inside the Acoustic Guitar Village, Cremona Musica September 2023 edition, there will be 2 didactic masterclasses:
–Acoustic Guitar Lutherie Masterclass
–Mandolin Intensive Masterclass
below all the details with program and teachers

Masterclass of lutherie for acoustic guitar, classical and modern

Friday 22nd, Saturday 23rd, Sunday 24th September 2023

Masterclass room 1 of the Cremona Fair offices

Teachers: Master luthiers LEO BUENDIA (Argentina) and TREVOR GORE (Australia)
Translation and assistance by luthiers Max Monterosso and Mirko Borghino

Cost of 250,00 euros
DOWNLOAD REGISTRATION FORM

PROGRAM:

Master luthier LEO BUENDIA
Leo Buendia comes from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and has always been animated by a deep conviction in the value of music and artistic craftsmanship. With the perspective and experience of a musician, he began his luthier career in his hometown of Buenos Aires, moving years later to Oakland, California to specialize in building high-end steel-string acoustic guitars and attending as an apprentice for 40 months the famous luthier Ervin Somogyi. At the end of this long period alongside Somogyi he founded Buendia Guitars, starting to satisfy many professional guitarists with excellent instruments both in sound and in aesthetics. Everyone is touched by Leo’s aesthetic, from the perfection of the headstock to the relief carved into the Brazilian rosewood bridge above the saddle; in all these details you can absolutely feel how much passion and art the instruments he produces are built.
https://buendiaguitars.com/

The Modern Guitar: Design & Aesthetics
Friday 22^nd, from 10am to 1pm:
Tonewoods in Guitars – Tonewood Selection and Evaluation 
This is a hands-on workshop divided into three stages. First, I will briefly lecture on the structure and nature of wood. The second stage involves hands-on exercises for noticing and becoming aware of specific significant characteristics of tonewoods. The third stage involves relating these characteristics to tap tones and sound producing potential of the woods. 

Saturday 23^rd from 10am to 1pm:
Guitar design and physics of the guitar’s neck and Head
This masterclass is oriented toward creating successful body contours. The shape of the guitar body: the bouts and the positive use of the waist. Scale length: the basics for layout and proportion. Bridge hight. Guitar cutaway. 

Sunday 24^th, from 10am to 1pm:
Custom-made ornamentations, rosette and Inlays
This masterclass refers to the overall look at the guitar as a whole. It concerns how its various elements combine together and are arranged in concordance with an existing criterion of taste, proportion, and fashion. This masterclass will cover, among other topics, the designing of a headstock. Endgraft decorations. Back-of-the-neck inlays. Fretboard inlays. Bound fingerboards. Binding and purfling. Designing and inlaying a rosette. Hand-carved rosettes, end graft, and headstock. 

Master luthier TREVOR GORE
Trevor Gore hails from Sydney, Australia and is a builder of both classical and acoustic guitars.
Graduated from Durham and Cambridge, UK, has been interested in guitars for 50 years and has been building them for 25 years. He has been a guitar design instructor for 14 years and author of the groundbreaking book “Contemporary Acoustic Guitar Design and Build”. When he builds guitars he tries to understand music, mode to play and needs of the future guitarist buyer. Together with the musician he discusses the options available for building an instrument that places the minimal impediment between him and his repertoire. Specific pieces of the woods chosen on the basis are selected to their measured acoustic properties and, using the design techniques that Trevor has developed, the thickness of the soundboard and the back and the dimensions and the distribution of the risers that will provide the sought sound.
His guitars are built with a very clear understanding of the interplay between resonances of the strings and the resonances of the guitar body, the resonances of the air and the resonances of the wood. So his theory is that if you don’t tune the body resonances in the right place as part of the design and construction process, you have a guitar that never sounds right in tune. This is what distinguishes and creates the diversity of its tools from many others.
https://goreguitars.com.au/

How to control the sound of guitars
Whole course summary:

• How string and plates vibrate
• Visualising and understanding modes of vibration
• Relating modes of vibration to guitar frequency response curves (FRCs)
• Measuring frequency response curves
• Relating frequency response curves to generic guitar types (modern and tradition classical, steel string rhythm, steel string finger picking)
• Introduction to theory of modal vibrations
• Mechanical impedance and admittance
• Responsiveness and monopole mobility
• Targeting the “right” modal frequencies and avoiding the wrong ones
• Measuring material properties so that you can make the best of the wood you have rather than wishing for the wood you’d like
• Practical tuning of guitar modes:  Moving from “as built” to “to design”

Friday 22nd, from 2pm to 5pm:
Fundamentals of Guitar Acoustics

• Making waves on strings
• Calculating the shape of the moving string
• Forces exerted on soundboards by a moving string
• The nature of waves on plates, vibration of plates
• Visualising modes of vibration using Chladni patterns
• How Chladni patterns relate to guitar frequency response curves
• Setting up Visual Analyser and measuring frequency response curves
• Characteristic responses of different guitar types

Saturday 23rd, from 2pm to 5pm:
Resonance, Vibration Sensitivity and Measuring material properties

• The nature of vibrations
  • Introduction to Simple Harmonic Motion
  • The natural response of spring/mass systems
  • Resonance
• Vibration sensitivity
  • Response curve for a simple driven oscillator
  • Admittance and Impedance
  • What makes a responsive guitar and how to measure that
  • Adding “allure” to your instruments
• Coupling of components
  • coupled vibrations
• Selecting targets
  • mode frequencies
  • the spread of mode frequencies
• Measuring material properties
  • Flexural rigidity
  • Measuring brace material
  • Measuring plate material

Sunday 24th, from 2pm to 5pm:
Achieving your target performance – moving from “as built” to “to design”

• Principles of resonance shifting
  • Efficient guitars – only move a resonance if it’s giving a problem
  • Adding/subtracting mass/stiffness
  • How to influence one mode and not another
• Process of resonance shifting
  • Assessing the problem using the tests we have studied
  • “Levers”: Edge thinning, bridge mass/stiffness, back plate, side masses, hole size
  • Adjusting the main air resonance – example
  • Adjusting the main top resonance – example
  • Adjusting other problematic resonances

Masterclass in mandolin specialisation

Sunday 24th September 2023 from 10am to 12:30pm
Masterclass room 2 of the Cremona Fair offices

Teacher: Master CARLO AONZO (IT)

Bring your technique to the upper level thanks to the revolutionary exercises of independence and syncrhonism created by Carlo Aonzo.
Short description: what are your strength elements to be developed? What are your technical gaps to be filled and in which way? Find it out by participating in our specialising session

Cost of 50,00 euros
info and registration: giulia.alliri@gmail.com
info@accademiamandolino.com

Master CARLO AONZO
Carlo Aonzo is a worldwide known Italian mandolin performer, teacher at the Conservatories of Bari and Ferrara and winner of several prestigious awards; during his long career he has played in all continents for such institutions as the Philharmonic Orchestra of La Scala in Milan, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the Teatro Massimo V. Bellini of Catania, the Sicilian Symphony Orchestra (Italy), the Carnegie Hall of New York, the Nashville Chamber Orchestra (USA), the McGill Chamber Orchestra in Montreal (Canada), the Philharmonia of San Petersburg (Russia), the Minsk Chamber Soloists (Belarus), the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival (Germany).
Carlo is often invited as musical director and visiting faculty by the most important international mandolin institutions namely the Classical Mandolin Society of America, the Federation of Australasian Mandolin Ensemble, the European Guitar and Mandolin Association, the Steve Kaufman’s Acoustic Kamp (Tennessee), the River of the West Mandolin Camp (Oregon), the Zupfmusik-verband Schweiz (Switzerland), the Mandolin Festival in Berlin, the Saigon Guitar Festival, the Goa Mando Fest (India), the Osaka International Mandolin Competition (Japan), the Yasuo-Kuwahara Competition Schweinfurt (Germany) and he regularly teaches seminars and workshops worldwide.
Since 2000 he leads his annual “Carlo Aonzo Mandolin Workshop” in New York and Milwaukee In 2006 he creates the International Italian Mandolin Accademia that he is still successfully directing and constantly expanding with new activities among which the production in 2020 of the short-documentary series “L’Italia dei 1000 Mandolini” (the 1000 mandolins of Italy) on the mandolin and its fascinating world. He has released several albums covering different musical genres, made research on the history of his instrument collaborating also with the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and published for MelBay, Hal Leonard (USA) and Les Productions d’Oz (Canada). He often appears in national Radio and TV programs in Italy and abroad, he has recently toured Japan, USA, Australia, India, Switzerland, France and Norway and has lately begun to play in duo with the grand master pianist Bruno Canino.
www.carloaonzo.com
www.accademiamandolino.com

Didactic material: All the necessary material will be provided in advance in digital format.