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 having a tailpiece, without the benefit of a the braces and top 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.
These next two are now decoupaged and being laquered;
