George Gruhns favorite guitar

[Prince of Darkness]

That peghead reminds me of this one:

Looking at them both, I do wonder if they derived the Thunderbird shape from the Travis

 

[GGJaguar]

Looking at them both, I do wonder if they derived the Thunderbird shape from the Travis

That would make sense. The Travis model was introduced in 1962 and the Thunderbird, Polara and Jet Star a year later.

 

[banjomike]

Looking at them both, I do wonder if they derived the Thunderbird shape from the Travis

I'm sure it did.

Supposedly, Merle Travis designed it, along with all the other ornamentation.
What's cool to me is how one of the guys at Guild refined it and made it more pleasing without losing any of its outrageous novelty.

What better shape for a guitar named the Thunderbird? Big, bold and unusual- seems to be a Guild specialty.

 

[banjomike]

When @ladytexan talked George into letting us upstairs at his old store on Main Street, I thought he was charming. Heck, he even played one of his sweet DS21 Customs for us!

Yup. I only met George a couple of times, but he's a pretty nice guy. He's opinionated, but his opinions all come from experience, and he can get real grumpy when some stranger starts to contradict him who's an obvious newbie know-it-all.

It's no surprise to me George likes the D-21. I was forced to sell my old D-28 in 2004 in a time of desperate need, and I mourned it deeply. It was a 1966 guitar, and I had owned it from the time it was new, my first really good guitar.

Suddenly, by pure happenstance, a year later in 2005, a 1964 D-21 fell out of the sky and landed on me. It cost exactly what the D-28 brought when I sold it, and my crisis had passed. So I bought it as a replacement.

My D-21 is definitely a different sounding guitar from my D-28. The 28 was darker and smoother sounding, slightly bass-heavy. The 21 has shorter sustain with less pronounced overtones, a brighter top end, and better balanced, less bass heavy.

The top and body woods used for both are the same, and the only big wood difference is the fingerboard and bridge. I came to think the rosewood bridge has to be what makes such a difference in the sound. Age, condition, and even location of the two are similar, and there's only 2 years difference in the age.
I don't understand why a rosewood bridge could make such a difference. But it's the only thing that could.

But I no longer miss the 28. I would hate to have to sell the D-21 now just as much as I hated to sell the other guitar.

 

[Westerly Wood]

Yup. I only met George a couple of times, but he's a pretty nice guy. He's opinionated, but his opinions all come from experience, and he can get real grumpy when some stranger starts to contradict him who's an obvious newbie know-it-all.

It's no surprise to me George likes the D-21. I was forced to sell my old D-28 in 2004 in a time of desperate need, and I mourned it deeply. It was a 1966 guitar, and I had owned it from the time it was new, my first really good guitar.

Suddenly, by pure happenstance, a year later in 2005, a 1964 D-21 fell out of the sky and landed on me. It cost exactly what the D-28 brought when I sold it, and my crisis had passed. So I bought it as a replacement.

My D-21 is definitely a different sounding guitar from my D-28. The 28 was darker and smoother sounding, slightly bass-heavy. The 21 has shorter sustain with less pronounced overtones, a brighter top end, and better balanced, less bass heavy.

The top and body woods used for both are the same, and the only big wood difference is the fingerboard and bridge. I came to think the rosewood bridge has to be what makes such a difference in the sound. Age, condition, and even location of the two are similar, and there's only 2 years difference in the age.
I don't understand why a rosewood bridge could make such a difference. But it's the only thing that could.

But I no longer miss the 28. I would hate to have to sell the D-21 now just as much as I hated to sell the other guitar.

the 21 was my fave Martin model. OM-21, D-21, whatever, the 21 had a great tone and balance to my ears. They were not muddy.

 

[twocorgis]

Yup. I only met George a couple of times, but he's a pretty nice guy. He's opinionated, but his opinions all come from experience, and he can get real grumpy when some stranger starts to contradict him who's an obvious newbie know-it-all.

It's no surprise to me George likes the D-21. I was forced to sell my old D-28 in 2004 in a time of desperate need, and I mourned it deeply. It was a 1966 guitar, and I had owned it from the time it was new, my first really good guitar.

Suddenly, by pure happenstance, a year later in 2005, a 1964 D-21 fell out of the sky and landed on me. It cost exactly what the D-28 brought when I sold it, and my crisis had passed. So I bought it as a replacement.

My D-21 is definitely a different sounding guitar from my D-28. The 28 was darker and smoother sounding, slightly bass-heavy. The 21 has shorter sustain with less pronounced overtones, a brighter top end, and better balanced, less bass heavy.

The top and body woods used for both are the same, and the only big wood difference is the fingerboard and bridge. I came to think the rosewood bridge has to be what makes such a difference in the sound. Age, condition, and even location of the two are similar, and there's only 2 years difference in the age.
I don't understand why a rosewood bridge could make such a difference. But it's the only thing that could.

But I no longer miss the 28. I would hate to have to sell the D-21 now just as much as I hated to sell the other guitar.

I agree about George getting grumpy when confronted by a newbie know-it-all, and saw it briefly when we were there. I just kept my mouth shut and listened to him, and he was a wealth of knowledge, which he shared freely. As for the D21 vs. D28 thing, these customs that Martin made for him using Adirondack over Madagascar rosewood. there were a few different iterations, and the model he was playing in the video was the 12 fret dread, which sounded great, but was $$$$. I've never owned a D21, but the '69 D28 that I own is simply spectacular, and boy has it been played over its life!

1969 Martin D28

Explore this photo album by Twocorgis on Flickr!

flic.kr

 

[Uke]

Back to the snakehead discussion. I'm probably missing something here, but isn't the width of the peg head irrelevant to keeping the strings in a straight pull? Can't you keep straight pull alignment with a headstock that's, to exaggerate, 10 inches wide? I was never a fan of the snakehead look. It always suggested cost cutting in my view.

 

[Rocky]

Back to the snakehead discussion. I'm probably missing something here, but isn't the width of the peg head irrelevant to keeping the strings in a straight pull? Can't you keep straight pull alignment with a headstock that's, to exaggerate, 10 inches wide? I was never a fan of the snakehead look. It always suggested cost cutting in my view.

It boils down to having minimum angle between the string posts and nut. You could have a super wide headstock and maintain straight string pull with either extreme cutaways on the sides, or custom tuners with extremely long worm gears.

 

[twocorgis]

I was never a fan of the snakehead look. It always suggested cost cutting in my view.

Cost cutting? How about weight saving? That's always good with me!

 

[Uke]

It boils down to having minimum angle between the string posts and nut. You could have a super wide headstock and maintain straight string pull with either extreme cutaways on the sides, or custom tuners with extremely long worm gears.

Still not seeing it. Take a snakehead headstock as is, just add "wings", and there you go. More visually pleasing to my taste. As I suggested earlier, I'm open to the possibility that I'm just not getting it.

 

[Uke]

Cost cutting? How about weight saving? That's always good with me!

Yes, but for me a few ounces of wood for the sake of appearance is worth the extra weight. By the way, I think it's funny that the snakehead shape showed up during the time George was involved with Guild, George the snake guy.

 

[fronobulax]

Still not seeing it. Take a snakehead headstock as is, just add "wings", and there you go. More visually pleasing to my taste. As I suggested earlier, I'm open to the possibility that I'm just not getting it.

I think you get it.

There are several competing goals, string to nut geometry, cost, weight and aesthetics. If you have a regular headstock with "straight strings" then you almost certainly will have to use custom tuners because the length of the shaft between the tuner and the tuner's "ear" will have to be longer than usual. So if you want the geometry the cost is probably going to drive the rest of the decisions.

 

[Uke]

I think you get it.

There are several competing goals, string to nut geometry, cost, weight and aesthetics. If you have a regular headstock with "straight strings" then you almost certainly will have to use custom tuners because the length of the shaft between the tuner and the tuner's "ear" will have to be longer than usual. So if you want the geometry the cost is probably going to drive the rest of the decisions.

Yes. As Rocky said above, it would affect the length of worm gears. I also remembered Fender's using surplus "Electric Twelve" headstocks to fabricate some sort of 6 string animal that looked ridiculous. To widen a headstock and keep the posts towards the center would indeed appear strange. Thanks all for helping me "see the light" (though I still don't like the look of a snakehead of any kind )

 

[Uke]

Take a snakehead headstock as is, just add "wings", and there you go. More visually pleasing to my taste.

Upon further thought, I repent of this notion

 

[Prince of Darkness]

I think you get it.

There are several competing goals, string to nut geometry, cost, weight and aesthetics. If you have a regular headstock with "straight strings" then you almost certainly will have to use custom tuners because the length of the shaft between the tuner and the tuner's "ear" will have to be longer than usual. So if you want the geometry the cost is probably going to drive the rest of the decisions.

A bit like the tuners on F style mandolins

 

[banjomike]

This is where the snakehead term comes from.
The peghead shape looks a lot like the top of a pit viper's head to more folks than what the design was intended to resemble.
It was supposed to look like a flower vase.

This is a banjo peghead from the 1920s, one of Gibson's earliest banjo designs. They got into the banjo game quite late, and even back then, this peghead looked weirdly antique. It wa unpopular, and Gibson sold few banjos until 1925, when they re-designed everything drastically.
That was the year Gibson introduced the Mastertone banjo line.

 

[Westerly Wood]

This is where the snakehead term comes from.
The peghead shape looks a lot like the top of a pit viper's head to more folks than what the design was intended to resemble.
It was supposed to look like a flower vase.

This is a banjo peghead from the 1920s, one of Gibson's earliest banjo designs. They got into the banjo game quite late, and even back then, this peghead looked weirdly antique. It wa unpopular, and Gibson sold few banjos until 1925, when they re-designed everything drastically.
That was the year Gibson introduced the Mastertone banjo line.

cool to know!

I know you knew Tony Rice or his brother, a slight veer, this is my fave acoustic song of all time next to Kottke's Busted Bicycle. Tony Rice was just an incredible acoustic guitarist:

 

[banjomike]

The 'snakehead' term was used by George, but it had nothing to do with his snake collection.

It comes from the peghead design of the earliest Gibson banjos.
Gibson got into the banjo game late; the competition had been making banjos since the late 1800s. So when this banjo came in the early 1920s, it looked weirdly antique.
It was supposed to be the silhouette of a flower vase, but the public thought it looked like the top of a pit viper's head. Which it does.

Their banjos didn't sell well until everything, including the peghead, was re-designed. In 1925, their new banjos appeared as the Mastertone line, and their peghead shape looked like a fiddle, not a snake's head. The name and that design stuck. The shape came and went from then until the company decided to drop the banjos entirely after the Nashville flood ca. 2010.

 

[GGJaguar]

One of the greatest flat pickers of all time.

 

[banjomike]

That's one of Tony's best!
Tony was one of those guys who faded slowly out of public view, so it's easy to forget how radical his playing was when he first came on the scene and how much it changed acoustic guitar playing afterward.

That smooth rippling sound Tony got with a flatpack was a sound that only fingers could ever do before. Doc Watson could do cross-picking, the term used for that technique, but Doc couldn't play melody using it. And Doc's playing was rougher and choppier sounding.

Tony as an artist had as big influence on modern acoustic music as his playing style. He came from a Southern family, but was raised in California, where his career began. His influences were Californians, not North Carolinians, and there was only a faint hint of the South in his singing voice.
Back then, bluegrass was still considered to be a branch of folk music and not a serious musical genre of its own. The players were seen as rednecks if they came from the east, or hippies if they came from the west.
And then Tony showed up. Longer hippie hair, but always dressed in west-coast casual elegance, and always a nice suit of clothes. No cowboy or hippie or redneck in anything, with a voice as beautiful as his playing, and all as neat as a pin. Never a hair out of place or a mistakenly-struck string.
His songs were pure quill bluegrass, though, played with smoothness, precision, and gob-stopping speed. Rice showed everyone what bluegrass became, but always was: American-style chamber music, art music only the best can play, and 100% native-grown American, while showing off bits of every other nation's own art music in it.

Tony always acted like a serious musician, always looked like a gentleman, played seriously musical concerts, and showed the world how good America's most home-grown instrumental music could be. And how challenging it could be to a professional musician who was brave enough to plunge into its depths.

A Paganini of the guitar, easily the equal of the best classical guitarists, playing on steel strings with a flatpick on a guitar that was built for only rhythm playing styles- a flashy prop for a singing movie cowboy.

Guys like Tony don't come along very often, but when they do, they always light a fire somewhere that grows over time.
Tony's now gone, but he left us Sara Jaroz, Molly Tuttle, Billy Strings, and many others to carry what he started on to greater heights.