Item 37
Price: $40,000
Appraised Value 2016: $40,000
Appraised Value 2021: $40,000
This is a large, heavy, unusually built concert guitar which brilliantly confirms Smallman’s design concepts. He perceived that achieving more tone balance, volume and sustain would require reinventing the bracing system so the soundboard could be made thinner and more flexible.
Internal construction of this guitar differs greatly from the conventional Torres-inspired fan-brace orthodoxy. The lower soundboard is uniformly braced with an interlocking lattice of fourteen struts, seven in each direction. These struts are a composite of carbon fiber and balsa wood. There are two very thick parallel harmonic bars with scalloped ends, above and below the soundhole, and the upper harmonic bar is tied into the sides with heavy arched horizontal fillet-blocks. The two-piece back has its center seam reinforced with a strip of lengthwise-grained maple. No back supporting crossbars or side braces are present. The top lining appears to be a thin cedar strip and is filleted with graphite paste, and the back lining is of conventional solid wood.
The soundboard is made of matched halves of straight-grained western red cedar with uniform grain spacing of 22 per inch. The rosette has a design band of two visually strong, intertwined, thick helixes in natural, black and chocolate brown colors. The teak bridge has its tieblock and saddle integrated into a carved rectangle. The tie-block portion of this rectangle has bone strips for string wear protection on its front and back edges.
The laminated back and sides have outer surfaces of Brazilian rosewood with strikingly pronounced and abrupt color and grain variations. The back bellies out to the player in the fashion of an archtop guitar. The back and sides are heavy and rigid to efficiently reflect sound waves, acoustically loading the soundboard. Neck and head are mahogany and the head is faced with rosewood. The ebony fingerboard has large frets. The soundboard is finished with lightly sprayed semi-gloss lacquer, and the rest of the guitar with sprayed gloss lacquer.
The sound is full, sweet and concentrated. Great reserves of volume are available so the dynamic range of the instrument is probably the greatest of any in the collection. The musical impact, or presence, is undeniable, and it is combined with nearly perfectly matched timbre between strings. Smallman’s guitar-making output is only about four guitars a year, so the demand for his instruments greatly exceeds supply.
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