ACOUSTIC SOUNDBOARD
M ARK DALTON
Fear not the Magic
Let’s face it. The acoustic guitar is a pretty
magical beast. Though I’m personally not prone
to flowery prose and the use of terms like
magic, there is no denying that it is. Another
word I would use to describe it is mysterious.
(Does anyone really understand the B string on
any guitar?) I first became aware of the magic
and mystery of this greatest of man’s achievements when I was a kid. There was quite a bit
of music in our family, and growing up nothing
captivated my imagination like acoustic guitar.
I give a lot of the credit for this (or blame on
bad days here at H&D) to my late uncle, Wayne
Adams. He was a lover of all types of music, as
long as it was heavy on acoustic guitar. While
most of the family was into bluegrass and
thought no greater joy existed than the music
of Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, and the Stanleys,
Wayne also taught us to listen to stuff like
Dylan and Emmylou Harris. He was a guy who
embraced the magic of the instrument. I can
still see him holding his D- 28 up to his ear as he
played “You are My Flower” the way Earl did
it. He would teach me to listen deep inside the
instrument and let what I heard stir my young
soul. After many years as a builder, there is still
a good bit of magic in the old sounds coming
from new guitars. And, after many years of
studying this wonderful thing, I can honestly say
there are still some mysteries associated with
wooden guitars. I hope there always will be. I
hope never to be as analytical about so magical
a thing as to try and remove all mystery from it.
When we’re setting up new guitars, we usually notice a consistency of tone that we have
worked hard to achieve through the years. But
on occasion, one will just blow your hat in the
creek for no apparent reason. Analyze these
special guitars as we may (and we have), and
we find that they are no different from the
others which sound great but leave your hat
dry and on your head. I think the mystery is
in the wood. Any time you’re working with a
product of Mother Nature there are bound to
be unexplained exceptions to every rule.
I spent last evening with a friend who has a
new guitar. He explained that when he analyzed the tone of it on his computer screen,
he noticed an overtone “around 600 Hz”
that was making him nuts. Now, mind you
he couldn’t actually hear this; he could only
know it was there by analyzing the tonal
spectrum on the computer. My advice?
Embrace the mystery and just play the thing.
So, as builders and as players, we can either
let these things drive us nuts, or we can go
with the flow… in the words of Iris Dement,
“Let the mystery be.” I have always noticed
that the better guitar player a person is, the
less time they seem to have spent learning about the mechanics of it. They usually
have a good setup person for that sort of
thing, and they spend their time letting
the music coming out of the thing move
them. My partner, Jeff Huss, recently carried some guitars to a venue to show to a
guy who’s a player in a major touring act.
One of the guitars was a Brazilian rosewood
dreadnought. When he got back to the shop
the next day, Jeff commented that the guy
was one of the best guitar players he had
ever seen, and that he had bought both the
Brazilian “D”, and an OM that he had with
him. Jeff said the guy really “pulled good
tone,” as they say where I come from. When
I asked what the guy thought of the Brazilian
the “D” was made from, Jeff said that he
never turned it over to look at it. He just sat
and played and figured out which guitars
moved him to make music. In the end, it’s
not a bad way to judge an instrument.
The greatest danger for us as guitar players
is to start to see the instrument more as a
mechanical thing than as a vehicle of expression. If your guitar is broke, get it fixed. If
it’s working, sit down and hold it up to your
ear and remember why you started to play
in the first place.
Wayne Adams
Mark Dalton
Mark Dalton is a founding partner of Huss and Dalton
Guitar Co. When not building guitars, Mark and his wife,
Kimberly, tend to the draft horses and mules that inhabit
their farm in the Piedmont region of Virginia.
