Everywhere I go I find a pal

Peter Weinschenk, Editor, The Record-Review

I am going back to the basics.

Over the weekend, I constructed a small plywood box, strapped a guitar string across the front of it and, inserting various kinds of wood, experimented with stringed instrument acoustics.

This was all research and study as I think about a next guitar building project.

It was fascinating. I inserted ebony, plywood, mahogany, redwood, maple and Zebrawood inserts. Some of the wood pieces were long, some were short. Some were solid, some hollowed out. Some rested on legs. Some were just flat.

Can you guess which insert created the loudest, richest sound? It was the redwood. That was a complete surprise to me.

I measured the sound not just by ear but with a phone app guitar tuner that displayed equalization bars. I next made a traditional archtop guitar bridge. This was a thin ebony piece of wood sitting perpendicular on a flat piece of ebony. The thin piece rested on two metal screws coming out of the flat piece.

It turns out that this traditional construction was just as good as the redwood. Again, I was surprised.

I would have thought the string energy would have been slowed down by the metal screws. Just the opposite. They seem to have an amplifying effect.

I have to say I don’t quite understand how and, more importantly, why any of these wood inserts worked better than others. I stared at my basic, small wooden box and puzzled over the physics I was observing.

People have been making guitars for centuries, refining the design and materials. Scientists have studied the instrument, analyzing the string harmonics, the holographic deflection of the guitar top when a string is plucked and mathematics of sound production of the guitar body as a Helmholtz resonator.

And yet I plucked the string on my humble box and couldn’t really understand how sound was produced.

I held my small box and felt a chill. It was like I was holding a miracle in my two hands.

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Dinner at my house has been a comedy or errors recently. On Friday, I cooked up a fish fry with roasted potatoes and cole slaw, not seeing that a house guest had already made some cole slaw. We agreed to use up the cole slaw as a side dish to a fried chicken dinner the next night. That was the plan, but our house guest forgot about the extra cole slaw and, instead, cooked up some broccoli. Eating the cole slaw, this meant we had too much broccoli. We agreed to serve the broccoli as a side dish next to Italian pasta we served the following night.

I believe we are now good. No extra meals, no extra side dishes. That’s a big relief.

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Due to COVID-19, the Birkebeiner cross race this year will be skied on trails across Wisconsin, not just in Hayward.

One of the Birkebeiner skiers blitzed by me on Saturday at Nine Mile Forest, town of Rib Mountain.

This skier was amazing, artistry in motion. He was a long-haired guy dressed in a Grateful Dead lycra suit and, swooping past me, he weaved around some other skiers chugging along. The skier, who had great form, speed and balance, was beautiful to behold.

Cross country skiing is a great thing to do. Sometimes, it is a great thing just to watch.