Official Luthiers Forum!

Just one more voice in the chorus of praise. Very nice work Colin. I'm proud to post on the same forum with such talent

What is that finish anyway?

John

Very, very nice Colin. Keep up the great work.

Yes, I knew there were a few Stad Guitars. I thought they found a partial third one within the past five years. Any count? This one looks like it was made yesterday. Thanks for sharing the link at USD.Edu

www.usd.edu/smm/3976portrait.jpg
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Well, now I see that a paper label inside the guitar isn't always used. Antonio would have loved this forum.Dickey38409.1688078704

Carlton

I wish I could take the recipe for the varnish to the afterlife! David Hume, the luthier at the Royal College of Music in London together with David Beare, one of the great Strad experts and a consultant to the College, have recently been coming to my faculty to borrow my scanning electron micropscope and my mass spectrometer to try and analyse Cremonese varnishes. David is one of the few people that actually gets to repair Stadivar violins!

The varnish I use on my lutes, and hopefully on my future guitars is the one that David uses on the violins he makes, these sell for $20000+ and tonally are virtually indistinguishable from the Cremonese instruments. I once asked him what was in it, he just said that if he told me he would then have to kill me! I just get it in a bottle marked "Instrument Varnish #2". I'm planning to get him drunk sometime and if I get the answer I'll post it. I have the theory that like the Cremonese varnishes it's nothing special, but just has acquired a mystique.

Colin

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

Hi again,

For those of you interested in rose designs and/or drawings for use on guitars, lutes, or just for fun, here are a few web pages I stumbled upon awhile back.

http://www.lutyst.dircon.co.uk/detailpages/roses.htm
http://www.parchmentroses.com/en_catalog.htm
http://www.wadsworth-lutes.co.uk/roses.htm

The most amazing one is the "parchmentroses" site. This woman's work is just unparalleled. Many European lute & early guitar makers just buy her roses and put them on their instruments. But they miss the fun and sense of accomplishment that Colin enjoys!

I have compiled a number of additional designs and drawings for guitar roses and will be happy to pass them along to anyone interested. Email me if you want them.

I've found that by copying or downloading rose pictures from the web and using Photoshop you can turn the picture into a pretty decent outline drawing for actual use. Not ideal but it works.

Bruce, I'm glad you liked the Rawlins Strad guitar enough to post a pic. Isn't it just perfect?

Skip

It's been a couple of years maybe three when I saw it. It's cool for a ten string. I'm still just banging away on sixes. Everyone thinks of Antonio as a violinmaker and he was, but he was much more. I like his quartets, one made for the French Court if I remember right.

Some of those old fiddles got a lot of embellishment. And he did a few like that, but mostly they were more plain. His cellos and violas are more rare, with his guitars even more so.

I love the ability of this website to borrow pics from other sites. I wonder if that is a copy right infringement, where I am sure that uploading the pic is?
This way maybe at least it would be considered referencing rather than stealing.....   (I just don't know)