Week 1

colorofarose
Oct 16, 2014
2 min read

Hi! My name is Daniel Rosenfarb, welcome to my blog! I hope to share a bit of my experience through my training and practicing in the art of Luthiere. I'm taking a one-on-one course

with the wonderful Brian Hawkins, of Hawkins guitars, located here in Virginia Beach Va. You can check out his site HERE! he makes some beautiful

sounding and looking guitars, let me tell you!

The first thing Brian taught me, after he asked me what kind of sound I wanted to get out of the guitar, was all about wood. I know crazy right? To be more specific he taught me to find the nodal point through something called "tap toning"(The nodal point is the point where the guitar hits the harmonics of the wood just right, thus making it sing!). In my left hand I held my thumb and pointer in the right spot, while in my right I tapped all around the wood, almost like you would lightely tap a hand drum. At the same time I placed my ear up to it, and listened for the harmonic qualities of the wood. WHOAH! I never knew the diversity of tone you get from one piece of wood to another! My imagination began swimming with visions (although unseasoned and premature) of what each piece of wood could potentially sound like once made into a guitar.

I then learned to bookmatch, which is when you match the two tops to eachother to look like one piece and the two backs to each other so they'll look like one piece. Once we went through several pieces of wood for tops, and again went through several back pieces, I finally chose a beautiful set of koa for my back and sides, and a high grade sitka spruce for my top.

*Click HERE to see a list of some of Brians tonewoods!

We then began to draw a line on the sides, to where we wanted to cut with the bandsaw, which I then learned to use for the first time!

The rest of the day was pretty much spent learning thickness sanding, how to use the machine and how to measure the thickness of the wood, we took quite a bit off...

We first sanded the sides....