Reischman Loar Split-top Experiment?

[Mike Black]

I've been thinking about this recently and thought that I'd ask.

This might be a question for Bruce/Spruce mostly. I remember a few years ago Bruce brought up the idea that John Reichman's Loar may have had two different tone woods on it. Bruce offered the suggestion to have some mandolins made that had a Red Spruce Treble side and Sitka Bass side. I know at lest one and maybe two of them were made.

My question was...How did they turn out? Anyone know?

[Michael Lewis]

What would you expect the response to be with a top like that? Inquiring minds and all . . . . . . . .

[Kevin K]

Very interesting. I've heard a guitar made by the Nashville Guitar Company made like that. I heard it when brand new so it was really stiff would like to hear it after years of playing.

[Mike Black]

Bruce supplied several people wood for at top like this, and I haven't thought about it in awhile, until recentley coming across my set.

I believe the reason for the two different top wood was to get a clear punchy trebel with the Red Spruce and a warm full bass with the Sitka Spruce.

I remember one or two actually being built and sent around to different people to test out. Anyone here the one who made it or played it?

I'm hoping that Bruce / Spruce will chim in.

[Don Grieser]

I think Will Kimble built one like that. I never played it, though.

[danb]

Could the folks who suspect it has 2 species walk me through the argument for that? One side is clearly off-quarter (The bass side). This can been seen in the cross section of the grain on the f-holes. Just wondering what else there is to the idea. We've been through it before, but it sounds again like an unsettled question to me.

By the way- John once very kindly let me have a pick on his Loar, and I'd say that the bulk of what you hear of his signature amazing tone is coming from John's right hand. I could get a nice sound out of it, but nowhere near the sound of the man and his Mandolin perfectly in tune with one another.

[Will Kimble]

I built one like that years ago with Bruce's encouragement, was engelmann on the bass side and red on the treble side. Turned out fine and is still being played and enjoyed. My personal conclusion is that there isn't a "bass side" or "treble side" in terms of sound production and it is better to use a homogeneous piece of wood for the top.

Will Kimble
www.kimblemandolins.com

[stratman62]

I got to play that Kimble last week and also sat straight across from for a couple of hours
while the owner was playing it. It has the deepest, sweet tone of any f-hole I have been
in close contact with. I left with a deep case of mando jealousy.

[sunburst]

My personal conclusion is that there isn't a "bass side" or "treble side" in terms of sound production and it is better to use a homogeneous piece of wood for the top.

I agree there's no bass side and treble side, but I'm not so sure homogeneity is any particular advantage. I think you can build a good mandolin with the same wood on each side and I think you can build a good mandolin with different wood on each side.

[danb]

I've seen 3, 5 piece tops on A models that sounded good.. I think Bruce told me a story about an 11-piece top on an A, though I'm not sure.

A really nice-sounding A2z had 2 tiny little 1/2" "wings" to make a very odd 3-piece layout, for example

[Jim Hilburn]

It seems to me that Lloyd must have thought there was a bass and a treble side when he came up with the positioning of the tonebars.

[MikeEdgerton]

You can turn most mandolins over, recut the nut and the bridge and restring them as Lefty's with no real appreciable difference in sound. If you can convert to left handed I don't know how much effect those tonebars have. Granted most folks don't convert F models but if it doesn't affect the A models I don't see how it would affect the F's.

Past threads on lefty conversions

[Ken Olmstead]

I think Weber built one or two englemann/red spruce tops like this. Maybe one of the Elites? Interesting concept but apparently did not warrant further production.

[Rick Turner]

A number of guitar makers build with two tone tops. Harry Fleischman is one of them, and he does fake dovetails with the center seam.

While there may very well be something to be said for building asymmetry into a top and its bracing patterns in order to control the modal vibration of the plate, the idea that there are specifically a bass and treble side to the top to which the bass and treble strings "belong" doesn't seem to hold up to scrutiny, though the idea is appealing. Guitars don't seem to much care about being converted to leftie, either.

[Bill Snyder]

Not a mandolin, but Howard Klepper has built guitars with split tonewood tops and backs.
If you want to know more about this guitar see the specs at his website.

[danb]

it's quite interesting to me that the Loar (and other gibson) tops were frequently quite far off quarter-sawn. You hardly ever see that nowadays. The interference pattern you see from the medullary rays is something that has always been a negative for me on instruments aiming to look like vintage ones.

I did a little googling and found a good article at lutherie.net about rays.

the f5 topJamie put on for me was hunted down with this in mind, the idea being that it would have less depth of wood figure on the top to make the sunburst look more vintage. The supplier described the look as "dead" and undesirable!

[sunburst]

The spruce that Gibson had in the days of Loar was apparently milled from lumber. When sawmills mill lumber they don't pay much attention to grain run out, and only a very few boards are perfectly "quartered". Much "tonewood" today comes from split stock so run out is minimal and most tops have grain exactly on quarter. Most of the Loars I've examined show run out in the tops, off-quarter grain, and even mismatched top halves. Bruce figures somebody must have really wanted red spruce in those tops for them to use the wood that they did, which was basically what they could get whether well milled or not. We simply have better top wood now than Gibson had in the 20s, so the "silk" (rays) shows up in the tops.
This is not the first time I've run across the idea that the silk in the top doesn't look "vintage". Guitar builders and players tend to recognize silk as a sign of quality because it indicates vertical grain, but I've talked to Loar owners and mandolin builders who don't like it because it doesn't look like a Loar top and they actually seek out "inferior" wood for the vintage look. Inferior, that is, in how it is processed for use as tops.

I had the chance to examine two 1923 Loar mandolins (one a July 9 with a one piece back!) and a 1924 Loar-signed mandola this past weekend. All of them had run out in the tops.

[Spruce]

"I remember a few years ago Bruce brought up the idea that John Reichman's Loar may have had two different tone woods on it."

Well, two pieces of wood that appear to be from two different trees...
But both spruce...



"I agree there's no bass side and treble side, but I'm not so sure homogeneity is any particular advantage. "

Well, a lot of the verbage on this subject arises from my experience with groking the wood in old Italian violins...
You see a lot of miss-matched wood, with a tendency towards wider-grained wood on the bass side and tighter on the treble.

And no run-out.
Ever.

Which led to my theory that the woodcutters at the time might have been harvesting violin wood in the field, splitting each half of the top out of the billet on-site.

This would facilitate faster drying without fungusing, as well as providing wood to the builder that was ready-to-roll. After all, who had a bandsaw kicking around to split a billet down the middle??

The lack of runout is the giveaway. I've yet to run into a Strad, Amati, or any other violin of the period with bi-refraction in the top.

I think those wood cutters were basically splitting shingles in the Val Di'Fiemme, and possibly even selling them as single pieces...
There's certainly much less emphasis placed on the importance of bookmatching during the period...

And, that has led to the discussion in violin circles that some of those makers were intentionally miss-matching their wood...



"I got to play that Kimble last week and also sat straight across from for a couple of hours
while the owner was playing it. It has the deepest, sweet tone of any f-hole I have been
in close contact with."

Here tis:




"I think Bruce told me a story about an 11-piece top on an A, though I'm not sure."

Gawd, my BS is catching up with me...



"While there may very well be something to be said for building asymmetry into a top and its bracing patterns in order to control the modal vibration of the plate, the idea that there are specifically a bass and treble side to the top to which the bass and treble strings "belong" doesn't seem to hold up to scrutiny, though the idea is appealing."

Yeah, it is....

When you bang on pieces of spruce, some are obviously leaning towards the bassier end of the spectrum, and some are very high-pitched...

Mixing them up seems like an interesting idea to at least consider...



"it's quite interesting to me that the Loar (and other gibson) tops were frequently quite far off quarter-sawn. "

I'm in possession of a spec-sheet for the various Gibson instruments pre-Loar, and the tolerance for the mandolins--including the F4 and other higher end instruments--was as much as 45 degrees.

Yikes!

[Big Joe]

Charlie D always had a preference for slab cut rather than quarter sawn. He said he could hear a difference, and I have no reason to doubt his conclusion. That being said, I could never really hear a difference. Each has its fans, but I reallly don't think that makes as much difference as the graduations, tone bars, size of F holes, and the person actually playing the instrument. Loar often used unmatched pieces of red spruce on his mandolins...especially the tops. After many discussions with Charlie on this it seems that was just the way the pieces of wood were there. They did not try to match the pieces at that time so whatever right half they had is what was used with whatever left half they had. They were not trying to book match them. I don't know if that affects tone much, but the Loars certainly do sound good !

[Spruce]

They did not try to match the pieces at that time so whatever right half they had is what was used with whatever left half they had. They were not trying to book match them.

Yeah, but what is interesting is that the other mandolins in the line during the period were bookmatched, and tended to be more quartered, if not dead-on.

That is what is interesting to me....

[Will Kimble]

A couple quick thoughts - the assymetry of the tone bars may help accentuate bass or treble, but as has been mentioned I think they would be equally effective if you switched the sides. I also think of the bridge as a filter that transmits bass & treble vibrations equally through its entire base.

Jumping ahead - I think the interaction of the top & back plates produces most of your bass response, and the center of the top has a lot to do the character and power of the trebles. To me, these variables both seem easier and more predictable to manipulate with a homogeneous top.

Most of us are using wood that is MUCH more carefully harvested than what Gibson was using in the 20s. It looks like it is almost all slip matched to me.

One of the other lessons I learned when I built the two top mandolin was that a competent builder could make a good mandolin with a much wider range of materials than is commonly accepted.

Regards,
Will Kimble
www.kimblemandolins.com

[woodwizard]

This is very interesting reading.

[sunburst]

a competent builder could make a good mandolin with a much wider range of materials than is commonly accepted.

Amen to that!
I rarely reject wood as substandard for structure or performance, and only slightly more as substandard visually. Wood suppliers have a hard time selling anything other than evenly colored, evenly grained, "boring" looking wood, even to student builders who are going to apply a dark sunburst stain over the ideal-looking wood in their student-built early instruments. It could just as well have had streaks and uneven color, knot shadows, or other "defects". A lot of great tonewood gets trashed by sellers because it doesn't meet the aesthetic standards of the market while the wood might have gone on to being part of a great sounding instrument.

[MikeEdgerton]

...A lot of great tonewood gets trashed by sellers because it doesn't meet the aesthetic standards of the market while the wood might have gone on to being part of a great sounding instrument.

Yup, who'd want the wood on the left when you could have the wood on the right

[Darryl Wolfe]

I'll take door number one on the left. Fire poker and all