The Recycled Resonator guitars
Being an instrument maker means people tend to give you broken instruments. Tooo many times I shrugged and somewhat begrudgingly accepted trashed Indian, Chinese, old Korean and early Japanese guitars and if I'm lucky the odd real fretboard endowed (not ply) half decent attempt which inevitably ends up with lifted bridges and bulging and collapsed tops. (I would have thought actually looking inside a real guitar would be a pre-requisite to starting to make a guitar factory but evidently not.) Mind you a quick look inside a lot of well respected brands of guitars (which shall remain nameless lest they sue me for telling the truth) will give you the impression nobody tries too hard; butt jointed and badly glued, shapeless bracing can be seen in some 'top end' respected brand name models with $1200 plus price tags, sad but true. What a waste of good wood and time is planned obsolescence.
I generally remove the back and strengthen the tops and neck joins so they can take the rearranged stresses involved with having a tailpiece, without the benefit of a the braces and top and also because they usually fell apart for good reason. (They were made weak.) It seems to help to deaden the body resonance so it adds the energy to the speaker cone instead of moving in sympathy and stealing energy. This also gives me the opportunity to bend the body back to increase the break angle across the bridge which helps the tone and keeps the strings in their slots. This changes the shape a bit and usually means a new back. They end up a lot heavier but they can handle the super heavy guage strings I like to use to give you more sustain, which for slide is much more satisfying to play.
I cut a hole in the top to take a speaker (usually recycled from the dump or otherwise burned out or shorted ones I get from repair shops etc.) which I sometimes coat with shellack if it could be brighter and it becomes the resonator cone. Lately I have been cutting out the cone and sticking the surround directly on the top which seems to help as there is less moving mass and less impedance from the speakers spider as well. I make the bridges from strips of carbon fibre and the all important link spiders from bamboo barbecue skewers or balsa wood. Different cones sound quite different, stiff helps and these are usually crenulated ones (tap the cone and you get an idea if it is good) but the biggest difference is using the old ones with cloth surrounds which are getting to be hard to find.
They generally look pretty ugly after all this so I have been decoupaging them and then finishing them with at least six coats of nitro-cellulose laquer. One day I will get hold of liquid glass or some such two part epoxy finish, which will be better aparently.
The finished product always sounds unique and somewhere between a Banjo, a harp and a guitar. They sound a bit mellower and less metallic than the standard aluminum cone and have more sustain. Sound samples are coming.
People often comment that they sound amplified, I guess because they have the characteristic sound of a speaker and also because they are quite loud and have a ringing overtone content that sounds a bit like a reverb.
Click on the following links to see pictures and (hopefully soon some sound samples) of the various ones I have constructed so far.
The Nimbin themed cannabis resonators
Here are some pictures of the next ones in the about to be decoupaged stage, a 12 Yamaha string and a Suzuki steelstring,) a passive speaker and a butchered normal speaker, and a guitar made by Robert in Berlin from some chunky old Russian beast after checking out these pages - thanks for sending the photos and getting in touch, I get a buzz thinking someone is out there seeing this and then getting inspired to do a bit of creative recycling.
These next two are now decoupaged, laquered and complete.
Onya Robert!
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