Thanks for your words of encouragement Kim. My mentor I guess is Bob Benedetto (incase you can't tell
) & although he's one of the worlds best luthiers, he is so open to sharing his methods and theorys. So I guess I have adopted the same principle, I can't go along with people that pretend it's some mystical art and keep their secrets to themselves. The more we share and critique, the better it is for luthiery & everybody that plays our instruments.
Matthew, Dennis and Sebastiaan have pretty much summed it up, the wide mouth (or Grande Bouche as it was known) or even "D" hole as it is often refered to today was the original design of Mario Maccafferi in 1932, he added the internal resonator (which I believe was made of bakelite!) which by his reckoning would project
all the soundwaves floating around inside the box out to the listener, I think he believed that some of the sound was being trapped inside the soundboxes of other guitars at that time & that the resonator combined with the large sound hole would allow his guitar a louder voice.
The drawback of them though was that being made of harder material than the soundboard and due to manufacturing techniques of the time were not very well attached to it. A number if not all, players had the added bonus of the resonator vibrating & buzzing when they played the guitar hard during comping. As a result they were removed by the players and tossed away, so to find an original Maccafferri with a resonator in would be as rare as rocking horse poo! There was also some belief that taking out the resonator increased the volume of the guitar, so perhaps it should have been called a baffle instead:lol: .
As Dennis pointed out, they were used mostly (and still are today) for rhythm playing, with the shorter 648mm scale they had a more mellower sound. When Django started using them, Maccafferri had left the Selmer company after only 3 years of building his design & Selmer then changed the design to the longer 670mm scale with an oval hole, it was called the Petite Bouche (little mouth) which produced the more lead orientated cutting, louder sound we now associate with Gypsy jazz. There was some belief that Mario left after an argument with management, maybe they had tried to get him to drop the resonator design after hearing player feedback but he believed so much in his design that he would change it?
One thing I would like to do (I think I mentioned it in an earlier post) is to build a 'mule' guitar that will allow me to try necks of different angles, remove both front and back plates and really experiment with different bracing styles and sizes in order to create "taylored" sounds as required. I would like to retain the outside appearance so that people immediately can identify the style of guitar but would like to alter the 'hidden' parts that go to shape the voice so much. I have yet to nut out the finer details to achieve this but believe I can build a side system that will allow me to remove the neck & either plate for tinkering without adding bulk or extra "non-resonating" parts that would thereby alter the sound. I love these small bodied guitars & would love to see how far I can take them.
Django was/is the godfather of Gypsy Jazz but this guy is one of his wiseguys
A modern day monster and makes playing such a fast passage look so easy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-y62lax0Pc Remembering that the pick they use to play this stuff is
5mm thick so it's not just a matter of flicking the pick slightly to make it sound staccato.
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as Francios Charles book is considered to be the definitive reference for these guitars.
