A couple very informative tapping and voicing articles

[Dan Bombliss]

If anyone's interested at all I've got a couple links for articles of Dana Bourgeois talking about tonewood selections, characteristics, and a little voicing.

In my guitar acoustics class here at Red Wing's southeast techs guitar program we were required to read these articles and tested on it. There's quite a bit of good info in here.

Here's the links:

Tapping Tonewoods
http://www.pantheonguitars.com/tonewoods.htm

Voicing the Steel String Guitar
http://www.pantheonguitars.com/voicing.htm

Enjoy,
-Dan

[Kevin Sjostrand]

Dan,
How is that training coming? What have you been learning so far?

Kevin

[Dan Bombliss]

Kevin,

It's actually really interesting and really in depth. Just about to finish up the first 4 weeks of the program which all revolve around tools (Intro to tools).

These 4 weeks have all been pounding the proper ways to use all the tools and prep them. The power tools is mostly stressing safety, but the hand tools is extremely anal. I spent like 3 hours solid making a 150 dollar Veritas block plane perfect. Spent hours perfectly flattening Lee Vally chisels and regrinding a better angle for what we're doing, and re honing them to far more razor sharp than factory. Also have alot of time invested making scrapers perfect to get the most ideal cutting edge possible, not to mention making the burnisher perfect taking out all of the machining marks so it's a super polish.

Next week we'll be starting to get into fret work, just dropped another big chunk of coin on tools and I'm interested to learn the proper ways to do all this stuff. I would have never thought that I'd have to redo expensive blocks or chisels or anything like that, but they definitely make the jobs easier and most consistent.

With that said, I'm really looking forward to what kind of a product I come up with next semester when we'll actually be building an acoustic and electric guitar. With all of the high end perfect tools, the instruction, and the knowledge that I'll have that I didn't have last year when I built my first guitar, it should be a pretty amazing instrument.

When the projects begin to get interesting, I'll post pictures of what I'm doing.

-Dan

[tippie53]

Education costs , you either pay the teacher or pay forever making mistakes. Formal training will take you far ahead of trying to teach yourself .

[Dan Bombliss]

Haha, John, I'm glad I realized that sooner or later. I decided the cost was worthy of the shed of years of the learning curve. And I think it might be a little less frustrating this way too :P

Dan

[Tony_in_NYC]

I would love to stand next to an actual person who is teaching me to sharpen a chisel or plane blade. The Youtube videos are great, but I am more of a hands on type of person. And slow. Perhaps a bit mentally handicapped as well, but thats just what a former "friend" once said, so thats probably not totally accurate.