There is really nothing to discuss with a luthier, your agreements about sound and building techniques, whether a lattice brace is good or not, ports, elevated fretboards, whatever, if you play his guitar and love the sound. This is the real end of debate, but not the end of discussion.

Debate has no winners with two granite block minds of old men; discussion pries the mind open and reveals facts of life, so to speak, the nuts and bolts of a luthier or a consumer's sound preferences from a life of performing certain music. I've spoken with many luthiers and there is never unanimity in everything, but there is commonality in everyone's desire for the guitar to sound good. I don't really care what it involves so much, I just want a great guitar, but I am interested in why something is exceptional so I can go forth and look for this feature in other guitars.

Randy Angella is a Northern California luthier who has been at it since the 1970s and with all of that experience you'd figure that he produces an exceptionally robust guitar. This is correct and some luthiers stick to a proven method, but Randy has the heart of an explorer. He's covered quite a lot of ground experimenting on his own, coming forth with quite a few innovative methods of manufacture. I've played two of his guitars and although they had different insides, there is the stamp of an old soul of the guitar, unmistakably both Angellas in a characteristic clarity and tonal width.

Both of these guitars were spruce topped with Brazilian rosewood backs and sides, and both were deadly similar in appearance, but one rattled my senses more than the other. And true to my contention that Fleta is the main point of departure for the modern guitar, the guitar that rattled me was a nine-braced one. The sound was outrageously intriguing, full and crystalline. The decay rang musically and long. Only in the nine-bracing was the guitar similar to a Fleta, it was a Spanish footed guitar not like the Fleta dovetail. No other Fleta feature was present that I saw other than the similar number of braces, but the system of placing and contouring these braces were dissimilar, and it was made of wood and fret wire with bone and tuning machines, which makes it like any other guitar.

Tightening the top has been a mantra of mine ever since hearing a Fleta, particularly Kenny Hill's copy. I've yet to play and Ignacio Fleta. With the purchase of a Jim Redgate lattice braced guitar, I further received some confirmation of this hunch of top tightening, and then with the Lucas radial braced guitar finally it dawned on me that the tight bracing of a top could be of benefit for my sound. Of course, the Lucas radial braced and reconfigured classical guitar is more than just this one feature as all guitars are. My sound, and not anyone else's, I do love the sound of traditionally braced guitars (I have five), the five-braced (I have one) and the Ruck tweak of the seven-fan (I own none), but in order for me to play at optimum expression, it seems to me that a guitar that is loud and punchy is more to my liking. Not every piece of music I've played requires this, but it easier for me to get sweet than it is to get mystery, awe and terror from a traditionally made guitar. To me the romantic sound is mystery, awe and terror; the baroque sound is sweet, clear and intimate.

It is understandable that Segovia and Williams ended on Fletas with Williams furthering this tightness idea with a Smallman. I did get a chance to hear Williams perform in a large hall in Pasadena, California with a Smallman. It was a tremendous sound and it is the player more than the guitar anyway.

What is somewhat true about a lot of tightly braced tops; they tend to spike the already spiked midrange, but I will say that the Smallman, to name one, is a rich sound although the tonal width doesn't encompass the crystalline range of a traditionally braced and made guitar. But a traditionally made guitar does not inspire awe and mystery in its sound and the deadly balance from one range to the next. Have you heard of the wolf tone in the guitar? These Smallman type guitars are amongst the most even and consistent guitars on the planet. It is a totally reliable and useful sound. What you can depend on, as a builder, is it all depends on what the performer wants though.

Randy is a bright eyed and dynamic looking man of sixty-two years old with an immense sense of good humor and energy. As said he has been making guitars since the 70s and is devoted to his family and friends in that old fashioned way. His workshop is his haunt and in it there are the usual stacks of wood and tools, nothing unusual about this, but within his stacks is a huge stack of Brazilian rosewood. Talking about preferences he seems a bit like Herman Hauser in that there is not much difference in using Indian or Brazilian, he is hard pressed to even justify a price difference since he purchased his Brazilian so long ago and in such an amount.

What is most impressive about him is how much ground he has covered as a luthier, experimenting constantly but keeping within the structures of his sound. I don't believe I've ever met a luthier that could keep to this ideal and mess around with so much interplay of developments in guitar building.

N.M. At the outset of this review I asked Randy to give me some general statements about his philosophy of building, which came in three emails and involved getting right into some of his innovative building practices.

R.A. I need to specify at the outset, that the changes I will be mentioning didn't start at the very beginning of my career. No, there was the normal five or six years of sitting on my hands before I even had a basic idea of what I was doing. Kinda wandering out in the desert. Once I had some skills and knew a little, I started sorting things out in earnest. Thus begins the arc that led to now.

There are a number of things that I have done that aren't within the conventional methods used today. One of my guiding principles regarding changes in my guitars is to first see if I can affect a change not by adding something, but by taking something out. It's why there are no side reinforcements or straps on my sides, or there is no attempt to stiffen a well-chosen Honduras Mahogany neck, or why I use the same piece of wood for all the braces. Why I scallop my transverse braces as much as I do and lay them into the linings. Why I prefer to work with just wood and not new high tech materials. All of these changes have cleaned up and simplified the sounds that come out of my guitars. It's all about the purity of a vibrating string and the wood's accurate and loving companionship with the string. Get that right and you'll have a great guitar.

I think the first thing I tried that netted a positive outcome was to make the two chevrons that are found at the bottom of the Torres bracing pattern into continuous brace that slants from the treble side down to the bass side and running it right to the sides and notching it into the sides to hold the ends down. This causes the fan braces to be shortened from right to left looking at the underside of the top. The sweet spot of the guitar went up some. I was trying to offset the paradox of light treble strings producing the melody and the massive bass strings needing to be in support at the bottom of the sound picture. So I found that I had tripped into the right direction.

I then added a second treble bar across the top of the fans between the fans and the middle transverse brace. The sweet spot went up some more and I can use the angle and the position relative to the bridge to compensate for different wood characteristics.

Next I added an eighth fan brace and up went the sweet spot. I didn't like there not being a fan brace on the joint between the top halves, so I added a ninth fan and that's when it all came together. Now the sweet spot runs from the around the F on the second string to the E at the eleventh fret, first string. That solved the problem and leaves the organization of the music to the guitar and leaves the player to interpret the music.

Another innovation I use on occasion when a twentieth fret is requested, is to move the fretboard forward on the neck so that the twelfth fret falls above the neck body juncture.Then just add the twentieth fret to the normal crescent fretboard end. I don't like the dufuss looking projection in the sound hole that is normally where the twentieth fret is placed. I don't put a twentieth fret on the sixth string so as not to confuse the player.

I don't use water based glues when I glue the sound hole re-enforcing across the grain and nor also when I glue the strap under the bridge.

I used a go bar arrangement for a while and just didn't like the way things were going. So I went back to lots of clamps set just right, and everything got better.

There also was a time when I got tired of building the Hauser style guitar and I started to lighten things up. What I got was; a shorter and somewhat less consistent decay, less volume and more noise, longer onset and lots of other guitaristic nonsense.

By slow and patient small changes, one at a time, I've managed to shape my sound's characteristics as my own understandings have slowly spiraled down into the core questions that we builders are faced with. As time has gone by, I have taken bold steps in evolving my guitars, but not without sometimes years of thought and reflection and then finally action.

N.M. What about the traditional Spanish foot joined to the backs and sides? Have you modified this procedure?

R.A. There are a number of things that I have done that aren't within the conventional methods used today.

I think the first would be that I assemble my guitars with a hybrid method taking some of the advantages of the Spanish heal and the ability to use solid linings instead of the traditional tantaloons used in the Spanish style.

I glue the top and the neck together in a fixture that aligns their center lines correctly and true. My necks have a Spanish heal that is cut to accommodate the sides at a positive angle of 1 degree. This is done so that the fretboard is thicker and more solid at the neck body juncture.

Before the sides are fixed to the top and neck, they are completely assembled and profiled to meet the complex and fine curves of the top and back along their edges. A further departure in my guitars is that my linings are solid two ply and are convex rather than the traditional triangle or flat linings. The linings are also continuous across the ends of the sides at both the neck end and the tail ends of the guitar. This makes it easier to capture the edge curves that are required to produce a guitar with curved top and back as the sides can be held and sanded on an abrasive surface plate. The sides are then glued to the heal and top all in one operation, as is done on most steel string construction. In assembling the guitar in this fashion I get the solidity of the Spanish heal, with the solidity of the steel string type construction.

N.M. What other builders have influenced you?

R.A. I met Craig Carter he bought a brand new Herman Hauser Sr. When I first saw it I was just blown away by the sheer beauty of the thing. It set a standard of excellence that I still aspire to. I discovered very quickly though, that it was really a demanding guitar to play. If you were not very accurate it didn't like you. In retrospect they were building guitars with too high impedance. The demand for a, just perfect, attack is a symptom of a guitar that is too stiff.

At the same time I had a friend that had a 412 Paracho guitar that I just loved to play. You couild see that the tenth fret was longer than the 8th fret and you knew the top was made of wood it just wasn't apparent what it was. But it was a blast to play. The guitar just gave you all it had, it was your friend.

I've spent the last 30 years working to build guitars that sounded as lovely as the Hauser and as much fun to play as the Paracho guitar.

I haven't diverged from the Fleta style so much as just tightened up the building technique. I admire the humble approach of the original Fleta builder. The father. I don't think the kids have the knack and I don't think their guitars are as consistent as the father's.

N.M. I hate to get all sickeningly sweet but guitars are like the same kind of flowers in a patch. You get up and look at the individual flower and there are differences; some are lacking color, some are bursting with color, some have stirring odor some don't smell that much, you go from flower to flower and you see individuals and choose the ones you'd pick to take home to your girl. Using this metaphor I'll say that Angella's guitars, in a patch of guitars, stand out with exceptional color and fragrance. The sound is exceptionally rich and individual. You can tell that Randy "hasn't thrown the baby out with the bath water," there is the sonic presence of the traditional sounding guitar but the overpowering mystery to his sound sits on top of it like the cherry on a bowl of sweet and rich ice cream, definitely not low-fat. Ricardo Cobo talked of a guitar we were examining having a chocolate sound. I don't remember is it was milk, semi-sweet or with almonds. If the Angella were chocolate it would be semi-sweet with some sweet blackberry in it; if it were wine it would be a red with medium tannin. How we describe guitar sound is generally pretty food and visual color oriented sometimes.

The Angella is not a Fleta nor is it a Smallman, certainly closer to former than the latter, but not anything than what it is. Now, how rare is that? I can't think of only a few present day builders that have such individuated sounds. Big, clear, sweet, long lasting, almost worded like something to eat or men's E.D. medication but an Angella is a musical instrument. I must be hungry and in need of sex? No.

Randy and I went about talking a bit about secrets, both of us saying that there are no secrets and certainly that guitars and pieces of music build themselves, moving like forces of nature and you just are along for the ride. I'm sure he's right!

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