Spreadsheets and "Contemporary Acoustic Guitar"

[Greg Holmberg]

Over on anzlf.com, I've posted several spreadsheets in the past, implementing various formulas from the book "Contemporary Acoustic Guitar" by Trevor Gore and Gerard Gilet. Panel thickness, fret positions, fretboard radius/width, neck shape, intonation compensation, 4DOF model, brace stress/sizing.

I decided to combine these into one big spreadsheet file with 20 worksheets, and create connections between them, so when you change one worksheet it affects others. In essence, I've tried to create a complete acoustic guitar model. How accurately this predicts acoustic function is yet to be seen.

I place them here for your use, in the hopes that they will be used to create better acoustic guitars. I feel that the necessity of creating ones own spreadsheets from the book is too high a hurdle for most people, and this has hindered the successful use of the wonderful information in the books. Yes, you can use the books to make a copy of a Medium Falcate steel-string, but I would like to see some new designs.

• Medium steel-string falcate with CF spreadsheet
• Medium steel-string falcate, no CF spreadsheet
• Classical nylon-string falcate with CF spreadsheet
• Wood Properties spreadsheet
• Guitar Modeling Documentation

You may copy and modify these spreadsheets for your own purposes, just always keep the copyright and the links to the original spreadsheet, and to the documentation.

You can work with these directly in Google Sheets (free to use, nothing to install) in your web browser, or can download an Excel or OpenDocument file to work on them offline. Use the File -> Download command in Google Sheets. For the OpenDocument files, I recommend the free LibreOffice software, available on all platforms.

Feedback, constructive or otherwise, is always appreciated.

I'm looking for people who would like to test the spreadsheets and work with me to find bugs. Please send me a PM if you're interested.

Greg