George Gruhns favorite guitar

[Uke]

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.

Thanks for this!

 

[banjomike]

I suddenly realized all this banjo stuff could be unfamiliar in a guitar forum.
Here's a picture of 'the fiddle shaped' peghead that replaced the snakehead.

This shape wasn't originally a Gibson design. Their strongest competitor in the banjo market, Paramount, actually used it first. Paramount invented most of the parts that constitute a modern banjo, and Gibson imitated the Paramount look in many ways when it introduced the Mastertones.
But the way those parts were manufactured, not their looks, is made Gibson Mastertone banjos famous. Paramount ultimately went bankrupt in the Great Depression. Gibson survived, and by then had abandoned copy-catting.

 

[adorshki]

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.

Mike was this for a different thread? I'm not seeing the connection.

 

[banjomike]

Mike was this for a different thread? I'm not seeing the connection.

Yeah!
Thanks... I don't know how both my peghead posts got here. They should be in George Gruhn's Favorite Guitar topic or some other one, but not this one.

 

[adorshki]

Yeah!
Thanks... I don't know how both my peghead posts got here. They should be in George Gruhn's Favorite Guitar topic or some other one, but not this one.

I mentioned Gruhn bringing the snakehead to Guild in the "D60" thread, I think? Always dug it on my D25, thought it was "elegant", but didn't know the source at the time.

With apologies for the veer, and you likely know this but some others might appreciate the insights since there's generic guitar "voicing theories" expressed:

I think George himself actually said he designed it to give the strings a straighter course to the pegs from the nut. IIRC the first Guild he did that used it was the Nightbird prototype ca '84.*** It was also a design feature of the F44 and D44, his first true production designs IIRC, and their descendants like the GF series. Appeared on D25's in '87, think that was the first time it was put an existing (as opposed to new) model.

The thing about headstocks though, is that I'm actually in that school that believes headstock mass affects tone (I prefer the term "voice", these days), however subtly.

I came aross the idea here about 10 years back and remembered the day I felt the D25's neck vibrating in my hand, first time I ever felt that in any guitar. It was about a year old, around 250 hours of playing time on her, on nice warm upper '70's spring day in the park, with a fresh setup, and I realized it sounded better than it ever had before. (That puppy could be heard across the park, still can. )

So while I was strumming and feeling the neck vibrate I realized there must be energy from the top/sides/back getting into the neck (via heelblock?) and maybe even getting back into the top in a kind of "super-excite" mode? Maybe via the fretboard extension?

Then I wondered what kind of damping effect the headstock exerted. Having been exposed to a little electronics theory, I hypothesized it would function like a microwave termination, that is, absorb the energy in the neck with its mass. Then it was time for the montuna so went back to playing but always remembered the moment. Thought; "AH, this must be what's meant by 'the opening up moment'" (Which I also subscribe to, but only ever felt it with the D25. )

The D40 has a traditional Guild "paddle" style headstock and I never felt its neck vibrate like the D25's, but it's also a "tank" compared to the '25. It took about 7 years to start opening up and it was gradual, but I played it far less than the '25 for the first 4 or 5 years.

Your thoughts?

*** Found the interview, it was '85:
https://www.vintageguitar.com/3275/1985-guild-nightbird-prototype/

 

[banjomike]

I mentioned Gruhn bringing the snakehead to Guild in the "D60" thread, I think? Always dug it on my D25, thought it was "elegant", but didn't know the source at the time.

With apologies for the veer, and you likely know this but some others might appreciate the insights since there's generic guitar "voicing theories "expressed:

I think George himself actually said he designed it to give the strings a straighter course to the pegs from the nut. IIRC the first Guild he did that used it was the Nightbird prototype ca '84.*** It was also a design feature of the F44 and D44, his first true production designs IIRC, and their descendants like the GF series. Appeared on D25's in '87, think that was the first time it was put an existing (as opposed to new) model.

The thing about headstocks though, is that I'm actually in that school that believes headstock mass affects tone (I prefer the term "voice", these days), however subtly.

I came aross the idea here about 1 years back and remembered the day I felt the D25's neck vibrating in my hand, first time I ever felt that in any guitar. It was about a year old, around 250 hours of playing time on her, on nice warm upper '70's spring day in the park, with a fresh setup, and I realized it sounded better than it ever had before. (That puppy could be heard across the park, still can. )

So while I was strumming and feeling the neck vibrate I realized there must be energy from the top/sides/back getting into the neck (via heelblock?) and maybe even getting back into the top in a kind of "super-excite" mode? Maybe via the fretboard extension?

Then I wondered what kind of damping effect the headstock exerted. Having been exposed to a little electronics theory, I hypothesized it would function like a microwave termination, that is, absorb the energy in the neck with its mass. Then it was time for the montuna so went back to playing but always remembered the moment. Thought; "AH, this must be what's meant by 'the opening up moment'" (Which I also subscribe to, but only ever felt it with the D25. )

The D40 has a traditional Guild "paddle" style headstock and I never felt its neck vibrate like the D25's, but it's also a "tank" compared to the '25. It took about 7 years to start opening up and it was gradual, but I played it far less than the '25 for the first 4 or 5 years.

Your thoughts?

*** Found the interview, it was '85:
https://www.vintageguitar.com/3275/1985-guild-nightbird-prototype/

The neck's contribution to the tone of a guitar is a complicated and confusing thing for me.
As you mentioned, back in the 80s, there was a widespread belief that adding mass to the peghead would make the guitar louder and/or increase the guitar's sustain.
There were some other items besides the peghead that were considered to be improvements too that followed the same theory; heavy metal bridge pins and a solid brass saddle in the bridge were some, and neither made any improvement.

The brass saddles killed a guitar's volume when I replaced the guitar's bone saddle with a brass rod experimentally. The metal bridge pins did nothing at all to the guitar, but they were so slick they were hard to grasp when I pulled them out of the bridge.

At one time, some little company actually made a thick brass plate that was held to the back of the peghead by the tuning pegs.They were supposed to be the miracle cure, and installing one was a fairly big job. The tuning pegs all had to be removed to fit the plate next to the wood and then re-installed.
Since guitars have many different peg spacings, the shaft holes in the brass plate have to align precisely to the holes in the peghead.
The plate fits next to the wood, and the pegs' bases hold it in place. Lots of different plates to be made for sale to fit different guitars!

I played a guitar with one, and all I noticed was it made the guitar neck-heavy and harder to tune.
The guitar was a Gibson J45, and I couldn't hear any big difference between it and a bunch of other 45s I played like it.

But logic says higher mass takes more to excite vibrationally than lower mass. I don't know physics, but that would appear to be true, in a general way.
The strings are pretty weak mechanical exciters on any acoustic guitar; the wooden top on a guitar has to be light and stiff to translate and amplify the weak vibrational force of the strings. Adding any more mass on the top sure doesn't work at all.
So isolating the top from the neck by adding mass to the neck would seem to be the trick. But it doesn't in reality.

Like you, I've noticed that a guitar with a neck that has vibrations I can feel in my left hand tends to be a louder guitar than one with a non-vibrating neck. More sustain, too. Both in pretty small additions.
The vibrations in the neck don't depend on the thickness or thinness of the neck- big thick necks can really vibrate, and really thin necks can vibrate so much they're like diving boards that just don't stop vibrating. Too much of a good thing, sometimes.

Could it be that a vibrating neck actually works in reverse of that logic? I think so. The vibration of the neck could feed into the top from the tight joint that holds the neck on the body. The neck's vibrations could make the top vibrate more strongly when the string attack was struck, and then could keep the top vibrating longer, which would increase the sustain.

I actually noticed all this more on my favorite banjo than on a guitar. Banjos are much stronger frames for the vibrating surface- the head- than guitar tops. The banjo head is a very thin membrane that's stretched tightly by a massive brass hoop that is directly connected to the rim, which is 3/4" thick and clamped down on the top by the hoop and by the flange that holds the resonator (the back) to the banjo.

So when it comes to mass and all the other stuff, the banjo has a lot more of it.
Yet the liveliest banjos all have necks that vibrate more strongly than guitar necks. The neck's connection to the rim of a banjo is as weak as the connection on a guitar is strong.

Mando players agree; they all want a mandolin that's jumping around in their hands while playing it, and the more vibrations the neck gives off, the better.
While dedicated solid-body electric guitarists swear the massive body's puny string vibrations make all the difference in their guitar.

So I honestly don't know which theory is correct. I tend to think this is something that simply can't be generalized and applied to every guitar. And what might work on an amplified instrument might not work on an acoustic instrument.

I only know what I can hear and feel nowadays. I've given up on mechanical theories that try to define subtle physical sensations.

For sure, the only certain thing I know that improves any guitar is playing it. A lot, all over the neck, playing it hard enough to really force it around sometimes, and playing it as softly as possible other times. And then allowing time to do it's thing.

Everything else is just voodoo in my opinion. Fun to mess around with, for those who are inclined, and good for sales, but will make an improvement only a dog can hear on a guitar.

This includes the idea of straight string pull on a peghead. That's probably a good thing that helps prevent string breakage, but I doubt it does anything tonally for the guitar good or bad.

 

[banjomike]

p.s.
I hope the forum mods move all this stuff over to the D60 topic where it belongs. I somehow glitched when I posted and it landed here.
I apologize for the mess. I don't know what I did, but I'll try to be more careful before I hit the Post reply button for sure.

 

[banjomike]

Here's a snake that is over-exaggerated to my eye.
Stromberg could have made it a straight string pull, but he didn't want to mess up the pearl ornamentation.

The link shows pics of the entire guitar, which is also as exaggerated in just about everything.

Featured Inventory Archives 1999-2012

guitars.com

 

[GGJaguar]

Strombergs (and D'Angelicos) were over the top. They get a pass on string pull.

 

[fronobulax]

p.s.
I hope the forum mods move all this stuff over to the D60 topic where it belongs. I somehow glitched when I posted and it landed here.
I apologize for the mess. I don't know what I did, but I'll try to be more careful before I hit the Post reply button for sure.

No problem. I think I got them all but PM me with URLs if I missed something.

 

[banjomike]

Strombergs (and D'Angelicos) were over the top. They get a pass on string pull.

Stomberg guitars are typically very hard to play; they're bigger than the other big arch-tops, and were built to have a high action.
They were built to be loud, and though they take a lot of muscle power, they sure deliver that volume. The jazz guitarists who kept the swing bands swinging loved the way a Stromberg cut through a 20-piece horn ensemble with their sharp, nasal tone.

I've heard them up close, but was too intimidated to try playing one. The D'Angelico guitars more gentle and kinder. I've only played one, and it was a beautiful experience in all aspects. That one was a 17" Excel non-cutaway that was made in 1958 (I think- can't remember for sure.)

Both of them look a little bit primitive now, compared to the modern hand-made guitars. If I had the money, I would buy a new Archtop over almost all of the vintage guitars. The craft has come a long way since the 1930s.

Even so, I sure would like to own an early 20s Gibson L-5 as nice as the one George has. It's very easy to understand why George got hooked by them. They are as seductive as Mata Hari and as charming, for sure.

I do have one, and it has their unique tone, but the one I have has a new fretboard, newer but still old tuning pegs, a bridge that's only half original, and a top that was refinished decades ago that's not accurate at all, but is nice work.
The neck was refinished less nicely, and the board is totally modern. The back and sides' finish is original but severely age-cracked and alligatored.

It came in the original case that was so mildewy it stunk the house up. So while working at Gibson, I scored a new case for it that was supposed to go with a Harley-Davidson limited edition J-180. The case fits well, but it makes the guitar look like a Grandma wearing a pair of hot pink Go-Go pants!
I've never known when it was made. Time took all the identifiers that weren't removed during the overhauls. It could be a 1924 or a 1929-1930.

And yet it still makes me feel like I'm Nick Lucas every time I play it. I love it just the way it is, and won't ever change a thing except the strings.