My Next Guitar

If I think about counting guitars, I think I could count them on one hand...except when I start thinking about partial guitars. Parts probably don't count for counting.

But if I think about counting cameras...impossible. I don't even know where they all are.

I used to have a vague idea which cameras I have more than one of.

I don't like to think about it.

Thank you for the welcome.
 
Uh-oh...this is one of those forums with trophies, but at least it does it's own accounting.

I forgot, in my last post, there is also the associated topic of 'how many lenses? ...also complicated by the difficulties with fractions.

I just noticed Rob's post was in 2015. I...
 
Uh-oh...this is one of those forums with trophies, but at least it does it's own accounting.

I forgot, in my last post, there is also the associated topic of 'how many lenses? ...also complicated by the difficulties with fractions.

I just noticed Rob's post was in 2015. I...
The recent influx of new members responding to some very old posts has provided us to see these old posts again and in a couple of cases I've seen responses that I had missed first time around. (eg,..Pete's wonderful posing of the Adult Fungas Gnat portrait.) So it's all good! :)
 
Maybe it has a longer history, but I found (working backwards), several references to guitars called 'After Legnani'. C.F. Martin apprenticed with Johann Georg Stauffer in Vienna. Both of them made guitars with the fingerboard tapering at the sound hole. Not all 'After Legnani' or 'Legnani Model' instruments have the fingerboard taper at the soundhole.

Here is a modern-built mid-late 19th c. style Legnani

I read there were two Legnani's a few decades apart. One was a guitarist, well-enough known to undoubtedly have been a guitarist, but not known to have been a luthier. The other was a violin-maker, with no known signed guitars. I have lost track of where I found these 'certain uncertainties', but there appears to be uncertainty about who actually built the Legnani guitar referred to in later builds as 'After Legnani'.

I don't remember if the Stauffer build or the Martin build had the fingerboard floating above the guitar top. My no-name student guitar has it firmly glued right to the top. Stauffer, IIRC, made an innovative adjustable neck long before Taylor, so that may have been one reason for the floating fingerboard.

Some guitars with that tapered fingerboard had an asymmetrical headstock that I believe must have been inspiration for both Leo Fender's Strat and Merle Travis' sketch handed Paul Bigsby as a 'design' for a custom guitar. But some Americans seem to have naively declared both of these modern guitar designs to be spontaneously inspired. If you look at Balkan domra and tambura/tamburitzas there are scrolled headstocks with the asymmetrical sideways scroll. I read somewhere Leo Fender had a childhood friend who was from one of the Yugoslavian regions where this style instrument was common. Hmmm...did he see one of those folk instruments?

But most European-originated string instruments have older heritage dating back many more centuries to Persia and nearby.

I lost interest at that point. But I learned that the German musical instrument industry in and around Markneukirchen seems to have inspired the German camera industry...subcontractor companies made components they were good at, and another put together the final product. Many of the components had no names. That's not true of German complete cameras or shutters, just the non-machinery components. Different trade unions/guilds?

One of the most interesting (to me) discontinuous continuities (or continuous discontinuities?) in string instruments is the heritage connecting Appalachian Hammered Dulcimers with the Hungarian Cimbalom ('invented' in 1874, but associated with the older psaltery and kannun/qanun. http://www.cimbalom.ca/cimbalom_history.aspx
 
Guitars that take pictures? (Close but not quite...)

Coming commission guitar(s) for someone's birthday. I cannot find the original listing on the Comins website, possibly because only a small number of Comins 'Aperture' models were built.

Bill Comins utilized an iris/diaphragm/aperture mechanism to allow the sound hole opening area to be adjustable.

Interestingly, he chased down patent ownership to pay a licensing or royalty (or whatever) for the use of the. I was surprised it was still due.

Here is a photo of a Comins Aperture guitar. I don't know how long the link will be valid, but with a little digging, something usually appears...I think I also saw an online magazine article that discussed it a bit more, perhaps resulting from an interview with the luthier.


There is a dead link later in this article under 'for more info', but this does explain most of it with (at this time) 15 photos, including the iris adjusted to...uh, various f-holes stops...?

As with many DIY iris projects, a shutter is not easily fit.

Ok, I'm really stretching the camera illusion a bit too far.

I have a couple of iris mechanisms that open up to nearly 76 mm/3" (inches, not seconds...no shutter included), that I bought from Surplus Shed in Pennsylvania. Comins is near Philadelphia, PA. I was born (or hatched, I don't remember,) <50 km from there.

Some kind of connection implied...
 
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