12 String Acoustic Guitar Instruments
12 String Acoustic Fast Facts
Because the strong, five-piece neck construction Ovation employs, the necks on its 12 string guitars are built to the same, easy to play dimensions as those on its 6 strings. All well-constructed acoustic guitars should have good projection and volume – that is, they should make efficient use of the initial energy applied by the guitarist striking the strings. However, if you listen to two well-made guitars, they will almost certainly sound different. This quality is referred to as the tone.
A Brief History of the 12 String Acoustic Guitar
The principle by which all acoustic guitars produce musical sounds is generally agreed to be the same. When you strike a guitar string, you apply energy to it and make it vibrate. However, this string vibration alone is not sufficient to create sound waves in the surrounding air that ca be clearly heard.
In this respect, a guitar string can be thought of as being similar to a tuning fork. A tuning fork also vibrates when struck, but it is virtually inaudible until you bring it into contact with a mass of lower density which can transmit the vibrations to the air more efficiently.
It is for this reason that acoustic guitars have a hollow body. The body is a carefully designed “soundbox”. The energy of the vibrating strings is transferred to the sound box via the saddle and the bridge over which the strings pass. The sound box then vibrates in sympathy with the guitar strings to create “amplified” – and therefore audible – air-born sound waves that can be heard up to a reasonable distance from the guitar. In other words, it is the soundbox that is responsible for the guitar’s projection and volume.
A simple way of illustrating this point is to play an acoustic guitar alongside a solid-body electric guitar which you have not plugged into an amplifier. The un-amplified electric guitar is much quieter. Its solid body is mainly just a mounting block for the bridge, pick-ups and controls. Because it has no sound box, the sound waved it generates are much weaker.
To sum up then, an acoustic guitar amplifies the
sound of the vibrating strings acoustically – through the design of the
body or the sound box. But the sound of a solid-body electric guitar must
be amplified electronically – through an amplifier and loudspeaker.
Guitar-makers (known as “luthiers”) constantly contradict one another
with their varying theories as to why an acoustic guitar has a good or
bad tone. The tonal characteristic is determined by a number of interacting
factors which are hard – if not impossible – to isolate. However, the
“soundboard” is the most important part of the guitar with regard to tone.
In fact, legend has it that, to prove this, the nineteenth-century Spanish
luthier Torres once made a guitar with a body that consisted entirely
of papier-mâché except for the wooden soundboard. Guitarists who played
his experimental instrument were apparently amazed by its fine tone.
Theoretically, you might think it would be possible to build a series
of different guitars with slightly varying construction details in order
to establish one way or another what determines the tone quality. In practice,
many top guitar-makers do exactly this – by changing their design slightly
to produce an instrument with the sound characteristics requested by a
particular customer. But you cannot get away from the fact that no two
pieces of wood are the same. For this reason, no two guitars have quite
the same tone; every guitar is unique to some degree.
View entire 12-String Acoustic Guitar Collection
Copyright © 2007
Musical Instrument Shopping Store
All Rights Reserved
