Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/10/26/guitarist-demonstrates-beautif.html
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Frankly they all sound the same to my wooden ear 
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I envy the craft of such masters; to be able to create wonderful things as a matter of one’s daily course, from skill and experience alone.
The credits list the first piece (on the Winter guitar) as “Traditional,” but it’s clearly Joseph Spence’s “Great Dream from Heaven,” popularized by Ry Cooder.
I’m pretty sure it IS a traditional song. Most of Spence’s repertoire was traditional songs.
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Came for guitar tones, stayed for crazily beautiful instruments and lots of sweet guitar face.
I know shit about guitars but this is pretty awesome!
Seems to me the “Winter” guitar should have cracks running up and down the grain from the cold dry winter air.
We live in a golden era of guitars. They are progressively mutating into different instruments before our eyes.
In the mainstream, we have harp-guitar hybrids (think : smashing pumpkins video), but a little less so are 7, 8, 9, and now 10 string monstrosities (mostly metal, but some other things too). I am seeing more and more bands that just double up 8 string guitars and do away with the bass player.
An increasing number of manufacturers are offering fanned frets, which may never become the norm, but may eventually be offered on mid range Fender guitars one day.
Would drying, cracking and then filling the cracks with epoxy resin change the tonality?
Whether or not it’s traditional (or composed for a hymnal, as other items in Spence’s reperetory were), that tune has a title, and that arrangement was devised by Spence and has been much imitated since. It’s a bit odd that those who wrote the credits would not to ask about the source–and it’s hard to believe that Wilson would not to know whose arrangement he was working from.
BTW, the melody of “Great Dream” is close to Spence’s version of “There Will Be a Happy Meeting”–his take on the hymn “That Glad Reunion Day,” a 1941 composition by Adger M. Pace. But the “Great Dream” melody goes back farther, at least to Aunt Molly Jackson’s “Poor Miner’s Farewell” (1932), which is a variant of John Wallace Crawford’s 19th-century poem “Only a Miner Killed.” The tune may be traditional or based on a hymn whose authorship has been forgotten (which amounts to nearly the same thing–“Anon.” was always somebody).
Yes. I was making a joke, in cold northern climates solid wood guitars tend to crack along the grain over time unless kept in a case with a humidifier. Actually all solid wood instruments have this problem, whereas laminate wood guitars avoid it but don’t sound as rich (which answers your question about epoxy resin changing tonality-- laminate wood guitars have glue in the soundboard from the lamination.)
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