Being an instrument maker means people tend to give you broken instruments. Tooo many times I shrugged and
somewhat begrudgingly accepted trashed Indian, Chinese, old Korean and early Japanese crap "guitars" and if I'm
lucky the odd real fretboard endowed (not ply) half decent attempt which inevitably ends up with lifted bridges and
bulging and collapsed tops. I would have thought actually looking inside a real guitar would be a prerequisite to
starting to make a guitar factory but evidently not. Mind you a quick look inside a lot of well respected brands of
guitars (which shall remain nameless lest they sue me for telling the truth) will give you the impression nobody tries
too hard; butt jointed and badly glued, shapeless bracing can be seen in some 'top end' models with $1200 plus price
tags, sad but true. What a waste of good wood and time is planned obsolescence.
I generally remove the back and strengthen the tops and neck joins so they can take the rearranged stresses involved
with the tailpiece without the benefit of a the braces and also because they usually fell apart for good reason. (They
were made weak.) It seems to help to deaden the body resonance so it adds the energy to the speaker cone instead of
moving in sympathy and stealing energy. This also gives me the opportunity to bend the body back to increase the break
angle across the bridge which helps the tone and keeps the strings in their slots. This changes the shape a bit and
usually means a new back.
I cut a hole in the top to take a speaker (usually recycled from the dump or otherwise burned out or shorted ones I get from
repair shops etc.) which I sometimes coat with shellack if it could be brighter and it becomes the resonator cone. Lately I have
been cutting out the cone and sticking the surround directly on the top which seems to help as there is less moving mass and
less impedance from the speakers spider as well.
I make the bridges from strips of carbon fibre and the all important link spiders from bamboo barbecue skewers or balsa
wood.
They generally look pretty ugly after all this so I have been decoupaging them and then finishing them with at least six coats
of nitro-cellulose laquer. One day I will get hold of "liquid glass," or some such two part epoxy finish, which will be better
aparently.
The finished product always sounds unique and somewhere between a Banjo, a harp and a guitar. They sound a bit
mellower and less metallic than the standard aluminum cone and have more sustain. People often comment that they sound
amplified, I guess because they have the characteristic sound of a speaker and also because they are quite loud and have a
ringing overtone content that sounds a bit like a reverb.
Click on the following links to see pictures and (hopefully soon some sound samples) of the various ones I have constructed
so far.
The Nimbin themed cannabis resonators
Here are some pictures of the next ones in the about to be decoupaged stage, (a 12 Yamaha string and a Suzuki steelstring,) a passive
speaker and a butchered normal speaker, and a guitar made by Robert in Berlin from some chunky old Russian beast after checking out these
pages - thanks for sending the photos and getting in touch, I get a buzz thinking someone is out there seeing this and then getting inspired to do
a bit of creative recycling.
