 12th and 15th fret, the bottom string kept on going out; so I tuned downwards to hold less tension on the bottom string and then retuned the other two accordingly. I think that it ended up being many cents short of D-flat, with the top string also coming down to an octave above that; with the middle string being what whatever that A-flat/G-Sharp is in the middle of that new insane key. 1-5-1 tuning is very easy to work out and requires no musical theory at all - you just get the same tone at the 5th fret for the middle string and at the 12th fret for the bottom string, as the open top string. As it is, standard tuning on a regular six-string guitar is just a series of relative 5ths.
I know that it sounds strange but most music stores aren't interested in selling you replacement parts for instruments. They want to sell you whole instruments which are packed in a box. Guitar shops will sell you strings but strings are a consumable item.
The unbelievable truth is that you generally can't buy machine heads very easily, let alone just one of them; so I found somewhere that I could buy a set for a normal six string guitar. Simple arithmetic tells me that six is just two lots of three; so even if I finish the job, I will have another set of machine heads which I can build another guitar with. The virus lives on.
However this is where the story moves into the unknown. I have to make the holes that the tuning pegs fit through, bigger. I have to do some surgery on #5 to replace the machine heads and the risk is that I end up creating cracks in the head of the guitar and the thing falls to pieces. With a properly built guitar that's a relatively simple operation but in order to turn #5 into #5A, I risk killing it altogether.
I already feel a tinge of sadness when I have to replace the strings of a guitar because that already feels a bit like cutting its vocal cords. As it stands, I currently have a no-string guitar which can not speak. A voiceless guitar fails at its only function.
The other side of the equation though is that if I do end up killing #5 and it can not be reborn as #5A, then the virus of luthiery will drive me to build #6. As it was #3 was already reborn into #3A and then was cannibalised to build #5. If I am forced to build #6 because #5 can't be reborn as #5A, then because there are no rules, who knows what #6 will sound like?
No comments:
Post a Comment