Voicing My Guitar
Voicing is the process of carving the top braces to create the sound of the guitar. Ervin Somogyi is known to be a master of this subtle art, and it’s one of the things I was most excited to learn from him during my time here.
The common way to voice a top is before it is attached to the rim. This makes it easier to carve the braces. However glueing the top to the rim changes the way it responds, so Ervin’s process is to do it with the top glued to the rim, and the back open.
In order to get to this stage of the build however, I had a few steps to go through since my last blog post.
The back had to be made, and fitted to the rim. This fitting is much easier before the top is glued on.
Here I’m glueing the reinforcing strips onto the back.
The brace ends get trimmed down, so they can tuck into the back lining.
The braces then get shaped.
After cutting notches in the back lining to accept the brace ends, the centre strip and reinforcing strips are trimmed to end just inside the rim.
Here I’m holding the back in place, it’s not glued yet.
Next the top is fitted. The transverse brace gets notched into the lining, and head block is trimmed to fit up against it.
Once the fit is good, I glue the top to the rim.
When I got to this stage, I let Ervin know that I was ready to do the voicing on my guitar. We sat down and had a discussion, going over some theory and principles guiding Ervin’s approach to the voicing. Then, I started carving the braces.
The idea was to shape the braces to allow the top to vibrate as optimally as possible. As I was carving, I was listening to the tap tone, the sound the top makes when tapped in different places. This could give me clues as to how the top was responding, and where I needed to remove wood. I was going for a low and open sound.
You can hear the change in tap tone from extremely tight, to loose, in the video below. It helps to listen through headphones, or decent speakers, in order to hear the low end response.
I was doing my best to apply the things I’d learned from Ervin, and it was really gratifying to see the effect these details had on the tap tone. At one point I thought I was done, then a further discussion with Ervin prompted me to remove a very small amount of wood from a few specific areas. As I was doing the voicing, I was tracking the change in frequency using an app on my phone. These few grams of wood made a surprising difference, the biggest per amount of wood removed of the whole process.
I’m excited to learn how the final tap tone translates to guitar tone.