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Being sorta serious for a tad, it shows what Gibson thinks of L5’s in the fact they did not offer a 100th Anniversary model for which they could have charged some obscene price.
I suppose there’s still time.
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01-20-2023 04:24 PM
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C’mon, Jim - you’re only saying that because you made it.
Originally Posted by Jim Soloway
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I'm surprised nobody pointed out the irony in the OP. A floating "CC" pickup is a 21st century innovation that has nothing in common other than cosmetics with the suspended blade pickup that Gibson designed in the 30s.
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Jazz guitars with no pickup could be considered "no progress", but if amplified by microphone they have a very nice sound. Some beautiful guitars too, like this 1949 L5 below.
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I'm not hearing the beauty by looking at it. Originally Posted by GuyBoden
Jazz guitars with no pickup could be considered "no progress", but if amplified by microphone they have a very nice sound. Some beautiful guitars too, like this 1949 L5 below.
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What a wonderful interview. Thanks. Originally Posted by QAman
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Ken Parker’s archtops are like nothing else, literally. Just to name one. Plenty of progress but a conservative market. That’s not meant as a slight towards the market. The guitar that makes me play it all the time is the best guitar, period.
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Parker's archtops are out of the reach of most of the market. The biggest progress I see there is the action adjustment, moving the entire neck up/down. He has a fairly long series of videos on YouTube going through an entire build, and it's worth the viewing time if you're interested in how he does it. It's a little depressing knowing that I will never have the spare cash to buy one, barring hitting a huge lottery prize, and even then I might not live long enough to have one built.
But I would certainly love to play one, just once. That ain't gonna happen either.
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The gloss is gone for KP archtops after a respected member here told me he A/B’d one with a Bozeman L7 21st century reproduction. The KP had one advantage it: you can continually hit it HARD and it remains responsive. But the tone and sound was in the same ball park as the Gibson reproduction. Originally Posted by sgosnell
Parker's archtops are out of the reach of most of the market. The biggest progress I see there is the action adjustment, moving the entire neck up/down. He has a fairly long series of videos on YouTube going through an entire build, and it's worth the viewing time if you're interested in how he does it. It's a little depressing knowing that I will never have the spare cash to buy one, barring hitting a huge lottery prize, and even then I might not live long enough to have one built. But I would certainly love to play one, just once. That ain't gonna happen either.
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Despite a three page thread on this, I haven’t seen anyone address the absence of any measures of progress. The only ones that I can define are sound, feel, and appearance.
I don’t think there’s been any clear progress in the jazz sound(s) of fine guitars. We all still crave and covet the classic jazz tones that have defined the genre for 80 years. Even the amplified tones are not better - they’re just more powerful and accompanied by much less noise if you use modern pickups & electronics.
Ergonomics could be considered an area of improvement. Design / build concepts from Klein, Forshage, etc have made guitar playing more comfortable for those who had problems with traditional shapes and dimensions. But this is a small niche, not a global improvement in jazz guitars.
Artistic embellishments like Beauregard’s Facette haven’t transformed the sound or feel of guitars, as far as I know. I haven’t played or heard one, but I also haven’t seen rave reviews and predictions of a revolution based on such designs. Side ports, alternatives to f-holes etc are also evolutionary - but they haven’t made it to the mainstream of guitars either. Likewise, Parker’s archtops are amazingly cool. But I don’t see his approach as being scalable to even tiny production runs.
So I’m still where I was at post #1. I don’t see any significant progress in the way guitars sound, feel, or look for playing jazz. There’s been a lot of progress in materials, methods, etc and good jazz sound and feel are more readily available from more makers than ever at a range of prices that starts at “very affordable” for most players. But the sounds we love remain the same.
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Others have picked up on this. Isaac Kahir from Cranmer Guitars will make you a nice L5 clone with exactly that kind of neck, he even has one for sale for 4-5k pounds. I have my doubts about the playing ergonomics this gives (but I use classical position) as well as about the fact it makes it impossible to adjust bass and treble action (somewhat) independently. Originally Posted by sgosnell
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Bass and treble action would be adjusted at the bridge. I don't currently have 5k British pounds of disposable cash. Nor even 4k.
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Jim’s observation is spot on… Originally Posted by Jim Soloway
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Define how we'd know if progress has been made with archtop guitars. Unless we have some objective measure, the position is impossible to answer. I would say that to my ears, post-Benedetto, amplified jazz guitar tone has gotten thinner and brighter; for some that is progress, for me it is not.
I'd also say that NK Forster's "long neck" guitars are a bona fide improvement in amplified archtops.
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"Artistic embellishments like Beauregard’s Facette haven’t transformed the sound or feel of guitars, as far as I know. I haven’t played or heard one". Originally Posted by nevershouldhavesoldit
If you haven't even heard or played one, how do you know they "haven't transformed the sound or feel of guitars"?
I spent six hours comparing high end guitars made by all the top builders at a boutique guitar store, and Mario's MB guitar was unlike anything in the store in terms of sound and build. I'm just a player, not a guitar construction specialist, so all I can say is he studied with the late Japanese luthier
Taku Sakashta, and made a similar guitar to Taku's innovative archtops.Taku Sakashta: Luthier's Legacy Lives On - Premier Guitar.
This was over ten years ago, and I was ready to fork over the four or five thousand bucks I figured it was going to cost, when the owner of the store told me it was more than twice that amount- used.
I spent a year trying to find an MB at a more affordable cost, and spent 7K for a used one that was owned by a urologist/'guitar specialist', who tried to lower the action on the guitar by screwing the bridge so deeply into the guitar that it cut a deep groove into the guitar's top, and the action was still unplayable.
When I told him I wanted my 7K back, he said he was going on a European vacation and I'd have to wait till the end of the summer for my money back. After what I called the 'summer of mounting anxiety', I finally received my check in the mail.
I found another guy who wanted to unload his MB so he could buy a Facette, but he wanted even more than the high end shop wanted. I asked him what a Facette was like, and he said it was ten times better than an MB. The cost was also triple the cost of the MB.
So you can find some guitar made by Linda Manzer. Ken Parker, Mario Beauregard or Taku Sakashta that 'transforms the sound and feel of the typical archtop', but it's going to cost you...
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There may be a wave of luthiers who’ve adopted that approach. There may be a wave of players who wouldn’t play anything else. There may be a line of adoring enthusiasts waiting for theirs to be built. But I haven’t seen, read, or heard a word about any of them - and I don’t live under a rock. I think it’s unlikely that Beauregard has transformed the sound and feel of guitars but no one before you has let the secret out. Originally Posted by sgcim
I’m sure they’re wonderful guitars, but so are many others. if it’s a revolution in jazz guitar making, it’s the quietest revolution in history.
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That is how we want it, surely? All this talk of transforming the sound and feel of guitars makes me wonder what kind of transformation the speakers desire – Hawaiian noises? Besides, it seems to me the sound many guitarists on this forum want is one created in the late 1950s, if not earlier. Originally Posted by nevershouldhavesoldit
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Perhaps the answer to your question could be found in listening to many of the dominant jazz guitarists of the last 50 years. You don't have to adopt their tonal and equipment preferences but at least don't denigrate them by pretending that they never existed and that the alternative to the guitar sounds of the 1950 is "Hawaiian noises". Originally Posted by Litterick
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What a blatant misinterpretation of Litterick's post. Originally Posted by Jim Soloway
Originally Posted by Litterick
The reason why many of these people want those high $ guitars is pure snobbery, whether they are the vintage ones or the modern "reinventions of the wheel". They want something only a chosen few can have, the unobtainium.
The sound of the electric ones mainly depend on the pickup anyway (and of course the amplification), and even the most sophisticated modern acoustic archtop gets eaten by a well built run of the mill flattop, even if it doesn't look like something that came out of Stradivari's shop.
The same snobbery is the reason why solidbodies marketed as jazz guitars don't sell either, regardless of their quality.
There's no such thing as "jazz guitar"; every guitar is a jazz guitar, even more so than every guitar is a rock guitar (mostly because of the association with distortion), though even that point is arguable.
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Really? What did I get wrong? I've gone back and read his post again and you clearly see something there that I don't. Originally Posted by Vihar
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Originally Posted by Vihar
Ah yes. Time to trot out the old reliable "snobbery" trope. Funny thing. I don't think I've ever once read on here that anyone thinks their super valuable or rare guitar is far superior to someone else's budget model. Yet it's not uncommon for people to suggest that people who pay a lot for rare or vintage guitars are fools for parting with their money, or, well, snobs. The snobbery is typically a one-way street, and its not heading the direction you seem to think it is. I think it's driven by petty jealousy. And while I'm ranting......there has never been a flattop that can keep up with a large body archtop for big band or swing rhythm. They just fart out when you start to lay into them. When I read BS like "even the most sophisticated modern acoustic archtop gets eaten by a well built run of the mill flattop", I know it comes from a perspective that has no idea what an archtop can do when utilized for what it was designed to do.
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I understand and agree with what I think is your main point. But I strongly suspect that a lot of solid body guitars are sold to serious jazz players. Marketing them as “jazz guitars” won’t bring many unbelievers into the fold, and those who know use mainstream instruments (although those I know use humbuckers). Originally Posted by Vihar
I’ve had at least one solid body among my gigging instruments since I could afford to add it (which was 1970). Apart from a wonderful Carvin, it’s always been a Fender and/or a LP. My current solids are a Tele and an LP (both 7 strings since the early 90s). Although not every guitar is a jazz guitar, every guitar can be one.
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That's a fair point. The CC shown is floating and a different design than the original. Originally Posted by omphalopsychos
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I think the last sentence is completely correct. But I sense (perhaps erroneously) that it's presented as a negative - and I think it's positive. Put purely and simply, most of us do want a jazz tone that came from that 80 year old mold because those tones are so good. Whether thunky, woody, airy, percussive, or smooth, the spectrum of guitar tones for bebop, standards, and most jazz in general hasn't changed because it's hard to imagine how it could be improved and there's a variant for almost everyone. Originally Posted by Litterick
Even outside the realm of straight-ahead jazz, most of the guitar tones are years old. Flanging began with open reel tape recorders. Remember the Maestro Fuzztone? The smooth distortion of cascaded gain stages started big time with Randall Smith and his early amplifier experiments - you know, the ones we call Boogie? Overdrive effects date back to the '60s - I drove my B15N with an ElectroHarmonix LPB-1. Dumble started modifiying Fender amps in the '60s. So even the sounds of fusion, smooth jazz, etc date back to the '50s and '60s. And most of the evolution of those sounds came from electronics rather than the guitars themselves.
To be honest, I don't think today's guitar tones are any better than they were back then, be it rock, jazz, fusion, country, or anything else. What's better is the ability to get the sounds you want in reasonably priced, reliable guitars and electronics and the ability to carry them to the gig and use them in real time. But despite all the progress in technology, materials, design, build, and availability of all this, I still maintain that there's been no progress in the quality of the sounds of the guitar for many years. It's one of the few things in life that's so good it needs no improvement. And that even applies to Hawaiian guitar!
If we're talking about improvements in the actual building of guitars (which is, after all, the title of this thread), they're there if you look. But they haven't made the guitar sound any better, and I don't think many have made it play any better. As for looks, there are some gorgeous guitars being made today that embody innovations and improvements in lutherie - but if they truly sounded significantly better, they'd be springing up in more guitars every years. That doesn't seem to be happening.
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