Joshl-m archtop build

paulmcevoy75

https://www.djangobooks.com/forum/discussion/comment/119692#Comment_119692

I find that article a little silly. My ideal is that, sound port or not, you design a guitar towards an acoustic goal and a tone that you're imagining or have already realized. This thing where you're covering or not covering stuff, it's a bit of a shotgun approach...sort of hoping that one or the other will work. Which is not to say that adjusting things after you finish a guitar is "bad" but when he's saying the guitar sounds muffled or whatever with the sound port closed, well what was your intention when you design the guitar? If you designed it to have a soundport and you cover the soundport, then it should sound muffled relative to the soundport open. But if you are like ok, I can close it or open it, which one sounds better, it sort of points to not really having a mark you're aiming towards.

I recently built a classical guitar with a soundport. It was my first soundport. It sounds fine. But not great. And not as good as other classical guitars I've built. Tbh none of that has to do with the soundport, mostly me not hitting the marks I wanted to hit in other regards. I wouldn't blame the soundport for the things in the guitar that aren't amazing, but by the same token if the guitar was amazing I wouldn't think it was the soundport that made it great. It's part of an wholistic system.

paulmcevoy75

Ps apologies for being generally pendantic here. I'm still formulating my own understanding of how all these things work and it grinds in my brain a lot during my work day so I think it comes out in an annoying package.

Buco

@paulmcevoy75 I don't think anyone is seeing and using the soundport as an overall design enhancement. It doesn't make the guitar better. Do luthiers who usually use the SP on their builds do any changes to the overall construction and design to compensate for it? I thought not. You make the best guitar you can. If you like what the SP does, which is mostly to the player's ears, you add one. That's all. You're not gonna screw up otherwise good guitar. What you described in the earlier post, as far as the changes, all stands. But it seems like, the difference to the audience is negligible. It's all about the difference it makes for the player. I would say the analogy is the sound with the SP is closer to what you hear when you place your ear on the side of the guitar. Not as dramatic of course. I think that's where the "muffled" description comes from, in comparison it's almost like it sounds muffled.

billyshakes

Here's some of John Monteleone's thoughts on the soundports in his guitars and their effects. He does speak to the dynamics of the guitar based on construction (i.e. bracing, etc) but also talks about air volume changes and how one of the ports acts more as a monitor, where the other gives different tonal characteristics. Pretty interesting comments. Seems even he didn't know how it would turn out when he tried it.

https://youtu.be/fBNRB0GUnlI?si=sqG3KswR-RIn4nbV&t=403