Alexandru Marian Spanish Guitars

The second recent double top has an all-cedar soundboard with black limba back and sides. This is an interesting African wood, very light, rather similar to mahogany. The back and sides of this guitar are reinforced and stiff in a modern way. I have been quite excited by the result. The first string is well bodied and the overall sound is delightfully powerful and rich. Nasality is well controlled, might I say even absent, the bass and overall voice are not overly dark and cavernous (for my taste, a major downside with many doubletops)

In 2024 I have crossed to the dark side twice, meaning i built two double tops. Of course, maximum volume at any cost has never been my goal, so on both I did my best to boost the response of a traditional guitar without sacrificing the tone.

First one has two cedar skins with a secret wood (not balsa) core and Madagascar rosewood body. 7 brace fan reminiscent of Santos or Romanillos, lightweight overall construction (single sides, active back). Recordings have: nylon strings for the video, carbon for the wav. As always no reverb, EQ, no enhancements.

Very excited to have started my guitar no. 90. Coincidentally I am building it for a very close friend, who happens to have also commissioned my guitar no. 2 in 2008. The soundboard is 12 years old spruce from the Italian Tyrol and the bracing and voicing are loosely similar to the 1937 Segovia Hauser from. Among many other small details, a difference is my usual elevated neck. The neck is Honduras mahogany with Blackwood fingerboard and reinforcement; Macassar headplate, Bois de Rose binding.

This is not a true step by step tutorial for beginners, but basically just the photos that looked pretty enough…

Step 1: The neck blank, and a shorter neck like piece, are planed and trued very carefully as to be perfectly square and straight. The neck receives a diagonal cut, these new faces are again planned very carefully. The other piece is cut into 4 which are then turned into the heel block. Photos show the cutting for the head, and the glue up. The heel is first glued 2 by 2 and then next day, glued again. All four in one go is an unnecessary complication when using hide glue.

Step 2: I cut a channel for the reinforcement heart. I use a chisel to remove the bulk, makes the routing easier. These days I much prefer to use a specially selected stiff piece of wood, glued with hide vs. carbon and synthetic glue. Next I attach the headplate (also with hide glue) and leave everything to rest for a few days. At this point I also thin the fingerboard.

Step 3: I start working the soundboard. First it is joined in a special jig, then cleaned and leveled, then the rosette is inlaid. Most of my rosettes are done in 3 stages over 3 days using circles I slice from wider laminations. The outside face is leveled and cleaned to perfection (even if it gets dirty and (hopefully not) dinged in the next stages). The soundboard is then thinned to a target resonance, stiffness and weight. I plane, tap, listen, record, analyze, write all the numbers and impressions down. This is the base for choosing the bracing wood and scheme and together with the resulting final sound, the base for the next guitar in this style. Next is to brace the soundboard, over 3-4 days. First the bridge and hole patches, which are then carved and tuned, then the fan, then the fan carving and tuning, then the cross braces, then the final tuning and Chladni tests.

Step 4. The neck is re-checked and re-trued following the reinforcement insertion. Headstock is carved, drilled and routed, fingerboard is slotted and glued with hide. This will rest for approximately one month to ensure all humidity has dispersed.

Step 5. I thin and bend the sides. I join the back, level and clean it and in this case, also insert a decorative backstrip. Then I bring it to a final stiffness and weight.

Step 6: On the back I glue what i call the back spine, and next day the cross braces. Instead of a thin patch, I glue an actual stiff brace along the center seam. This is planed to fit the curvature of my radius dish. It helps the back retain that curvature very nicely. I also think a stiffer back is better than a flimsy back – to avoid projection loss. This is nothing new, other luthiers have been boosting the vertical stiffness of the back in various ways. But one thing I never seen elsewhere is to keep the vertical brace uncut. I just carefully score and remove about 1mm to create a slight pocket? or notch? in which the cross brace locks in. Most of the wood is removed from the cross braces. In this way, the vertical brace maintains its integrity and effect on the back plate, while the intersection is aesthetically cleanest.

Back braces carved and tuned, shellac seal coats, heel block carved, testing wedge locking the sides.

Assembly:

-glue neck to soundboard
-glue endblock to sides and top, glue the sides into the neck with wedges, glue each of the 140 connecting teeth (dentellones or peones in Spanish). Plane them with a special small round plane to remove glue stains.
-glue sides braces and sides-to-back connecting teeth.

-Before closing the box, the back peones and sides braces are cleaned, smoothed and sealed with shellac. The entire rim is rubbed with a radius dish covered in sandpaper, followed by planing the sanded areas, until the dish sits on the back with no visible gap (this is checked with a powerful light inside) The back is placed over the rim in a (hopefully) centered position, the brace end positions carefully marked on the rim, the pockets are cut. This is something slow with lots of trials (again with light inside) because rushing through will certainly result in sloppy pockets with gaps around the brace end. First thing another luthier notices when peeking through the hole is a bad fit between brace end and pockets, also bad fit between back and rim, shoddy lining details etc etc. The the back is glued. For some reason I didn’t find much photo inspiration today, except one when painting shellac. The wet shellac really popped the side rosewood but it is not particularly visible in the image.

Next steps after closing the box: trimming away all excess top and back, scrape sides clean and flat, inlay end piece connecting the sides. I usually use a simple scheme here, with a side offcut and simple veneer lines but in this case I am mirroring the back center strip.

Cleaning veneers then laminating:

Bridge work: holes, channels routed, tieblock edge unbleached bone inlay installed, bottom planed with a specialized compass plane, then scraped to also be concave across the width, bridge finsihed with a few french polish sessions applied. Purfling blanks are planed straight, calibrated and cut into strips, binding blank is scraped clean and flat before laminating to the side purfling.

Binding work:

A few more shots as the binding is finished and leveled.

Fret pressing. One of the steps which now, when I use a press, brings me joy and satisfaction. The traditional way of hammering directly on the guitar is incredibly frustrating and anxiety inducing, followed by a lot of obnoxious work releveling and refinishing the frets. In the first photo you can see the initial leveling of the fretboard using a high precision diamond plate. After curing, the fretboard shows a slight concavity as the hide glue pulls inside the concavity scraped on the back of the fingerboard.

Neck fitted and glued in place:

Bridge glued, neck carving, first sound check.

Strings off and starting to detail it. The guitar might seem “done” but finishing the neck, cleaning everything, rounding the edges, chasing any valleys and dings and small defect is actually several days, of long hours of filing, scraping and sanding. And then, everything will be rubbed with alcohol and pumice creating a paste that besides filling the pores will dirty up a lot of things that shouldn’t be dirtied…and then again we start cleaning and leveling and detailing, before the first shellac coat. And that, always reveals more discreet defects which require more detailing….

Pore filling, first shellac coats, etc

A recent delivery from last years build batch. Special quality Austrian spruce and Madagascar rosewood. Hauser hommage soundboard but with elevated neck and armrest. Audio sample from an early polishing phase. No reverb/enhancements etc, purely the dry sound from the workshop.

Torres homage with Romanian spruce and maple, brass tornavoz, 640 scale. Figured Spanish cedar neck, Malaysian blackwood fingerboard, Madagascar rosewood headplate, bridge and binding, Gotoh premium aluminium tuners.

Video recorded raw, without polish. Nylon strings, no reverb.

A Hauser hommage built with a highly rare figured Amazon rosewood body and Italian bearclaw spruce soundboard. Elevated neck of figured Sipo, African blackwood, Macassar headplate, stainless frets; wenge binding, NOS Fustero tuners. This guitar produced one of my most memorable recording sessions in the wonderful hands of Bogdan Mihailescu.

This is the first time I try a more parallel fan with all harmonic bars open, resembling the famous 1973 Romanillos used by Julian Bream. The plantilla is my typical medium/small I also use for Torres type builds. I can describe the sound as warm and deep, more so than the size suggests. The delivery is eloquent which produced a very pleasing fast Scarlatti (check the audio link at the end). The soundboard is stiff Carpathian spruce with an unusually dark and beautiful Indian rosewood body. Maple binding and light green accents in the rosette and purfling, Gotoh premium tuners.

This is my second in a series of guitars which take inspiration from the work of Dominique Field, this time in Red Cedar and 640 scale. With the addition of an elevated neck and a discreet soundport, I believe these offer an excellent blend of tone, volume, projection and playability, perfectly bridging the gap between purely traditional guitars and modern, heavy body lattice braced soundboards.

This set of Ziricote has been in my possession for more than 10 years. Perfectly quartersawn and virtually impossible to improve upon. Finest quality old rosewood headplate and bridge, matched in figure to the ziricote, ziricote headstock back, maple binding, African blackwood fingerboard, steel frets, cedrella neck, Gotoh premium tuners. 

I am including a couple videos, as always the pure sound as it came from the microphones, without any silly reverb or any other enhancement. First with zero finish (raw wood) and second with partial finish on, giving a more polished, closer to final sample. Also including a video from when I was bending the sides, quite terrified at the prospect of anything going wrong, as ziricote has a reputation of being extremely delicate. These actually bent like butter with zero distortions or any other of the usual bending issues.

This is my smaller shape, Torres based guitar but which I am now reluctant to call a Torres hommage anymore. Through slow evolution it has migrated towards a more balanced sound, slightly more forward, clear and projecting than a close Torres replica. It might be close to what Romanillos tried to teach his students: a versatile, well balanced small bodied spruce traditional guitar.

The soundboard is Carpathian spruce, body and bridge Indian rosewood. African blackwood fingerboard with stainless steel frets, cedro neck and Ceylon satinwood binding.

Unfortunately no pro player demoing this one, just me trying it when absolutely new born and bare wood.

This is a 2018/2019 build which I neglected to post. I think it has matured with a very interesting tone, modern yet not artificial or non-guitaristic, which for me is essential when building a concert guitar. Specs are lattice braced German spruce top, mahogany elevated neck, Amazon rosewood body, old rosewood bridge and armrest. For the sound samples two excellent modern pieces by Romanian composers Dan Dediu and Catalin Stefanescu.