Shaping Sound
While the great luthiers behind the classical guitar – the boutique builders of their day – had limited access to woods and made their instruments in small workshops completely by hand, today’s classical and nylon-string guitars are a lot more likely to be made in very large factories in Asia, at least the ones we can afford. The new NX series, for example, is made at Yamaha’s own factory in Hangzhou, China, which was established back in 2003. By 2009, when the wraps were taken off the original NX series, it was producing around 500,000 instruments a year. Clearly, what has been a good selling range for Yamaha – available all across the world – is not going to be changed in a heartbeat. But this is Yamaha and it’s a company that rarely does things by half… or in a hurry.
According to Yamaha designer Yoshihiko ‘Yoshi’ Tambara, the first area to receive attention were the guitars’ tops, specifically “to redesign the top fan-bracing using the Yamaha Acoustic Simulation technology”, he told us at the launch of the new NX range back at the NAMM 2020 show, pre-pandemic. “The main aim was that we wanted to
