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25 years ago I had my workshop in the industrial part of Sausalito, California, located on the mudflats of Richardson Bay in an area created by the U S Army Corp of Engineers for the promotion of the US WWII effort, particularly the construction of Liberty Ships. My particular building had been the Vehicle Maintenance Shed, a low wood frame structure of 4000 square feet with a concrete floor. Being on a reformed mudflat in a time of rising sea levels meant that winter storms during extreme high tides had a tendency to flood the building with sea water. That is a lousy quality for a guitar making facility, so although I didn’t own the building, I went to the trouble of installing a wood floor in the entire structure. I spent 15 years in the shop, and paid just 37 cent a square foot monthly for the privilege, so it worked out in my favor overall. <>
<>> <>So when an inventor called
saying he had head I made guitars
and he wanted to run an idea by me, I was willing to indulge him.>
Roland Hannes was a Frenchman
working in a local restaurant,
Il Fornaio as a waiter. A classic day job for the starving artist, I
thought.
He let me know that I wasn’t the first luthier he had spoken to, and
thought he
had an idea for making a better guitar. I have had others come to me
with wild
ideas in the past, and so I took this with a grain of salt, of course.
But his
idea did seem interesting to me. He thought that my putting longer bass
strings
and shorter treble strings on a guitar, one could get a better tonal
balance,
and that due to the way the human
body
interacts with a guitar, this would have little or no impact on the
playability
of the instrument. He showed me that I would be feasible to do this as
the
frets would still be straight lines, just no longer parallel. I thought
about
this for a few minutes, decided that he was right, the idea was
feasible, and
then thanked him for his time and told him I had to get back to work.
<>
<><> <>Over the next few months I
made him two working instruments
on his “slant-fret” motif. These were Telcaster like solid bodies and
had a 1 ¼”
discrepancy between the shortest and longest strings. They were much
more
transparent to play that I had expected. After a minute or so of
personal
adjust, I thought they could be played perfectly competently. Rolland
got
himself an attorney and did a patent search which found the way clear
for his actual
application. This is a time consuming process, no to mention expensive.
He was
into it about ten thousand dollars when he discovered that another
person was
on a parallel course and then in fact beat him to the gate. Which is to
say
that another person managed to get the patent within weeks of the
moment that
Rolland thought it was to be his. >
<><>
<><>There is a huge music trade
show that happens every year in
the Los Angeles area called NAMM, short for North American Music
Merchants. I
have been going to this show each year with my best customer, Eric
Schoenberg.
We drive down and back, and that means we spend 8 hours or so each way
in
conversation.. We tend to talk about guitars. On one of these trip
early in our
friendship we were discussing the qualities of the OM relative to the
qualities
of the 000. These are two Martin models which appear, to the casual
observer,
to be pretty much identical. The OM precedes the 000 in the Martin
history, OM’s
being made from 1929 to 1933 more or less, and 000’s being made
subsequently.
The difference is that the OM has a 25.4” string length, and the 000
has a 24.9”
string length. This small change actually makes a profound difference
in the
quality of the sound of the guitar. Typically, the OM had a more
focused bass
than a 000, and the treble is more edgy
as well. The 000 on the other hand has a very sweet treble voice, in
our time
it is best known as the choice of Eric Clapton for his acoustic tracks
on his
best selling “UnWired” effort. The trade-off for this sweetness is that
this
model rarely has the kind of power and clarity in the bass that OM’s
take for
granted.>
<>
<><>When one of us said, “why not put both string lengths on the same guitar?”. Now I like to think it was me, but Eric likes to think it was his mouth, whichever, it was “duh” obvious that it was a good idea. I offer as evidence that it was my revelation that there are now 35 such Sexauer’s, and not a single one is a Schoenberg! > <>It is a simple idea, in
retrospect, an OM bass and a 000 treble
on one guitar. Just a half inch difference in string length. I make 2
versions
of the idea. One is just the string path, with the rest of the guitar
being
entirely conservative in appearance, though there is some necessary
brace
moving on the inside. I refer to this as a JB, and put it on the end of
the
guitar designation. An OM then is called an FT-15-JB, for Flat Top, 15”
wide,
multi-scale. >
<><>J and B are the initials of
Jack Brennerman. Jack was a year
older than I in High School, and belonged to the Spartan r Society, a
student
police agency in my high school , SSS for short. I am not kidding. One
day at
lunch , while eating by myself, Jack came around and asked me where the
chairs
that were supposed to be at my table were. Of the perhaps 8 that should
have
been there, I could only see 3, so as I saw his question as completely
absurd,
and being the wise guy then that I still am today, I looked all around
the
room, particularly I the rafters, and then deadpanned that I didn’t
know where
they were. Jack apparently didn’t have much of a sense of humor as he
responded
with what I have since learned is called a right upper-cut, and knock
me out
cold on the floor. He broke my nose in three places, and nearly got me
expelled
from school for fighting with administration approved student forces.
In an
effort to find forgiveness, I have named my asymmetric guitar after him
in
honor of the fact that I can still see the evidence of our interaction
in the
mirror today. >
<><>The other variant I call JB
is the fully asymmetrical
guitar, where I basically wrap the entire guitar around the string
path, rather
than just the braces. I replace the FT with the JB in this case, so
that an OM
sized guitar of this design is called a JB-15. I have made this in 13“,
14”, 15”
and 16” sizes, and it has accounted for about a third of my work in the
past 8
years. I have come to believe that the JB is a better guitar.>
<><>Thank you, Roland, Eric, and Jack; great idea!> |
Bruce Sexauer, 2010 |
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