Hernandez y Aguado Style Guitar - Douglas Fir Top, Mahogany Back and Sides

The classic guitar is a delicate equation painstakingly conceived to produce a brilliant, balanced tone over its entire playable range.

Irving Sloane, Classic Guitar Construction, 1966


The young guitar student that I mentioned in my last post came to my shop yesterday to take delivery on the Douglas fir/mahogany guitar. It is a close copy of a guitar made in 1968 by the great Spanish makers, Manuel Hernandez and Victoriano Aguado.




The top is from a salvaged Douglas fir board...





...and the back and sides are Honduran mahogany.


The young man played several Catalan songs arranged by Miguel Llobet, I thought I was listening to an old recording of Andres Segovia! This guitar has an old Spanish-like quality to it that gave me goose bumps, it sounds so wonderful! I can't wait to hear this guitar in six months!

I hope to get a chance to record the young man and his guitar this winter so I can post the videos on this blog.




He and his father gave me a deposit so I can start working on another guitar for him.

He really likes the Douglas fir for its sound, now I need to convince him to let me use sustainable woods that grow here in North America for the rest of the guitar...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Make a Traditional Froe Mallet

Image
What holds the Holy of the Holies, what did Brahma become? Wood. Why will aspen always tremble? For the nails driven into the cross. What makes the color of wood? The soil it tastes. Cradle, fiddle, coffin, bed: wood is a column of earth made ambitious by light, and made of beauty by the rain. Kim R. Stafford, Having Everything Right , 1986. Rive , verb, to split Shake , noun, a split in a piece wood. (Heart shake, ring shake) Shake , verb, (Middle English), to split. I know I should have been in the studio working on my back log of guitars, but the day was so nice and warm with a tall blue canopy, I couldn't stay inside. I decided that I needed to make a proper froe mallet. This style of mallet is traditional to northeastern California , primarily Tehama (where I'm from), Butte, Shasta and Plumas counties where making shingles by hand from sugar pines was an industry. I don't know if it was used in any other region along the Pacific Rim, other parts of the United S
Read more

The Guitar's Scale Length, Your Hand Size and a Chart

Image
I will cite the case of a marvelous concert player, a Japanese lady who is barely 5 ft. tall and with hands that are real miniatures. She plays a 664 mm 10 string guitar and demanded that I build this guitar with an action 1 mm higher than normal, which she handles with incredible ease. This is serious study! Jose Ramirez III, Things About the Guitar , 1990 Here is the hand size and scale length that I found on the forum at delcamp.com . Thumb tip to pinky tip span of 250mm+,  664mm scale length Thumb tip to pinky tip span of 230mm to 250mm,  656mm scale length Thumb tip to pinky tip span of 210mm to 230mm,  650mm scale length Thumb tip to pinky tip span of 190mm to 210mm,  640mm scale length Thumb tip to pinky tip span of 170mm to 190mm,  630mm scale length Thumb tip to pinky tip span of below 170mm,  615mm scale length Here is my flexible imperial/metric ruler. Here is my hand properly placed on the flexible imperial/metric ruler. Today my reach from lit
Read more

A New Tool

Image
When I build a new guitar, I need to shape the fretboard after it is glued onto the neck. The fretboard needs to be a flat taper, it gradually becomes thinner on the bass side then the treble side at the twelfth fret and this taper continues to the end of the board. This taper givea the bass strings extra room to vibrate, less chance of an open or fretted string hitting a fret. To achieve this I usually start with my Lie-Nielsen No.62 low angle jack plane and finish the job with long sanding blocks. The Lie-Nielsen is a wonderfully versatile plane, but it is a tad long for leveling the fretboard after it is glue to the guitar neck and the Lie-Nielsen low angle block plane is a little too short for the task. I decided to look at the low angle bevel up planes offered by Lee Valley. I bought a Veritas Small Bevel Up Smooth plane this early this month and I am very glad that I did. With just a little honing of the blade, it stepped up and did the tasks I asked of it, such as smoothing a p
Read more