Wednesday, December 2, 2015

A Brief Explanation of my Torres FE-17 style guitar

Antonio de Torres is one of my greatest influences and so I decided to make a guitar replicating one of his most famous instruments, the guitar made in his First Epoch in Seville that he made for himself but later sold to Francisco Tarrega, probably the greatest guitar virtuoso in Spain of that time.


These guitars use the same plantilla as the 1864 FE-17 that Tarrega used, but that is about it.  The rest of the design is an amalgamation of elements from different Torres guitars and some of my own construction style so in other words, these guitars are not really copies but guitars homaging the romantic guitar style of Torres.

To begin, these guitars have a smaller plantilla.  About 12 15/16 inches wide at the lower bout as opposed to the 14 inches of the last Tarrega Torres, the SE-114.

I used a smaller scale length (633 mm) than in the FE-17 which had a scale length of 645 mm. I think this string length of about 25 inches combines well with the smaller shape. It is very comfortable, too.

I used glue blocks for attaching the sides to the top instead of Torres' kerfed lining. I also used my laminated solid lining to join the sides to the back.

The necks are of modern widths, 51 and 52 mm at the nut.

I used pegheads planetary friction pegs because they give the guitar a romantic 19th century look but are 100% dependable to hold their tuning. They are also very light weight.

The tops are very thin, about 1.2 to 1.7 mm to be true to Torres' style and sound. One of the guitars has an open lower harmonic bar and one doesn't, but the one that has it has a transverse brace in under the saddle, something Torres never did.

Both guitars have a shallow wood tornavoz, again Torres only used a deep brass tornavoz on some instruments.

One guitar has a rosette and top purfling copied from another guitar from 1964 the FE-18. It looks a little like the one on FE-17 but is a little more simple.  I added a little something I saw on a Lucas Waldner guitar that I think made good design sense.  The other one has the austere style of Torres' simplest and least expensive guitars, which I think looks very nice. too.

And the bridges are pretty much the same proportions as the FE-17 but one I decorated in the style of Llobet's FE-09 with big pearl circles inlaid into the wings.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

This sounds very technic. I've played for many years now and I've never even bothered to learn the names of other parts of the guitar besides, body and arm. I had to google "peghed" to be shure that I was going to make sense when I write this is a beautiful guitar, i feel fascinated about the friction pegheds, it makes me want a guitar with it. Thanks for describing what you do, i find it very inspiring and substancial.