Smallman is the maker who asked the forbidden question: what if the most important thing about a concert guitar is that the back row can hear it? His answer — a thin top supported by a carbon-and-balsa lattice — gave the instrument a volume and projection it had never had, and divided the classical world into the grateful and the appalled.
John Williams took up his guitars and never really put them down, which settled the argument as far as concert halls were concerned. The traditionalists were not wrong that something was traded away — a certain breathy intimacy, a Torres softness. But Smallman was not wrong either. He just valued a different thing, and built honestly toward it.
“What if the most important thing is that the back row can hear it?”
Chapter I
Why we forgive him
Because he was right that the question mattered, even if we would answer it differently. We build closer to Torres than to Smallman — but we have studied his lattice, argued about it over tea, and borrowed more from it than we like to say. A maker who forces the whole field to defend its assumptions has earned his place on the wall, whatever you think of the sound.