sequoia
Well-known member
I spent over an hour with my master guitar luthier friend talking about sides and the depth of the box. His verdict? The height of the sides makes very little difference in how the top responds and the sound of the instrument until you get to the extreme ends of very, very thin or very, very deep. He has done extensive experiments on this. He did this by using binding tape to tape a back on a guitar with a top glued on and running it through the band saw to get a thinner and thinner body after each test. The testing was quantitative rather than qualitative using acoustic measuring equipment. In a nutshell (and this was a long, long conversation so I will summarize) this is what he found: Much to his surprise, it made almost no difference how the instruments sounds (responds).
So just for the fun of it, I'm going to make a thin ukulele and see how it sounds. I don't have any fancy sound measuring instruments so it will be qualitative (how does the thing sound?) rather than quantitative. I basically pulled a number out of the air as half the depth of my usual ukes sides which worked out to 1 and 5/16th at the waist (not counting back and top thickness). The usual straight taper of 3/16th was reduced to 1/8 inch.
Nothing like actually doing something rather than thinking about it to immediately reveal problems (challenges?). First off the neck to body joint area is greatly reduced thus bringing in structural integrity issues. Maybe the size of the standard box is dictated not by what it sounds like, but by issues of neck to body structural issues? And second, it becomes immediately obvious that the sides are integral to how the box is strengthened overall by the height of the sides.
Just to be on the safe side (and my friend says no worries it will sound just fine meaning it will sound like a toy guitar ha ha ha), I'm going to put in an LR Baggs under saddle transducer. This is a side project so will report back by reviving the thread later which could be awhile. Picture below of the neck and tail blocks in. Pretty thin...
So just for the fun of it, I'm going to make a thin ukulele and see how it sounds. I don't have any fancy sound measuring instruments so it will be qualitative (how does the thing sound?) rather than quantitative. I basically pulled a number out of the air as half the depth of my usual ukes sides which worked out to 1 and 5/16th at the waist (not counting back and top thickness). The usual straight taper of 3/16th was reduced to 1/8 inch.
Nothing like actually doing something rather than thinking about it to immediately reveal problems (challenges?). First off the neck to body joint area is greatly reduced thus bringing in structural integrity issues. Maybe the size of the standard box is dictated not by what it sounds like, but by issues of neck to body structural issues? And second, it becomes immediately obvious that the sides are integral to how the box is strengthened overall by the height of the sides.
Just to be on the safe side (and my friend says no worries it will sound just fine meaning it will sound like a toy guitar ha ha ha), I'm going to put in an LR Baggs under saddle transducer. This is a side project so will report back by reviving the thread later which could be awhile. Picture below of the neck and tail blocks in. Pretty thin...