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GuitarEngineer.com |
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Front View of Vacuum System |
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About Us |
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GuitarEngineer.com is committed to the continued study of the acoustic guitar as both a daunting scientific endeavor and an artistic masterpiece. Thank you for visiting GuitarEngineer.com and I hope you enjoy the content. Please visit regularly because the information is dynamic and continuously being maintained and updated. Feel free to forward any suggestions and questions to paul@guitarengineer.com.
My Bio I started GuitarEngineer.com in January 2005 and maintain the site from Hermosa Beach in southern California. I recently finished an M.S. degree from California State Long Beach in mechanical engineering and currently work as a structural analyst at an aerospace company in El Segundo, CA. My master’s thesis, “Sensitivity Analysis of an Acoustic Guitar by FEM” is posted on this site and can also be found on the Research page. Prior to aerospace, I started my engineering career as a mechanical designer and progressed into the engineering manager role at an international graphic machinery manufacturer operating in Huntington Beach, CA and serving the worldwide printing industry. After completing the coursework for the graduate program at Long Beach, where I found a job in aerospace that was more applicable to my schooling and relocated to Hermosa Beach. I am currently converting my garage into a luthier’s workshop where I plan on applying the combination of technical education and manufacturing background to the exciting craft of guitar building. I understand that there is much more to guitar building than theory and research and I look forward to discovering the things about the craft that cannot be taught in a book.
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Technical information on classical and steel-string guitar research, design, manufacturing. |
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My Story
I imagine every luthier and luthier-to-be (me) has a story about how they discovered guitar making. Here is mine…
It wasn’t until I had completed my graduate classes and I was deciding on a thesis topic that I had my “big idea”, as one of my friends called it. I had always enjoyed playing guitar (although, for as long as I have been playing and for the money that I have spent on lessons, I should be a concert guitarist, which is the farthest from reality). One day while strumming my favorite combination of chords, open G and open C, I started to think of the mechanisms at work in an acoustic guitar. A string is plucked and it vibrates at a given frequency. The force of the plucked string, in turn, drives the top plate to vibrate. The top plate drives the air in the cavity and the surrounding air. The vibrating air reaches our ears and is the music (or noise depending on the player) that the listener hears.
I got excited (I’m an engineer, these things excite us.) An acoustic guitar is an ideal and challenging structural dynamics problem and a perfect topic for a master’s thesis! I started to realize that all of my schooling (7 years in undergraduate and 4 years in graduate school...what’s the hurry!), work experience (5 years in manufacturing), and a fascination for woodworking (though I had only read about woodworking...hadn’t really made anything) had trained me to be the perfect Guitar Engineer!
It was an overwhelming feeling to realize the convergence - all my skills, training, and interests into a single encompassing topic! I immediately started to read everything I could find that had to do with acoustic guitar research (check out what I found). Each time I found another article, journal, website, or book, I would become more passionate about the topic. I spent about a year just doing research. I finally found where the most recent work was at regarding studying the acoustic guitar using finite element analysis, FEA, and started from there. 4 years of graduate school later and I have completed the final draft of my thesis (2/24/05) and submitted it to the school bookstore to be hardbound, and ultimately submitted the Library of Congress!
“Sensitivity Analysis of an Acoustic Guitar by FEM”, Dec 2004, P. Shaheen
I would love to hear your story. Share it at paul@guitarengineer.com.
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