Shaping Sound

Few guitar companies have the kind of technology Yamaha boasts at their disposal when it comes to the acoustic. The redesigned NX series illustrates some complex electronics under the hood of these new nylon-strings

- Dave Burrluck

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 increase the acoustic volume with a warmer sound but also to keep the long-term stability of the guitar so the top won’t move over the years.”

“The obvious thing to get more volumeis to simply brace more lightly,” added Yamaha’s Julian Ward during the same interview, “but we have a thing about the integrity and stability of an instrument over a long period of time.”