The Art Guitars of Enrico Bottelli:

Entropia

"Il caso non esiste"

For several years now I had had a decorative idea for a new instrument in mind, but I could not bring it into focus.
The idea came from a question: why always use purfling lines of just one wood, why not try to compose lines formed by many different woods?
And without a specific rhythm, nor defined regular spacings.
Why not simply let the beauty of the woods, the colours, the grain, express in their enormous variety?
So, together with my trainees, we set about preparing and gluing sequences of different woods, 20 to be exact, and of different widths from 1 mm to 15 mm, trying to match colours according to taste.

Afterwards we cut the patchwork into 0.9 mm strips in 2 layers for the fillets of Back & Sides and strips of 0.6 mm in 4 layers for the soundboard and rosette.
For the centre of the rosette, we composed truncated cone-shaped tiles with several 0.6 mm layers in the 2 directions and glued them alternately.
The same technique was also used for the oval buttons of the Rodgers tuning machines, in the nut, in the decoration of the bridge and on the wings in the form of small circles with a diameter of 10 mm, to create a coherence throughout the instrument.
The overall result may look like utterly random chaos, (hence the name of the instrument, Entropy), but it is not.
In reality in all those stripes there is a choice determined by taste, by
precise colour sequences ('chance does not exist').
This whole decorative part is set in a context of woods with wavy grain,
flamed maple (the prince of classical stringed instrument making), for sides, back and head veneer, the Tasmanian Blackwood for the edges of the instrument, and also the ebony of the fingerboard, which is, deliberately, slightly flamed.
There is an obvious contrast between the small linear segments of the purflings and the irregular movement of the flaming of the ribs, the back and the bindings.
The overall look of the instrument is modern; the traditional ornaments usually present on classical guitars and even the typical arch pattern mosaic that has now become my hallmark, are absent.
But the instrument basically retains its own measure, elegance and classicism, within this modernity.
From a design point of view, the instrument starts from a Hauser shape and internal project, but the under bridge reinforcement is eliminated and the thin top (under 2mm) go towards the traditional Spanish guitar.
The final result is an instrument with good depth (Helmholtz resonance 90Hz, between F and F#), quite warm and rounded mids and a very lively, brilliant, somewhat percussive but sweet and modulated treble with good sustain.
An instrument that combines a certain uniformity typical of the Hauser design with the exuberance, sensitivity and readiness typical of the Spanish guitar, with a very sweet, clear, round, focused and colorful treble.

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