Day Three: Seminar Luthiers
The Luthier's Seminar was held in the Ballet Hall. It was a shame that the location was a bit hidden, so the surge of visitors was not that large, at least I noticed that after barging in after the workshop with Jaques Stotzem.
Guests were Theo Scharpach and Bert Kwakkel. Another German luthier was bound to come, but considering the guitars on display (A Scharpach Classical and two Merulas (one "classic" and one "special"), he had not shown up or he did not bring in any show models.
Much to my pleasure I recognized the sound of the Kwakkel guitars when I entered the hall. Just a year's wait and them "my" Kwakkel will be ready too! If you are interested, just take a look at my stories about Luthiers in the Guitarities section of this web site.
There was a lecture on the trends in classical guitar building, towards sound quality or sound volume. Nowadays there is quite some experimenting -to be specific with carbon fibre materials for e.g. the braces of the top- to increase the volume of the guitar. The question was the effect of synthetic materials on the sound quality. I got the impression that the real discourse concerned the "battle" between wood and plastic, which becomes even more fierce now popular types of wood for guitar building like Rio Rosewood and Canadian Spruce are not available any more or becoming scarce.
Sadly I just missed the presentation. I still heard a discussion about strings, namely nylon strings versus carbon strings. My personal experience with carbon is not that positive, but it is a subjective choice in the end.
I have played D'Addario Pro Arte for years myself, usually Normal Tension. I liked their sound and ease of playing, even though the G string should have been a bit thinner.
At a certain time the D'Addario Normal Tension versions were out of stock for quite a while, so I had to choose another brand. I have played Savarez Alliance Normal Tension for two years. Its thinner E, B and G strings are nice, but I experienced sharp and flat string inaccuracies in new packages, and the life time of the strings was not quite long. I guess I'll return to D' Addario.
Bert Kwakkel confirmed my thoughts, saying that he used "normal (non-carbon) nylon" D' Addario strings for his instruments because of their consistency and stability. The opinions about carbon strings were divided.