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So much good stuff to read in this thread.
What really stood out in the video is a certain humbleness from the people involved in the project. At least it came out that way. They went to the research with a blank slate and an open mind. Angelo sounded so giddy talking about the guitar. There was a lot of joy in his voice (I wonder if he's going to get one...)
A few things that Gerald said caught my ear, one of which was when he said in the beginning had Selmer continued making guitars, they would be making Selmers, they wouldn't be making copies of Selmers. It's as if he's answering the question about some of their modernized approach to building.
I'm curious what they've done that makes the weight so high at 2.25 kg (5 lb). That's a pretty large increase, almost 40%, on Selmer 503 at ~1.65 kg (~3.6 lb).
It has the truss rod, but so does my Barault which weighs in at ~1.7kg, so it's not (just) this extra metal.
Pickup, preamp, volume control, solid brass parts... label covered with the layers of gold, diamonds encrusted binding, secret compartment with Django's pick reproduction (that would be cool actually) etc...
I'm going with 'designed for durability'. Something you need in a €15k collector's piece. I've had an old flamenco guitar or two that were insanely loud and responsive but wafer-thin all round. The usual working life expectancy for that kind of instrument is about 3 years.
https://youtu.be/sDO_dJYl8PE?si=BO6bL0Es9Ij1XQKp
They shoulda just put a "hide glue" label over that jug. That picture is kinda funny.
FWIW, the two restoration experts I know well prefer hide or fish glue for rebuilding vintage instruments. There various structural/maintenance reasons for that preference, and maybe (in the case of, say, old Martins) sonic ones.
As for vintage-replica/structural vs. sonic correctness, I again defer to my luthier friends. The presence or absence of a truss rod can have structural implications. Same with, say, fingerboard material. And both might affect the final sound. But there are so many variables in a build formula that the range of possible outcomes is really hard to predict or control (cue Al Carruth on quantifiable characteristics).
In my active-journalist days I interviewed a lot of builders and came away with the strong impression that control of voice is an art that can be achieved by an individual builder and encouraged in a small-shop or even a factory environment, but the more people involved in the build process, the harder it is to maintain consistency. It's not impossible to have a "brand" sound, but the range of departures from the ideal is going to increase with the number of hands involved. I have the good fortune to own five guitars I know to have been built by a single set of hands, and for three of those builders I have played multiple examples of their work. Their voicing and playability are quite consistent across the samples I've encountered. And I've found similar consistency in small-shop instruments (notably Goodall).
If Selmers built across a span of decades demonstrate a consistency of voice, that suggests standardized shop practices that could produce a consistent product. And I wonder how many of those practices were rooted in something other than producing a given voice--say, structural integrity or production efficiency or cost control. Once there's a design formula that produces the basic voice, production practices will determine how far individual instruments will depart from that ideal. (I'm thinking of all those old Martin dreads and Epiphone archtops.)
Django didn't play a Mark IV or whatever.
Thx. Now I can't stop picturing Django wearing sunglasses and blowing through a sax in full Coltrane pose.
and in the end if you sit in front of a friend playing 5 different guitars and your friend is blindfolded he will have a hard time telling the difference between the guitars, but 5 different players on the same guitar will be way easier sonically. I think we all want to feel like the guitar makes a huge difference and there is inspiration from playing a great instrument but in the end to the end listener the results are small.
www.scoredog.tv
Hide Glue has amazing qualities. #1 most amazing is that it's reversible which puts it into the sort of art restoration space, everything you do should be undo-able. I think it genuinely is physically harder than yellow glue like Titebond, but I would be willing to be that zero people could hear the different if you could blindfold test someone on two otherwise identical guitars. I would bet a large amount of money on that. For repairs it is cool because of the reversibility. It's essential for violin making because violins are made to be taken apart. If you have to take a guitar apart, something very bad happened.
Hide glue I think also has a high melting temperature once cured than titebond. Or at least it's somewhat less likely to creep at high temperatures, like in the back of a car.
But lots and lots and lots of really high end luthiers use Titebond for everything. Some people use a mix. I will used either hide glue or epoxy for braces for the most part (epoxy while I'm experimenting with carbon fiber, hide glue otherwise, although I did use titebond recently for one of my vacuum bagging experiments).
Ultimately I don't think it makes any difference in sound, whatsoever. You shouldn't leave your guitar in a hot car, regardless. I guess maybe I think there's a teeny tiny chance hide glue might be slightly superior for gluing braces but if I really examine it in my head, it shouldn't make a difference. It's kind of fun to use it for some stuff though.