Official Luthiers Forum!

Thought you guys would like to see the latest. This one is a prototype; more "production" guitars to follow. The next one will go to a gentleman in Singapore who already has to electroCoustics. He commissioned the project.....so it's HIS fault.

Anyway, the basic construction is similar to my steel string electroCoustics, ie, solid double carved Western Red Cedar body, mahogany neck with cocobolo appointments.

The pup system is different from my other instruments, since I obviously can't use a magnetic pup, this one has a simple Fishman(Martin) ampjack preamp, and a V/T network that I designed. But the pickup itself is rather different. I used a coaxial polyemr piezo cable for the UST...this stuff was purchased from a company that makes "perimeter alarms" from it. It's just a coax piezo really, but does lack a certain "quack" that we're all so familiar with.

Anyway, here's a photo and several short clips. The first one is my ham handed playing on a bossa arrangement, the second and third are from a local player who was kind enough(and open minded enough) to come over and give it a shot. Thanks for the look/listen, and critique the tone and "look" if you will.

Dave

http://www.electrocoustic.com/audio/eclassic2.mp3

http://www.electrocoustic.com/audio/crahan-classical.mp3

http://www.electrocoustic.com/audio/crahan-newage.mp3

Very nice looking and sounding design. Do you have any "sound chambers" cut inside the body? I'd be interested in finding out more about the pickup. It sounds very good. Is coaxial polyemr piezo cable something that anyone can buy? By the way your "ham handed playing" sounded the best of the three samples. Perhaps that is because your guest player is used to playing a normal classical and wasn't used to the solid body design.

The cable is available from Measurement Specialties,

http://www.msiusa.com/piezo/piezo_coax_cable.htm

The body is 'double' carved...take a look at the first page of my site, there's a cross section photo....

I work in a research lab where we have bought about 2 miles of that cable. I'm ashamed to admit I've never hooked it up to a guitar. They sell two varieties of the cable. One has a spiral wrap of piezo material, and the other has the piezo material coated on the inner wire and is more expensive. Unless there is a huge difference in sound, you want the expensive kind, because the wrapped kind is a royal pain to connect to other wire. The expensive stuff is incredibly easy.

There used to be a warning not to try to buy it for guitar pickups because they already had a deal with someone. I assume this is still in effect