Official Luthiers Forum!

Mr. Turner I apologize in advance if you find riddles annoying,
from things I have read,

Did you by chance ever hear a Slope D in Koa with ladder bracing?

I think one song the artist/owner of this guitar recorded (written by a guy named Huddie) has the same name as is given the instruments model.

which could be said to be created at a luthrie that shares its name with the Roman temple of the gods.

Its creator gave it some all mahog siblings and Banjo Killer cousins.

From what I have read the artist has been an associate/employer so the is a chance you have maintained/played/heard this instrument.

Is that enough to name the creator, model/song &
artist.

Do you know what he means by modified ladder bracing?



John How and other Craftsmen and players of ladder braced guitars,

My only real experience with ladder bracing is through
my dulcimers.

Tone Faerie informed me I should do my best to seek playing impressions, building intuitions and engineering considerations of small to large LB guitars before attempting an acoustic lap guitar like object(they are really homes for tone faerie).

Small and with mandolinish Chop?

Large and dark but defined?

Effects of playing with string tension,

effects of bridge plate size & material,

effects of changing brace spacing,

Playing with plate thickness,

Things to avoid?

Recipes for success in voicing.

All input appreciated.

   Thanks in advance,
                       Kirby.

_________________
"It's a Tone Faerie thing"
"Da goal is to sharpen ur wit as well as ye Sgian Dubh"
"Sippin Loch Dhu @Black lake" ,Kirby O...

Martin Simpson/Bourgeois/Paragon Martin Simpson Model...

I've played it; I never worked on it and never got inside with a mirror.

Here's the problem with ladder bracing...

Sales.

As small shop luthiers we have to charge more than most people want to pay for the somewhat odd character of ladder braced instruments. I know that both John and John Kinnard at Del Arte do make some ladder braced guitars, and Marc Silber has been involved with making them in Paracho, and they all seem to have customers for them.   My own customers right now want my "X-fan" braced guitars, so that's what I've been building. I'd love to try doing some ladder braced instruments, perhaps adding some carbon fiber to the formula as well as doing the bridge plate with the grain in the same direction as the top grain orientation.   It's worth going back and looking and seeing if the ladder can be updated at some point.

The biggest problem with ladder bracing that I see is that it takes a lot of it to keep the top from looking like a potato chip pretty quickly. The braces are all about cross grain stiffness, and they do little for the torque and pull on the top other than establish hills and dales

I might note that the among highest survival rate without collapsing on
ladder braced instruments seem to be the old 30's Gibsons and Kalamazoos.
Certainly not all of them do well, but they usually fare better than most. A
notable difference on these is the extreme radius they used on tops in the
30's and 40's. A strong compound radius can be a very key structural
feature, as boat builders will certainly attest to.

The ladder braced L-1s, L-0s, and some of the early LG-1s can often still
be found in excellent shape. Of course they were relatively small guitars (I
like to think of the sides as the most important structural brace), so there
are other factors to their survival. I don't want to confuse correlation with
causation, but I think it stands to reason that the heavy top radius played
key a role in their survival.

_________________
Eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation.

Does this sound like a better fit on the riddle?

Dana burgoius-Panthion/Burgous blues/Ry Cooder

""
The biggest problem with ladder bracing that I see is that it takes a lot of it to keep the top from looking like a potato chip pretty quickly. The braces are all about cross grain stiffness, and they do little for the torque and pull on the top other than establish hills and dales

Thats why modified ladder caught my eye.

_________________
"It's a Tone Faerie thing"
"Da goal is to sharpen ur wit as well as ye Sgian Dubh"
"Sippin Loch Dhu @Black lake" ,Kirby O...

[QUOTE=Rick Turner]
The biggest problem with ladder bracing that I see is that it takes a lot of it to keep the top from looking like a potato chip pretty quickly. The braces are all about cross grain stiffness, and they do little for the torque and pull on the top other than establish hills and dales[/QUOTE]

Is that so Rick? Better tell Neil Harpe then with his Stella repros and John How. I'd better go and tell my little Grand Concert and harp guitar the same thing too

I thought you were against people here making sweeping statements about things they had no experience building?

_________________
Dave White
De Faoite Stringed Instruments
". . . the one thing a machine just can't do is give you character and personalities and sometimes that comes with flaws, but it always comes with humanity" Monty Don talking about hand weaving, "Mastercrafts", Weaving, BBC March 2010

Luckily I am my own customer so This can be a quest for a sound in my head and not about how it will look or last. 25 year old Douglas fir top 100 year old df bracing. Touchy about splitting but it will add crispness i.m.o. Trying for crisp, dark and minimize the overtones on this one.

Very light cf lattice for the potato chip prob? But not on this one.

David
L-0's and blues got me thinking about this.

_________________
"It's a Tone Faerie thing"
"Da goal is to sharpen ur wit as well as ye Sgian Dubh"
"Sippin Loch Dhu @Black lake" ,Kirby O...

You meant Pantheon, of course. Remarkably well-preserved building.

Main problem with ladder braced guitars, IMO, is that with rare exceptions they lack depth and complexity of tone. About the best Stella repros I have heard have been the Fraulinis.

Dave, Dave. It has to stop somewhere. Or it ought to.

_________________
Howard Klepper
http://www.klepperguitars.com

When all else fails, clean the shop.

Hi Dave W your red Kite is got me thinking about this a while ago and I still want to do a step top version for a mellower tone.

In my ham handed experiments re-topping cheapies (done a while ago) I did have the potato chip probs but my tops were flat.

_________________
"It's a Tone Faerie thing"
"Da goal is to sharpen ur wit as well as ye Sgian Dubh"
"Sippin Loch Dhu @Black lake" ,Kirby O...

Concerning ladder bracing guitars, it's important to distinguish between
pinned bridge and tailpiece models. Most of the ladder braced guitars that
survive are of the latter (pun intended) style, including most of the Stellas.
The pinned bridge ones typically turn in to pringles. There are of course
occasional survivors, but relatively few.

If you do have good experience with building large body non-tailpiece
ladder braced guitars that are holding up, I'm sure Kirby and some other
folks would be interested in your techniques. Pinned bridge ladder braced
guitars with flat tops rarely survive. If your tops are holding up well without
being terribly overbuilt, it would be interesting to know what you're doing
different from the norm. Top thickness, bracing pattern, top radius, etc.,
could be useful.

_________________
Eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation.

Ah, yes...Pantheon, and I wasn't doing work for Ry when he had that guitar...

As for sweeping statements...I think you only need look at the number of "X" braced guitars vs. ladder braced ones selling in the real guitar market to see that sometimes a sweeping statement may carry a majority of truth. I think it's safe to say that at least 99% of the steel string guitar market is supplied with "X" braced guitars.

Walk into any music store that has an inventory of steel string guitars and try to find one that's ladder braced and retails for over $1,000.00.   

What? Couldn't find any?   Wow!

We in the ivory tower of Luthierstan can get to thinking of ourselves as being awfully important in the overall scheme of things, but in fact we are the fly on the ass of the elephant in the real guitar world. The real guitar world has pretty much rejected ladder braced guitars for anything other than period pieces or ultra cheap-o's.

And David, while I may not choose at this time to build ladder braced guitars, much of my earliest repair work experience was in fixing them. Unlike many contemporary guitar makers who do not have much time in handling old twisted and broken guitars...which is a great way to find out what works and what fails over time...I do, and some of my opinions are based not only on what I build, but what I've repaired over the years. Given two guitars of equal build quality and similar top thickness, I'd say that a ladder braced guitar is twice or more as likely to need major structural repair than an "X" braced one over a generation or three. That's based on a kind of informal historical record of what's come through my hands in 44 years. Some of that may be because the "X" braced guitars were better cared for, having been perceived as being better quality guitars based on tone.

I don't doubt that there is a nice little list of folks making ladder braced guitars, but it's a very specialized market. I would guess that many of the buyers are looking to sound like they had a race change and their music was being played on a 78 rpm record. From a marketing point of view, many of those players do not buy small shop-built guitars; they seek out the vintage ones that are still fairly inexpensive compared to vintage Martins, etc. There are exceptions...the Stella 12 strings, for instance, which are now big bucks. It's a niche market, and it's not likely to grow huge, but I'm glad if some folks can sell hand-made guitars into that market. Just don't confuse a niche with mass acceptance.

An interesting side note: some of my favorite guitars of all times are the Howe Ormes which had the cylinder top and ladder bracing.   The cylinder top adds tremendous longitudinal stiffness with no weight penalty.   That's the direction I'd go with a ladder braced guitar. There are a few problems that show up long term, but they are remarkably robust for such lightly built instruments, and it's because of that longitudinal belly ridge, aka cylinder top.

As for most of the other ladder braced guitars of that era (1890s), most of them, including nearly all the Washburns, are not really very good sounding guitars. The best of the ladder braced ones...the Stellas, etc. came a bit later, and they didn't have a great survival rate.

It will be interesting to see how well contemporary ladder braced guitars hold up over 25 or more years. I've seen tops look kind of wavy on a couple of the Bourgeois guitars...

My inclination would be to go relatively tall and skinny on braces, taper them out nicely to the ends, run the grain with the top grain on the bridge plate, and perhaps even laminate a cross grain piece to it.   Also get the neck angle right so the saddle isn't too high off the top which puts a lot of torque in the bridge area; keep that at 1/2" or so.

The sound in my head is a strong fundamental that lacks over tones for a strong slide attack, not the complex weiss sound.

I sketch and sketch and scribble but nothing feels quite right yet.

Has anyone done glitter patterns they could describe.

Edit for above (Pantheon. oops)

I am running before I crawl on this I know but I find happieness in reaching for a certain sound.

_________________
"It's a Tone Faerie thing"
"Da goal is to sharpen ur wit as well as ye Sgian Dubh"
"Sippin Loch Dhu @Black lake" ,Kirby O...

The sound in my head is a strong fundamental that lacks over tones for a strong slide attack, not the complex weiss sound.

I sketch and sketch and scribble but nothing feels quite right yet.

Has anyone done glitter patterns they could describe.

Edit for above (Pantheon. oops)

I am running before I crawl on this I know but I find happiness in reaching for a certain sound.

_________________
"It's a Tone Faerie thing"
"Da goal is to sharpen ur wit as well as ye Sgian Dubh"
"Sippin Loch Dhu @Black lake" ,Kirby O...

double oops.

I have a floating bridge step top in mind (mellower)
but something is pushing me to do this first.

Thanks Rick I will have to research the Howe Ormes

I don't know bout wanting to sound like I have had a race change but I have spent some of my best times in bayou country and Nacogdoches Tx.

a direction I was thinking was to start with a relatively thick top .250 and carve leave some +- .5 pillars along the grain topped by very light thin braces then carefully fit the heavier cross grain braces to this mess.

have to go for a couple of hours feel free to tell why thats a goofy scheme.

_________________
"It's a Tone Faerie thing"
"Da goal is to sharpen ur wit as well as ye Sgian Dubh"
"Sippin Loch Dhu @Black lake" ,Kirby O...

I have no experience of building ladder braced guitars, I leave that to the experts on them here, that's just John How and Dave. I do however have a lot of experience with ladder braced lutes and early guitars. I have built lutes that have tops in the sub 2mm range that are true flat tops and after years of playing are still flat tops, not potato chipped at all. They are only fitted with gut strings though, not steel, and gut only has about half the pull of steel, however, they do have 15 strings.

More importantly than that I have worked on and rebuilt quite a few original museum specimens as far back as a 1590s Venere, and put them back into playing condition. They do show many age related problems, and often the brace pattern can be seen on the top of the plate, but only because of wood shrinkage, not distortion.

But of course, what do I know?

Colin

_________________
I don't believe in anything, I simply make use of a set of reasonable working hypotheses.

[QUOTE=Rick Turner]
As for sweeping statements...I think you only need look at the number of "X" braced guitars vs. ladder braced ones selling in the real guitar market to see that sometimes a sweeping statement may carry a majority of truth. I think it's safe to say that at least 99% of the steel string guitar market is supplied with "X" braced guitars.

Walk into any music store that has an inventory of steel string guitars and try to find one that's ladder braced and retails for over $1,000.00.   

What? Couldn't find any?   Wow![/QUOTE]

Rick,

What's that got to do with the price of fish or the point I made? And keeping the fish analogy it's a red herring. Mass market or niche means nothing to your statement that you need a lot of bracing to stop the top from looking like a potato chip. I humbly disagree based on the ladder braced guitars I have made. We can argue over the definition of what "a lot". Here's what John How did on one of his:



Here's mine:



And on my harp guitar (12 strings, 230lbs string pull):




[QUOTE]
We in the ivory tower of Luthierstan can get to thinking of ourselves as being awfully important in the overall scheme of things, but in fact we are the fly on the ass of the elephant in the real guitar world. The real guitar world has pretty much rejected ladder braced guitars for anything other than period pieces or ultra cheap-o's. [/QUOTE]

Rick,

I have no illusions or delusions whatsoever about my importance - I just enjoy making lots of different instruments. You will have to make your own assessment of your importance.

[QUOTE]
And David, while I may not choose at this time to build ladder braced guitars, much of my earliest repair work experience was in fixing them. Unlike many contemporary guitar makers who do not have much time in handling old twisted and broken guitars...which is a great way to find out what works and what fails over time...I do, and some of my opinions are based not only on what I build, but what I've repaired over the years. Given two guitars of equal build quality and similar top thickness, I'd say that a ladder braced guitar is twice or more as likely to need major structural repair than an "X" braced one over a generation or three. That's based on a kind of informal historical record of what's come through my hands in 44 years. Some of that may be because the "X" braced guitars were better cared for, having been perceived as being better quality guitars based on tone.[/QUOTE]


Rick,

Yes a lot of early ladder braced guitars blew up or got destroyed in bar-room fights but so did lots of X braced ones too. As you've said in posts before you can learn a lot from guitars that don't work. If the CF Martin driven X hadn't become the main line of evolution in steel string guitars and they'd stayed ladder braced the builders would have learnt and adapted too. It's a bit like Neanderthal and Cro-magnon man - the Neanderthals didn't dy out because they were stupid.

[QUOTE]
I don't doubt that there is a nice little list of folks making ladder braced guitars, but it's a very specialized market. I would guess that many of the buyers are looking to sound like they had a race change and their music was being played on a 78 rpm record. From a marketing point of view, many of those players do not buy small shop-built guitars; they seek out the vintage ones that are still fairly inexpensive compared to vintage Martins, etc. There are exceptions...the Stella 12 strings, for instance, which are now big bucks. It's a niche market, and it's not likely to grow huge, but I'm glad if some folks can sell hand-made guitars into that market. Just don't confuse a niche with mass acceptance.[/QUOTE]

Back to the herrings rouge again Also check out the recordings John How has on his website, particulary the one of Jesu Joy of Man's Desire. I'll do some recordings in DADGAD on mine and post them here to. The sound can be just as complex and versatile as most modern fingerstyle guitars. These are NOT (or don't have to be) just blues and ragtime guitars - although they do this perfectly.

[QUOTE]
An interesting side note: some of my favorite guitars of all times are the Howe Ormes which had the cylinder top and ladder bracing.   The cylinder top adds tremendous longitudinal stiffness with no weight penalty.   That's the direction I'd go with a ladder braced guitar. There are a few problems that show up long term, but they are remarkably robust for such lightly built instruments, and it's because of that longitudinal belly ridge, aka cylinder top.[/QUOTE]

Funny you should mention that . . . guess what I do.

[QUOTE]
As for most of the other ladder braced guitars of that era (1890s), most of them, including nearly all the Washburns, are not really very good sounding guitars. The best of the ladder braced ones...the Stellas, etc. came a bit later, and they didn't have a great survival rate.[/QUOTE]

Ask Martin Simpson about the all mahogany ladder braced Concert guitar dating from around 1915-1920 that he borrowed from me for over 2 years and I have videos of him playing Blind Willie Johnson stuff on that he said was only missing the scratch, scratch, scratch of the 78's

[QUOTE]
It will be interesting to see how well contemporary ladder braced guitars hold up over 25 or more years. I've seen tops look kind of wavy on a couple of the Bourgeois guitars...[/QUOTE]

Could be or maybe not. I'd love to see a survival rate based on population - what percentage of X braced guitars built between 1900 and 1945 are still with us?

[QUOTE]
My inclination would be to go relatively tall and skinny on braces, taper them out nicely to the ends, run the grain with the top grain on the bridge plate, and perhaps even laminate a cross grain piece to it.   Also get the neck angle right so the saddle isn't too high off the top which puts a lot of torque in the bridge area; keep that at 1/2" or so.[/QUOTE]

Funny you should mention that . . . guess what I do.

[QUOTE=Howard Klepper]Main problem with ladder braced guitars, IMO, is that with rare exceptions they lack depth and complexity of tone. About the best Stella repros I have heard have been the Fraulinis.

Dave, Dave. It has to stop somewhere. Or it ought to. [/QUOTE]

Howard,

It's a shame we don't live closer for I'd love you to play these guitars. When I made the first one I thought that it would be just mid-range honk for blues and ragtime but the sound is as complex as any guitar I have so far made and I play Celtic stuff on it a lot in DADGAD and other open tunings.

As to the it has to stop somewhere do you mean ladder braced guitars or me writing this to ensure that mis-conceptions don't become accepted fact - a cause from reading his post here that is very dear to Rick.

_________________
Dave White
De Faoite Stringed Instruments
". . . the one thing a machine just can't do is give you character and personalities and sometimes that comes with flaws, but it always comes with humanity" Monty Don talking about hand weaving, "Mastercrafts", Weaving, BBC March 2010

Well, Dave, I guess for someone whose opinions you don't like too much, I have hit on some of the (perhaps) same and right things that you do to make ladder bracing work.

I still call it a specialty niche market.

And the Martin Simpson example playing Blind Willie Johnson...isn't thatexactly what I was saying...that a (some, many, most?) ladder braced guitars have that 78 rpm sound.

As for the lute example...agreed, and from the internal pictures I've seen they often feature a lot of rungs to the ladder. Check out the Robert Lundberg series in American Lutherie from some years back. And the sound is not exactly that which the modern classical guitarist is going for.   Once again, it's a period sound.

All I'm saying is that modern ladder braced guitars are likely to be a much more difficult instrument to sell in the "hand crafted" lutherie market. Of course there will be exceptions to the rule, but I come from a perspective that includes the larger world of factory and boutique factory guitars, and I try to keep a perspective on which designs have mass appeal and which are very specialized.   Even my shop (which probably produces more instruments a month than any other shop represented here on this forum) makes fewer guitars in a year than Martin does in a day. It behooves me to keep that in mind whenever I design something, build something, or think of my place in the overall guitar market. Many of the opinions I express here have that perspective as a foundation. There is a lot wrong with "the market" as a driving force, but there is also a certain beauty to the Darwinian survival of the fittest aspect to it. The fittest happened to be "X" braced steel string guitars and fan braced classicals. That could change, but I'm not betting the farm on ladder braced steel strings... You are very welcome to, though.

Part of my prob is that my wood is salvage from an old building and a dresser. It is q-sawn old growth but I am still worried that to much arch will induce splitting.
Even if it was perfectly prepped I would probably still worry, I would like to get 5-15 years out of it.

_________________
"It's a Tone Faerie thing"
"Da goal is to sharpen ur wit as well as ye Sgian Dubh"
"Sippin Loch Dhu @Black lake" ,Kirby O...

Dave thanks for the bracing picks, looking at them my mind says Johns would haves more bass response and more room for complexity but I think I am also still trying to wrap my mind around how ladder braced guitars work.

_________________
"It's a Tone Faerie thing"
"Da goal is to sharpen ur wit as well as ye Sgian Dubh"
"Sippin Loch Dhu @Black lake" ,Kirby O...

Bourgeois Martin Simpson Model was not a ladder braced guitar. It was a 12
fret slope D cutaway with lightened/modified bracing. The ladder braced (or
modified ladder braced as it were) bourgeois model was/is the Bourgeois
Blues. We never built one while I was there but I did get to see an old top
pattern, and it was, from my bad recollection, considerably different to the
pics posted above.

_________________
John Mayes
http://www.mayesluthier.com

[QUOTE=Rick Turner] The real guitar world has pretty much rejected ladder braced guitars for anything other than period pieces or ultra cheap-o's. [/QUOTE]
John How has gained GREAT success with his ladder braced guitars from a lot of folks that have reviewed them. And these players are definitely from the real world of guitars.

yep that's the one. since he had the guts to try a large body LB I sure wish to understand his reasoning behind the design.

I am very curios about plate thickness and bracing for both the koa and mahog models.

_________________
"It's a Tone Faerie thing"
"Da goal is to sharpen ur wit as well as ye Sgian Dubh"
"Sippin Loch Dhu @Black lake" ,Kirby O...

[QUOTE=Rick Turner]
An interesting side note: some of my favorite guitars of all times are the Howe Ormes which had the cylinder top and ladder bracing.   The cylinder top adds tremendous longitudinal stiffness with no weight penalty.   That's the direction I'd go with a ladder braced guitar. There are a few problems that show up long term, but they are remarkably robust for such lightly built instruments, and it's because of that longitudinal belly ridge, aka cylinder top. [/QUOTE]

Can somone provide some insight into how these early cylinder tops were built?  It would appear from some photos that I've seen that they must have used some kind of press to create the shape - as opposed to a cylinder dish and shaped braces similar to how most people currently create the spherical domed tops.  thanks

There are exceptions to every rule, alright. When I was sharing shop space a few years back we got in a classical to do some work on. Everything about it seemed 'standard' until we looked inside and saw the ladder braced top. The sound was fine. That was before I had a lot of the test equipment I use now, so I can't say much more about it.

I do have some test results on a couple of old Gibson classicals, with ladder bracing, but you don't want to copy those! The 'main top' resonant modes were 80-100 Hz higher than most guitars, and the 'cross dipoles' were similarly elevated. Can you say 'tank'? Surprisingly, in a way, the 'long dipole' modes were about where they usually are; but then, these were three brace tops, with the lower brace near the bridge line, so the long dipole would not be effected as much.

The lute top I have has a cross brace about every 1-1/2" to 2" from the bridge on up. These are 3-4 mm wide and as much as 17mm tall. The one immediately in front of the bridge is only about 3/4" away, and maybe 5" from the tail end (all measurements by calibrated eyeball). This is much closer to a 'lattice' top in some ways than any other modern design.

Didn't Mace write something to the effect that lute tops had to be taken off every few years so that the braces could be removed and the top ironed out flat? When was the last time you did that on a guitar? ;)

Corrected on the Bourgeois Blues...

I think it's great that several luthiers are having success with ladder braced instruments, and I'll believe it's hit the big time when Bob Taylor comes out with a ladder braced model...

Back to my own favorite ladder braced guitars...I don't know how they did it, but yes, I think they probably pressed them.   My thought is to do it in a press with an inside shoe the full width of the top, then have a center top shoe that presses the center of the top first, and then two recurve shoes that press next. They may have steamed the tops, but they'd have to do something to keep the center seam from popping. It looks as though the rosettes were inlaid before the tops were pressed. The ladder braces were carved to match the inside of the tops.

One could press the tops with heating blankets, and then put the top into a vacuum jig with the face down and then do the bracing. It might even be possible to just dampen the top or use the veneer softening solution from Joe Woodworker to aid the arching process and do it cold.

The top on my favorite HO measures between .095" and .100" around the rosette. I've not checked it with a Hacklinger gauge, but I suspect it's similar or maybe even slightly thinner elsewhere around the top. There are four ladder braces, one in the upper bout, and three in the lower, plus a modest sized bridge plate of spruce. The instrument is very light, and is very close to the size of a 12 fret 000, but it's deeper. Back and sides are Brazilian rosewood. The weak point is the neck block which one started to collapse inward, though the top did not crack. That's the issue that my flying buttress braces would easily take care of in a modern version of this guitar.   Maybe I'll build one for Montreal 2008 or H'burg 2009.

The Howe Orme design really works; this one has got the fullest bass response of any 100 year-old "parlor" guitar I've ever played, and speaking of Martin Simpson, he declared this one to be one of the finest guitars he'd ever played.

Also, I'm surprised that my generalized comments re. ladder braced guitars have been taken as some kind of personal insults; some folks seem to be sensitive to the edge of paranoia here.   No slights intended, but I stand by my assessment regarding the state of the market for ladder braced guitars. It's going to be an uphill slog for luthiers wanting to make them. Look, there's a market for practically everything. Fred Carlson gets to make and sell a harp guitar a year...beautiful creations that do not prove that there's a huge vacuum for $45,000.00 harp guitars. When I infer that there isn't a large market asking for ladder braced guitars I'm not saying anything negative about those who choose to make them; I'm merely pointing out that there is a limited niche market for them. The success of a one person shop here or there making unusual or historical reproductions or left of center instruments is a given, and we should be thankful that there are those several hundred or several thousand (maybe) people a year in the world who care for instruments that are different. But it doesn't affect the realities of the larger market by much. Believe me, I know what happens when you build things slightly out of the norm. But, make a better mouse trap, and all that...

As for John specifically, I think it's great that he can make a go of it. Still, what can that be? Thirty guitars a year, total? Forty? And he makes both traditional and "modern" "X" braced guitars, so that probably takes the ladder braced total down under fifteen a year. Well, in a world market that buys a million and a half guitars a year, there is certainly room for a few hundred ladder braced examples, and it might as well be some fine hand builders who fill that desire.

This reminds me of when Steve Grimes was making the Ned Steinberger "tensionless" bridge design acoustic guitar...oddly similar to the Babicz guitar, and his comment was that he wasn't going to give up making his other models...   Think of "X" braced guitars as being the luthier's "day gig" and ladder braced guitars a kind of art project that can pay... However, I don't see a clear cut advantage to traditionally ladder braced guitars other than to get a kind of vintage sound.

Are there prominent contemporary guitarists using modern ladder braced guitars as their main instruments? Or are these guitars reserved for a kind of special sound?

Back to my favorite HO's: I see the Howe Orme design as being something quite else. It's not what we think of as a ladder braced guitar because the cylinder top completely changes the ratio of longitudinal to transverse stiffness BEFORE you even start to put in the braces. It changes the rule book and uses engineering to allow a lighter top to be stiffer in the direction of string pull. Brilliant solution. And a niche product.