heres something i found in my email box from acoustic guitar magazine interesting approach to guitar design
Batson Guitars’ Scientific Lutherie
Since they started building guitars in the late ’90s, brothers Cory and Grant Batson have earned the respect of players including Don Ross, Ed Cash, and Tim Thompson by taking a fresh-eyed and open-minded approach to guitar design that often eschews tradition in pursuit of the most resonant, harmonically rich, and playable acoustic guitar possible. Their guitars, which are based on the familiar shapes, feature many structural elements, like soundports and fanned frets, favored by several next-generation luthiers. The Nashville-based guitar company has also successfully introduced signature inventions like its truss-bracing system.
Path to Innovation
Cory Batson’s love for guitar building stemmed from his early teens, after his father helped him build a rolltop desk, which led to Cory working at a custom furniture shop. Later, after his guitar was stolen and he realized that he could not afford to buy the Lowden he cherished, Cory began his first steps toward becoming a luthier.
“I always really enjoyed physics,” Cory says. “It was my favorite course in college. And in [one of the books], the author talked a lot about the soundboard working like a drum, which I related to as a drummer. It raised a bunch of questions for me—basically why, if a soundboard works like a well-tuned drumhead, would you cut holes in it and weigh it down with things like heavy bridges?”
That thinking led to experiments in removing mass from the soundboard to enhance its vibrational capacity. To that end, the Batsons designed a two-piece bridge that weighed only about 20 percent of a standard bridge’s mass. Further experiments led to what has become a staple of Batson design, the ShorTail tailpiece—a structural element that might look more at home on an archtop to the average player, but which improves the soundboard’s potential and the guitar’s overall playability. “The principal function of the ShorTail tailpiece is to make sure that the saddle is the only thing on the top,” Cory says. “But the reason our tailpiece is short, compared to an archtop or something, is because that longer string length reduces string tension. I’ve had players comment that it makes medium-gauge strings feel like light-gauge strings.”
Batson Guitars’ signature truss bracing system is both aesthetically elegant and acoustically advantageous, says Cory Batson. The design was based to some extent on the principles of architectural bridge and building design, where flexibility is built in to respond to dynamic or variable loads. Batson’s thin, lightweight truss braces, which actually bear some resemblance to bridge spans and supports, are designed to expand the guitar’s frequency response—treating bass, treble, and the volume or delicacy with which a player plays as the dynamic load. “With truss bracing I get much more volume, sustain, and low frequency out of a guitar,” Cory says. “Low frequency is the hardest thing to get out of an acoustic guitar. And though truss bracing is really strong, it’s really light, and I can free up the top to let those long-wave bass frequencies vibrate a little more.”
By Charles Saufley
