Dampening a carved top for thunk I think

[Dean_G]

This is kind of a ramble, sorry about the bandwidth :>}

I went to hear Tal Farlow back in the 80s and he had a couple of fairly large screws behind his guitar bridge.
If I figured it correctly, there was a bar of some kind inside he could tighten against the top to effect some kind of dampening. (?)I asked if it was to increase sustain and he said "you know, you can have too much sustain". I thanked him and had him sign my old 10" blue note TF quartet lp.

I believe some forum members knew Tal or studied with him. I think I remember some posts indicating that. Please correct me if I misunderstood about the purpose of the screws behind the bridge!

Moving along ..
Back in 2005 I was able to have Daniel Slaman build me pretty much my dream guitar, a 16" cutaway carved top based on a modified es150 that Howard Roberts used to play. Slaman exceeded my expectations, it's a marvelous ax.

However lately I've been thinking a lot about getting an es175 for the thunky funky laminate sound. I had 2 in the past as well as a Tal but all my Gibsons were sold to fund the Slaman.

Of course I can't afford one these days or an Epiphone, so I did a little experiment with my Slaman by rolling up some fabric and stuffing it between the bridge and tailpiece with some pressure on the top. It tones down some overtones and openness and helps in the thunk department. And strangely it seems to help my playing. It may be all in my head.

I'm interested if anyone else has done experiments along these lines. I have a friend who routinely stuffs all his archtops with stuff to prevent feedback. I find it annoying, but here I go doing it myself!