Guitar designer

Tannin

I love window shopping for guitars. Going into shops is great but I don't like doing that unless I'm considering buying one.

So I shop on-line. I don't mind burning a few of someone's electrons to look at all the stuff they make. Hey, what else do you do on a cold winter night when you've had your dinner, surfed The Fretboard, and played as much guitar as  you can manage in one sitting? 

But the very best sort of on-line window shopping is those places with a guitar designer. So far as I know, Lakewood was the first, and is still by far the best. Emerald have got one up and it's quite good too. I haven't been able to find any others yet, but there must be a few around.

Let's see if I can link to an actual design. First Lakewood .... nope. At least not exactly. you can link to the guitar designer with a base model loaded, but the link does not include your modifications.  So here - https://www.lakewood-guitars.co.uk/designer/designer.php?lakey=2.0-1659521222-j-1-1-0-06-12-01-02-02-02-02-17-05-05-01-05-03-02-01-01-03-12-02-01-02-02-02-02-01-01-01-01-12-68-03-09-02-01-01-01-01-01-02-01 - is the starting point. (Be patient, it takes a while to load.)

* Cutaway jumbo, 14-fret neck
* AAA European Spruce top, Indian Rosewood back and sides, Cedro (Spanish Cedar) neck, ebony bridge and fingerboard.
* LR Baggs Anthem.
* Lots of other stuff I won't list here, such as tuners, headstock type, neck carve and width, binding, purfling, and so on.
£3000

You can see it all on-screen, in 3d. You can zoom it, spin it around to any angle, and all your changes update on-screen so you can *see* them. 

Today I chose a cedar top and French Walnut back and sides (an awesomely good looking wood!), no cutaway, Ziracote fretboard and bridge, a 46mm nut, thicker neck carve still in a C shape, no front fret markers, and different tuner buttons. Despite the expensive French Walnut back and the rather pricey Ziracote trim, the cost comes down to £2765 because I save on the things I don't need - pickup, fretboard markers, and cutaway - and it looks bloody lovely. Reckon it would play well too. Or maybe I could have the spruce after all ... click, click ... there it is! All sorts of other things to play with if you want. I love this game.

Here is the Emerald one. https://emeraldguitars.com/3d-guitar-builder/

PS: and although I frequently burn some of Lakewood's electrons without buying anything, who knows? One of these days I might just push the button

bertie

Tannin said:

Here is the Emerald one. https://emeraldguitars.com/3d-guitar-builder/

dear god my eyes  - those things are hideous,  the link ought to come with a health warning

Tannin

The thing to do with an Emerald is avoid those awful fake wood tops at all costs.:)  It is a carbon fibre guitar and ought to look like one. The no-veneer green weave plain CF top is not unpleasant. At least it looks honest.

(But why buy one at all? One reason is the X20-7 which looks like a corker of an idea. The other reason is for travel and outdoor use. I go outback a lot - rain, desert heat, tropical humidity, frost, we get the lot - obviously can't subject a good wooden instrument to any of that, and have plenty of room in the car for a full-size guitar, so something like an Emerald X-20 might be the very thing. I don't think they have the same sound quality as a good tradition guitar, but they are far from disgraced - see here for a really well-done Emerald vs Martin vs Taylor comparison. Bloody expensive things though.)

BillDL

bertie said:

Tannin said:

Here is the Emerald one. https://emeraldguitars.com/3d-guitar-builder/

dear god my eyes  - those things are hideous,  the link ought to come with a health warning

Some of them look like the dashboard of a Rover 75 before BMW started to put its foot down on what the UK Longbridge designers thought would be nice.

Sporky

bertie said:

Tannin said:

Here is the Emerald one. https://emeraldguitars.com/3d-guitar-builder/

dear god my eyes  - those things are hideous,  the link ought to come with a health warning

Those are awesome looking. The sort of thing that might tempt me into air-powered guitar weirdness. 

BillDL

There used to be quite a few online design features on manufacturers' websites, but they were created with the need to have Macromedia/Adobe flash player enabled on a desktop or laptop browser.  With the popularity of smartphones for so much Internet activity and Flash being discontinued, web designers had to start harnessing the native capabilities of HTML web design and mobile apps for all of these interactive web features, and it took quite a while.

Tannin

^ Indeed. And Flash was truly, truly awful. (I speak as someone with 25+ years experience in IT. I can think of worse software than Flash, but not without having to go outside and vomit.) And I can think of uglier fake wood than Emerald guitar tops - most of it applied to the side of American station wagons in the 1980s. 

Soupman

@Tannin - I didn't know such 'choose your own specs' sites existed. Great idea. Thanks for that! 

Tannin

Cheers @Soupman I just wish we could save and post our optioned-up designs. I reckon it would be a lot of fun - e.g., all starting with with, say, a plain vanilla spruce and rosewood dreadnought and posting our finished configurations - all those different woods and scale lengths and nut widths and bindings and so on. And, of course, we could laugh at @bertie's bad taste.

Soupman

@Tannin I was in GuitarGuitar store in Newcastle last week killing a spare 10 mins & was surprised to see 3 Cole Clark acoustics there. Looked great with the 'made in Australia' on the headstock. Didn't have time to try though. Think I'd best stay out of the shop  .

bertie

Tannin said:

 And, of course, we could laugh at @bertie's bad taste.

my bad taste ?   I wasnt the one that posted a link to this >>>>






I dont call this bad taste at all >>>>>

Tannin

Three Cole Clarks isn't enough, @Soupman - I don't mean that flippantly, I mean that if you play 10 of them you will hate 5, be indifferent to 3, quite like 1 and fall in love with the 10th. They vary enormously. This is not sloppy quality control, it's just that they use a pile of different woods in different combinations and they all sound very different to one another. They don't have a consistent "house sound" the way that (e.g.) Maton, Guild, Gibson, Martin and Taylor do.

They are, of course, best-known known for their plugged-in sound - by all reports they are an outstanding stage guitar - but I neither know nor care about that. I'm a pure acoustic player. I've played two Cole Clarks that I really loved, and still rather regret only buying the first of them. The second - an all-Blackwood Angel 2 - was in the shop for about a week. When I went back to have another look at it, it was gone already. Just as well, really. 

I've recently been through a phase of not liking mine as much anymore, and even vaguely thought about selling it. Last month I replaced the strings with a set of those Galli LS I liked so much on it last year and all of a sudden it is my most-played and most-loved guitar again. It is very quiet by acoustic guitar standards, has more treble than most, and tends to sound cheap and boxy if you strum it too hard (it is a small guitar after all) - but fingerpicked, it is a gem. It has a wonderful string-to-string balance and warmth, and you can push it hard without complaint. When I get lost playing and lose track of time ... well, I can do that on any guitar if it is a good day, but of late it's mostly been on that little Cole Clark Angel. I'm in love again.

Tannin

Hmmm ... two lovely instruments ... and an ugly painted thing with a slotted headstock.

As for the Emeralds, that's the point of the guitar designer - you can actually make an Emerald look ... well, not exactly good, but at least fairly unobjectionable. 

Mellish

What puts me off those Emeralds isn't the shapes (that I'm OK with), it's the position of the soundhole  

Tannin

Really? It's one of the things I like about them.  If you think about a guitar from a structural engineering point of view, you have a lightly built wooden box with a long stick poking out, and this is required to stand up to the high stress of string tension for decades. What is the worst possible place you could put a large hole? Ans: under the strings.

Spanish guitars put the soundhole where it is back in the days of gut strings when there was little string tension to resist. Archtops aside, nobody has ever changed it. (We won't say "classical guitars" because the distinction between classical and flamenco instruments wasn't made until the middle of last century. Until then they were just "guitars".) When steel strings came along, luthiers responded by making pretty much the same guitar as before, but using thicker tops and heavier bracing. In fact, you could argue that the whole steel string guitar is simply a minimum-change adaptation of the Spanish guitar.

If we actually *think* about acoustic guitar design, we want the top free to vibrate, we want it as stiff as possible for bass and middle reproduction (same as a speaker cone - floppy is bad) but also light enough to produce plenty of treble. And from an engineering standpoint, we don't want to be putting a great big hole in it exactly where it needs to be strongest to resist the pull of the strings. But we do need a hole. It can be any shape and doesn't need to have a large area because its tuning effect on the body cavity is primarily related to the length of the perimeter, not the area of the hole.  (This is why archtops can have such narrow slits for F-holes - the area is irrelevant so long as the length is there.)

Back around the turn of the century, Tacoma reasoned as follows. We put the sound hole in the upper bout because the lower bout makes most of the sound and is best left alone, and we put it off to one side because we can use lighter braces that way, and we put it on the bass side because bass is what we mostly need to boost and that works better on the same side as the bass strings. (That last seems a little surprising, but is apparently correct. Pretty much everyone who uses a non-standard soundhole location puts it on the bass side.)

Tacoma came to those decisions when they designed their first own-brand guitar, the Papoose, which was a tenor instrument with a 485mm scale designed for travel and tuned to A. They went to the paisley sound hole to get more bass and volume out of the small body and short scale. Later on, when they brought out standard-tuned guitars and then baritones and basses, they stayed with the paisley design because it let them use lighter bracing and get better sound out of the top wood. Numerous modern makers are doing broadly similar things.

Curiously enough, the most prominent present-day offset-soundhole guitar makers are probably McPherson of Wisconson and Emerald of Ireland, and both make carbon fibre instruments - a material which has such a huge strength to weight ration that the structural advantages are pretty much wasted. Go figure. 

Mellish

Tannin said:

Really? It's one of the things I like about them.  If you think about a guitar from a structural engineering point of view, you have a lightly built wooden box with a long stick poking out, and this is required to stand up to the high stress of string tension for decades. What is the worst possible place you could put a large hole? Ans: under the strings.

Spanish guitars put the soundhole where it is back in the days of gut strings when there was little string tension to resist. Archtops aside, nobody has ever changed it. (We won't say "classical guitars" because the distinction between classical and flamenco instruments wasn't made until the middle of last century. Until then they were just "guitars".) When steel strings came along, luthiers responded by making pretty much the same guitar as before, but using thicker tops and heavier bracing. In fact, you could argue that the whole steel string guitar is simply a minimum-change adaptation of the Spanish guitar.

If we actually *think* about acoustic guitar design, we want the top free to vibrate, we want it as stiff as possible for bass and middle reproduction (same as a speaker cone - floppy is bad) but also light enough to produce plenty of treble. And from an engineering standpoint, we don't want to be putting a great big hole in it exactly where it needs to be strongest to resist the pull of the strings. But we do need a hole. It can be any shape and doesn't need to have a large area because its tuning effect on the body cavity is primarily related to the length of the perimeter, not the area of the hole.  (This is why archtops can have such narrow slits for F-holes - the area is irrelevant so long as the length is there.)

Back around the turn of the century, Tacoma reasoned as follows. We put the sound hole in the upper bout because the lower bout makes most of the sound and is best left alone, and we put it off to one side because we can use lighter braces that way, and we put it on the bass side because bass is what we mostly need to boost and that works better on the same side as the bass strings. (That last seems a little surprising, but is apparently correct. Pretty much everyone who uses a non-standard soundhole location puts it on the bass side.)

Tacoma came to those decisions when they designed their first own-brand guitar, the Papoose, which was a tenor instrument with a 485mm scale designed for travel and tuned to A. They went to the paisley sound hole to get more bass and volume out of the small body and short scale. Later on, when they brought out standard-tuned guitars and then baritones and basses, they stayed with the paisley design because it let them use lighter bracing and get better sound out of the top wood. Numerous modern makers are doing broadly similar things.

Curiously enough, the most prominent present-day offset-soundhole guitar makers are probably McPherson of Wisconson and Emerald of Ireland, and both make carbon fibre instruments - a material which has such a huge strength to weight ration that the structural advantages are pretty much wasted. Go figure. 

Oh I get all of that but I'd never buy a guitar with an upper bout soundhole for the same reason I could never buy one with side-mounted controls: just puts me right off  

guitarjack66

Tannin said:

I love window shopping for guitars. Going into shops is great but I don't like doing that unless I'm considering buying one.

So I shop on-line. I don't mind burning a few of someone's electrons to look at all the stuff they make. Hey, what else do you do on a cold winter night when you've had your dinner, surfed The Fretboard, and played as much guitar as  you can manage in one sitting? 

But the very best sort of on-line window shopping is those places with a guitar designer. So far as I know, Lakewood was the first, and is still by far the best. Emerald have got one up and it's quite good too. I haven't been able to find any others yet, but there must be a few around.

Let's see if I can link to an actual design. First Lakewood .... nope. At least not exactly. you can link to the guitar designer with a base model loaded, but the link does not include your modifications.  So here - https://www.lakewood-guitars.co.uk/designer/designer.php?lakey=2.0-1659521222-j-1-1-0-06-12-01-02-02-02-02-17-05-05-01-05-03-02-01-01-03-12-02-01-02-02-02-02-01-01-01-01-12-68-03-09-02-01-01-01-01-01-02-01 - is the starting point. (Be patient, it takes a while to load.)

* Cutaway jumbo, 14-fret neck
* AAA European Spruce top, Indian Rosewood back and sides, Cedro (Spanish Cedar) neck, ebony bridge and fingerboard.
* LR Baggs Anthem.
* Lots of other stuff I won't list here, such as tuners, headstock type, neck carve and width, binding, purfling, and so on.
£3000

You can see it all on-screen, in 3d. You can zoom it, spin it around to any angle, and all your changes update on-screen so you can *see* them. 

Today I chose a cedar top and French Walnut back and sides (an awesomely good looking wood!), no cutaway, Ziracote fretboard and bridge, a 46mm nut, thicker neck carve still in a C shape, no front fret markers, and different tuner buttons. Despite the expensive French Walnut back and the rather pricey Ziracote trim, the cost comes down to £2765 because I save on the things I don't need - pickup, fretboard markers, and cutaway - and it looks bloody lovely. Reckon it would play well too. Or maybe I could have the spruce after all ... click, click ... there it is! All sorts of other things to play with if you want. I love this game.

Here is the Emerald one. https://emeraldguitars.com/3d-guitar-builder/

PS: and although I frequently burn some of Lakewood's electrons without buying anything, who knows? One of these days I might just push the button

Sounds like a lot of fun. Can't say I particularly like your harp/guitar designs though.

Tannin

Harp guitar? Not me mate. That was Bertie.

bertie

Tannin said:

Harp guitar? Not me mate. That was Bertie.

not me -  just taken from the  URL you posted from that awful site

DavidR

I've played an Emerald last year courtesy of fellow FB user who lives nearby. It was nice. Very comfortable. Design features such as angled curve between upper and lower bouts and bevelled edges. Surprisingly normal tone. Didn't sound hugely different to a wooden guitar to my ears. Very nice to play. Not heavy.

Personally I think you can design in quite a lot of attractiveness using the website designer feature. Some of the carbon fibre colours are themselves very nice looking.

Not tempted enough to by one though. Expensive + I have no specific need for another large acoustic. But I like the idea of not using wood, and the Emerald was, to me, a very attractive instrument in its own right. If the Emerald had had a distinctive tone of its own though (say like Ovations do) I might have been more tempted. But it didn't particularly. Just a nice cleverly constructed instrument.

Take a look at the regular YouTube video they do of guitars they have made and sold recently.

Shipping Video 24/06/2022 | Custom Carbon Fiber Guitars - YouTube

Tannin

However, @bertie, Emerald also have reasonably unobjectionable guitar-shaped guitars which can sound quite decent. (These were what I actually  linked to.) 

As for you, @DavidR all I can say is thank all the saints that Emeralds don't sound like Ovations! 

(Yes, I do understand that some people actually like the sound of Ovation guitars. I just don't understand why!)