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Old 09-06-2009, 12:44 PM
Huckleberry Huckleberry is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: London, UK
Posts: 1,465
Default The Responsive Guitar - E. Somogyi

So my copies of The Responsive Guitar and Making the Responsive Guitar arrived this week. I've started not so much reading as consuming The Responsive Guitar - what a fantastic piece of literature.

The level of insight and detail is unmatched in anything I've seen so far, and the writing style is very engaging. For example, woods are covered in detail including grain, stiffness, how and why figure occurs etc. Ervin discusses how temperature affects stiffness of wood, providing results of his own measurements, and suggests that this is why many guitars 'wake up' after being played for 20-30 minutes - it's the player's body heat and the internal friction of the instrument causing the wood of the top and back to become less stiff and more responsive.

I'm still only a short way into the 600-odd pages of the two volumes, but have already learned a staggering amount.

Yes, at a first glance they're a little pricey, but with the sheer amount of information, insight and detail they provide I think they're worth every penny. The Responsive Guitar would be of interest to anyone serious about guitars, not just luthiers or prospective luthiers. I haven't looked at Making the Responsive Guitar yet, but I'm intending to make a small number of guitars for my own use over the next few years. Using this repository of knowledge and experience, I am sure that I'll recoup the cover price many times over in quality of the guitars I build.

In short - highly recommended! I'd be interested to know what other AGFers think of these books (from an earlier thread I think a few have purchased them), particularly whether some of the luthiers on the forum have found them of use.
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