The
german luthiers Gernot Wagner and Matthias Dammann did in the early
90ties experiments with new materials and top designs and lamination
techniques. The conclusion was that top response can be significantly
increased by making it lighter and also a bit more flexible. To allow
the top to maintain its structural integrity they started to use a
material witch has its provenience in aeronautics – it is a
honeycomb grid made of aramid called Nomex, a kind of nylon fiber.
It
was Gernot Wagner who became aware of the Nomex honey-comb grid and
had the idea to use it for instrument building, this was in fact a
mayor break through and did open new possibilities. I had the honor
of Gernot’s visit in my workshop in 2014, when he was on a holiday
in Lisbon and was able to show him my work and exchange different
perspectives about his technology. I had also the generous help of
the Canadian luthier Marcus Dominelli who gave me very precious
information about the procedure and the details and encouraged me to
develop my own top design and I am very grate full to both of them.
Meanwhile a lot of builder
started to get familiar with the procedure and made their own top
design based on it and double-top building has become very popular
but most builder do forget that this was only possible because of the
innovation and investigation for new methods, which once had to be
carried out by someone. Beside other vantages, the nomex sandwich top
guitars have a more uniform tonal characteristic between instruments
from the same builder, which were built in the same way, because the
overall characteristics of the top like weight, flexibility and
directional stiffness do depend much more of the quality of the
sandwich and the bracing, in opposition to a traditional guitar where
the specific characteristic of a piece of wood has a mayor influence
of the outcome. Even like that the quality of the wood is still
important and tops made from spruce or cedar do not sound the same.
Since
2013 I build successfully a nomex sandwich-top model of my own
design. The vantage of this procedure (nomex laminated between 2 thin
layers of wood), is to have a top which is more responsive and has a
somewhat lower top resonance frequency than
a traditional build, which gives the
instrument a special sound characteristic – generally the sound is
warmer and fuller, with more fundamental content and some more volume
with very good sustain.
My sandwich-top model has
beautiful and rich timber with good balance over the hole scale. The
sandwich-top is my top model and I have it regularly in stock for
demonstration and sale either in spruce or red cedar. If you are
looking for a high quality instrument at an affordable price this is
a very good choice, and you shouldn’t hesitate to visit my workshop
when ever you are in Lisbon, if you are looking for an instrument of
course. For soudndsamples: click soundcloud Youtube
