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The difference in stringing is obvious, but this is only superficial. The most meaningful differences are internal and structural, and have to do with the fact that the steel-string guitar must be built to withstand relatively great string tension compared to the nylon-string or Spanish guitar. (Before nylon strings were invented, Spanish guitars were strung with gut strings.) And being built differently, these instruments produce tone differently. As a matter of fact, from an engineering standpoint, nylon- and steel-string guitars are totally different instruments that simply share the same name. The principal elements unique to the steel-string guitar are its neck design and size, the bridge, and the X-bracing under the face or soundboard. Let’s look at each of these elements in turn.
First, virtually all steel-string guitars have adjustable tension rods that are designed to counteract the pull of the strings. These truss rods have access ports either behind the nut or through the soundhole. The neck on nylon-string guitars are under much less of a load and do not need reinforcing rods.
The necks on steel-string and Spanish guitars are sized and shaped to support very different playing styles. Spanish guitars work best for a technique that anchors the fretting-hand thumb behind the neck, while the wrist bends and extends the fingers over the fretboard. Accordingly, this neck is wide and its back is shaped with a somewhat flattened, gentle curve.
The steel-string guitar was originally developed for a playing style in which the fretting-hand thumb wraps around the neck, while the picking-hand attacks the strings with a plectrum. Therefore, a steel-string guitar’s neck is narrow with closer string spacing. It also has a somewhat triangular cross-section with a softly rounded “peak” in the back. This design is optimized to allow players to wrap their hands around the neck, as the “V” shape fits into the valley between the thumb and the other fingers.
The steel-string bridge differs greatly from its Spanish counterpart. For starters, the strings tie directly onto the Spanish guitar bridge. This design works well within the holding power of the glue joint that keeps the bridge on the guitar face. Metal strings, however, exert so much pull that merely glued-on bridges will lift off. Steel-string luthiers realized that a better solution was to anchor the strings to the underside of the face itself, and bypass the possibility of glue failure at the bridge. This explains why the strings pass through the bridge into the body cavity on a steel-string.
Also, the Spanish guitar saddle is parallel to the frets, while the steel-string saddle is at an angle. This is necessary because the very stiffness and mass of metal strings create intonation problems, which increase with string diameter. Heavier strings need to be slightly longer to achieve correct intonation, and slanted saddles are called “compensated” saddles for this reason.
Both the layout and amount of bracing control a guitar’s sonic characteristics. I wrote about this in my August 2010 column, “What Makes an Acoustic Tick.” You can read it online at premierguitar.com/aug2010 and view photos that illustrate various bracing patterns. There are many factors that go into a guitar’s internal bracing, and the importance of these factors far outweighs the instrument’s structural characteristics when discussing sonic traits.
I’m often asked, “Why are there so many sizes and shapes of steel-string guitars to choose from, while classical guitars all have very nearly the same size and shape?” The classical guitar is considered almost perfect by its adherents, and builders are encouraged to refine the design, but not change it. The steel-string guitar world, however, is not bound by such thinking and steel-string builders are free to invent new versions and features as long as someone will buy their instruments—much like the automobile industry. Consequently, with both cars and guitars, models are sometimes released that are not on par with their predecessors.
Another and more interesting reason is that steel-string guitar music and its playing techniques are changing. In the classical guitar world, these factors are moving ahead slowly as technique, repertoire, and accepted design are comparatively frozen. Because the flattop guitar is so relatively new—virtuosic steel-string soloists, interpreters, arrangers, and composers only really began to emerge in the 1960s—we’re experiencing an explosion of musicians who are exploring and discovering new tonal, dynamic, and compositional possibilities for their chosen instrument.
Consequently, guitarists are demanding higher levels of responsiveness, tonality, playability, and fidelity of intonation from their steel-strings. Most recently, ease of amplification and recordability have also become essential considerations. This is a very exciting time for the steel-string guitar, and there’s no reason to think these factors will not continue to grow for decades to come. Next month, we’ll wrap up our exploration of the steel-string with thoughts about its cultural significance.
Ervin SomogyiA professional luthier since the early 1970s, Ervin Somogyi is one of the world’s most respected acoustic-guitar builders and rosette designers. To learn more about Somogyi, his instruments, or his rosette and inlay artwork, visit esomogyi.com.
Once you have the “Cowboy” chords together there are thousands of songs that are suddenly under you hands. But what if you want to make those chords a bit more interesting? Barre chords cat be stretchy and difficult, but there are ways to create new sounds out of old chords.
LA LOM from left: Jake Faulkner, Nicholas Baker, and Zac Sokolow
These days, trace the cutting edge of modern guitar and you’ll quickly find a different kind of musical ancestor to these early clashes of traditional styles and electric instruments. Listening to artists like Mdou Moctar, Meridian Brothers, and Hermanos Gutiérrez, it’s easy to hear how they’ve built upon the traditions they investigate. LA LOM’s tropical-guitar explorations are right in line with this crew.
If you’ve heard LA LOM, there’s a good chance it was because one of their vintage-inspired videos—which seem to portray a house band at an imaginary ’50s Havana or Bogota café as seen through an old-Hollywood lens—caught your eye via social media. (And for guitarists, Zac Sokolow’s bright red National Val-Pro, which he plays often, lights up on camera.) Once you tuned in, these guys probably stuck around your feed for a while.
LA LOM’s videos were mostly shot at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles and feature cover songs culled from the several-nights-a-week gig that they played there during the first few years of their existence. It’s that gig that started the band in 2019, when drummer/percussionist Nicholas Baker enlisted Sokolow and bassist Jake Faulkner to join him. Sokolow—who is also a banjo player and has worked in the L.A. folk scene as a member of the Americans and alongside Frank Fairfield and Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton—explains that their first task was to find a repertoire for their instrumentation that started with electric guitar, upright bass, and congas. “One of the first things we played together were some of these old Mexican boleros,” he recalls. “I realized that Nick had an interest in that stuff—his grandmother used to listen to a lot of that kind of music.”
The trio’s all-original debut is steeped in the influences the band explored through their video covers.
Sokolow’s own early love of the requinto intros to boleros by classic NYC-based group Trio Los Panchos, as well as music from Buenos Aires that he’d picked up from his grandfather, informed their sets as well. Soon, LA LOM had embraced a repertoire that encompassed a wide variety of classic Latin sounds—Mexican folk, cumbia, chicha, salsa, tango, and more—blended with Bakersfield twang and soaked in surfy spring reverb.
The trio have moved beyond the Roosevelt Hotel—this year LA LOM played the Newport Folk Festival, and they’ve opened for Vampire Weekend. And the band’s newly released debut, The Los Angeles League of Musicians, is an all-original set of tunes that takes the deeply felt sounds of the material they covered in their early sets to the next logical musical destination, where they live together within the same sonic stew, cementing LA LOM’s vibey and danceable signature. On the album, Sokolow’s dynamic guitar playing is at the forefront. The de facto lead voice for the trio, he’s a master of twang who thrives on expressive melodies and riffs, and he’s always grooving.“One way that we differ a little bit from a lot of those ’60s Peruvian bands—we don’t really get as psychedelic in the traditional way.”
Zac Sokolow's Gear
Sokolow plays just a couple guitars. His red, semi-hollow “Res-O-Glas” National Val-Pro is the most eye-catching of them all.
Guitars
- National Val-Pro (red and white)
- Kay Style Leader
Amps
- Fender Deluxe or Twin ’65 reissue
- Vintage Magnatone
Effects
- Boss Analog Delay
- Fultone Full-Drive
Strings and Picks
- D’Addario or Gabriel Tenorio (.012–.052)
- D’Andrea Proplex 1.5 mm
LA LOM’s cover-song videos detail the rich blueprint of the band’s sound, and they also serve as an excellent primer for tropical guitar styles. We assembled a setlist of those covers, as if LA LOM were playing our own private function and we were curating the tunes, and asked Zac to share his thoughts on each.
“When you play Selena, it always just goes over well—everybody loves Selena.”
The Set List—How LA LOM Plays Favorites
“La Danza De Los Mirlos” Los Mirlos
“Los Mirlos are a group from Peru. They’re from the Amazon. They’re one of the most well-known classic chicha bands that play that Peruvian jungle style of cumbia. I’ve tried to look into what the history of that song is. As far as I know, they wrote it. I’ve heard some older Colombian cumbias that have similar sections; I think it’s kind of borrowing from some old cumbias, and a lot of people have covered it over the years. In Mexico it’s known as ‘La Cumbia de Los Pajaritos.’
“It’s always been one of my favorites—especially of the guitar-led cumbias. The way we play it is not too different from the original, and it’s one of the first Peruvian chicha kind of tunes we were playing.”
“Juana La Cubana” Fito Olivares Y Su Grupo
“That’s a song from a musician from Northern Mexico, on the border of Texas, who sort of got popular playing in Houston. It’s very much in that particular style of Texas-sounding cumbia from the ’90s. He’s playing the melody on the saxophone. That song is so famous, and you hear it all the time on the radio.
“There was one time that I was driving home from a gig really late at night and heard that, and realized there’s some little saxophone lick he’s playing that kind of sounds like “Pretty Woman,” the Roy Orbison song. I had this idea that it would sound more like ’50s rock ‘n’ roll played that way. We started just playing it [that way] at gigs, and it sounded really good instrumentally. That’s how we decide to keep something in a repertoire—if it feels really good when we play it.”
“La Danza Del Petrolero” Los Wembler’s de Iquitos
“That is from another group from Peru called Los Wembler’s de Iquitos. They’re from Iquitos, Peru. It’s kind of dedicated to the petroleum workers.
“I would say one way that we differ a little bit from a lot of those ’60s Peruvian bands is we don’t really get as psychedelic in the traditional way. We don’t use that much wah pedal. I usually keep my tone pretty clean. I’ll have reverb and a little bit of delay sometimes with vibrato, but we don’t go for any really crazy sounds. Usually, we keep it almost more in a country or rockabilly kind of world, which has just sort of always been my tone.”
“One of the first things we played together were some of these old Mexican boleros.”
“Como La Flor” Selena
“That’s probably one of the first cumbias I ever heard. There’s something very emotional about that melody. It's kind of sad, and really beautiful and catchy. When we play that out, people just go crazy. When you play Selena, it always goes over well—everybody loves Selena. And we made a video of that with our friend Cody Farwell playing lap steel. He was trying to find a way to fit steel into it, and I don’t think I’d ever really heard the steel being played on a cumbia before. He was always kind of finding cool ways to fit it in and make the tone fit with ours. On our record, there’s a bunch of his steel playing all over it. It came out sounding pretty different from other covers I’ve heard of that.”
“El Paso Del Gigante” Grupo Soñador
“Grupo Soñador are from Puebla, Mexico, and they were a real classic band playing this kind of style. They call it cumbia sonidera. I feel like that style and that name is more almost about the culture surrounding the music than just the music itself. There’ll be these impromptu dances that happen sometimes on the street or in dance halls, and they’re usually run by DJs who will play all these records and sometimes slow them down or add crazy sound effects or talk into the microphone and give shoutouts to people with crazy echo and stuff on their voices.
“A lot of the records that came from that scene have a lot of synthesizers. Usually, the melody is played by the accordion or the synthesizer with crazy effects. It just has such a cool sound.
“I try to kind of imitate that sound on my guitar as much as I can. Something I often do with LA LOM is to try to get the feeling of another instrument, because in so much of the music we play or the covers we do, it’s some other instrument, whether it’s a saxophone or a synth or accordion playing the melody.”
“Los Sabanales” Calixto Ochoa
“That was written by Calixto Ochoa, from Colombia, who I’ve heard referred to as “El Rey de Vallenato”—the king of Vallenato, which is a style of cumbia that came from mostly around the city called Valledupar in Colombia. And that’s the classic accordion-led cumbia. The much older cumbia was just called the gaiteros, with the guy who played flute and drums. And then the Vallenato style emerged, which is that accordion-led stuff, and Calixto Ochoa. He’s just the coolest. We’ve learned a couple of different covers of his. I think the way we play this is more like rockabilly than cumbia.”
