the Aguado room

[Early Romantic Guitar]

In his method Aguado describes the room in which the guitar sounds best! 
He describes a medium sized salon with a high ceiling, the guitar is placed at the short size of the room. Using software we can imitate such a room or, even better, we can use a recorded sample of such a room to proces our home recorded guitar. I tried to imitate that 'Aguado room'.
I used my Aldric guitar with (old) gut strings. Any comments?

 

air

 

[Rob MacKillop]

Very beautiful, Hans. It has warmth and clarity - the best combination. Nice playing, too - very expressive, the way I like it. 

 

So, technical stuff: what software do you have. Can the settings be duplicated? Are you willing to share your numbers?

[Lars Hedelius-Strikkertsen]

again I will use my video - Duo Historico- as an example, and though it seem that I'm aiming for more views thats not my intentions :-)

The place where we recorded this video is a house from 1808. Its perhaps a little to small taken from Aguado's point of view but its furnished exactly the same way as they did in the begining of the 19th C wich is very few chairs up against the wall, a little table perhaps but keeping the room "open" and free in the center totally oposite the salons at the end of this century wich were stuffed with furniture and heavy curtains. The sound is allso recorded here in this room and not in a studio. The microphones are in extremly high quality.

[Rob MacKillop]

What I have with my Steinberg WaveLab Essential 6 is called Natural Verb, with sliders for:

Pre-Del, HPF, LPF, Size, Decay, Damping, St-Mix, Wet-Dry, Sensitivity, Threshold, FadeOut

 

:-)

 

Not sure what all that means. Lars, that room you have access to sounds beautiful too. 

[Jelma van Amersfoort]

Gorgeous!

[Dr. Christopher Page]

Perhaps this is of interest, thought not specifically related to guitars. It is the only example I know from England of a professional 19c musician adapting the interior of his house for music:

• Pitt Byrne, Gossip of the [Nineteenth] Century 

II, 317, Signor Marras, a drawing room singer of Neapolitan birth; his house in Queen’s Gate, has parquet floors. Lace and muslin curtains and uncarpeted staircase; ‘it will scarcely be believed what a wonderfully fine effect these arrangements produced in the matter of acoustics…'.

Incidentally, the famous image of a guitarist giving a recital in a large room that we see in Guitaromanie is surely meant to be satirical, as all the other images in that book plainly are.