Composite materials are light, strong and stable. Think of the Airbus, that European consortium, produced carbon fiber for their airplanes. Carbon fiber has been around since the 60s.

Nomex, used in double-tops is also a lightweight but strong material and both of these materials can stiffen and lighten a top to produce a different sound than traditional single tops of 100% wood.

Put yourself back in the mid-eighteen hundreds and the advent of the grand piano and you'll understand that guitars, such as the Robinson, Smallman, double-tops, The Lucas, guitars that utilize carbon-fiber in layered tops and Kasha put the listener of these instruments into a quandary and the question is asked: Is this a classical sound?

Often I've had the thought, when hearing a classical guitar that has been tweaked to hell and back in order to gain volume, that this sounds like a big guy with a cold. Often, particularly with Smallman type lattice braced and carbon-fiber layered, there is the sound of a dobro or resonator guitar, so imbued in the mid-range that there is a nasal sound.

I did have a guitar made by Jim Redgate, in cedar and Brazilian rosewood, that was lattice braced but with a significantly thicker top. Note here that the Smallman type top construction leaves the top incredibly thin and therefore the top is ringed with plywood around the perimeter in order to keep the top for collapse. Jim Redgate's guitar is different and you can actually differentiate between spruce and cedar but you can't on a Smallman; the top is so thin that it is a mere diaphragm.

With these guitars, do we get a classical instrument? Of course we do, but not in the traditional sense. The sound is more focused in a narrow range as opposed to the 7-fan braced guitar, like the Hauser, which has a broad tonal palette that is not a focused in the middle range. Keep in mind that the guitar itself, no matter how it is braced is an instrument in the midrange tonally.

The Lucas radial braced guitar may be the successor to the Fleta in that the Fleta went outside the bracing pattern to tighten the top, using 9 braces. As well, the lattice-braced guitar also tightens the top but in the usage of unnatural materials such as carbon-fiber goes beyond the Fleta.

The Fleta may actually be the first "modern" guitar in that the Torres is nothing but a culmination of building tendencies of the day. Besides the 9-braced top with a maple plate on the inside of the top, towards the fretboard, and the dovetail construction of the neck join to body, like a violin (body and neck are made separately), the Fleta, in my mind, constitutes a true point of departure.

The Lucas is made to operate like a speaker diaphragm, in that the bridge is dead center in the guitar's back bout and there are sixteen symmetrical braces coming out from the center. The Robinson brace-less top has the freest floating top that is in existence. At least, that I know of, with no impregnation of the top with carbon fiber, it is pure spruce. A carbon fiber cantilevered support is used to brace along with two transverse carbon fiber braces and two smaller ones. The widths of the braces are minimal.

The guitar, for all appearances, is traditional and you folks force a luthier to go for a look that won't rattle the senses. It is quite attractive and very clean. Paul is an excellent woodworker and French polisher.

As with the Lucas, the Robinson, upon first hearing, presents the same thing I referred to in the opening grand piano reference. Is it a classical sound?

Damn right, it is! It is a warm, open and loud guitar, more traditional sounding than most and there is none of that "big guy with a cold" nasal and dobro-like midrange bark.

As a matter of my taste, it is an exceptional sounding guitar and extremely well balanced with a much better than average 3rd string with makes the break from unwound to the wound 4th sound less differentiated. This one thing is quite remarkable and worth an in- depth look into but this is a general article about Paul Robinson's guitar.

In Paul's own words for his reasoning to make such an instrument, "The concept was to reduce the moving mass of the soundboard assembly without making a paper thin top and to give the soundboard more freedom to move..."If it isn't there, it can't cause a problem" was part of the concept. I felt that the fan bracing on most tops, while transferring sound to the top and providing strength, also dampened the sound at the same time. My understanding of carbon fiber is that you get most of what you put into it back somewhat like a spring...Less energy lost, more volume....The bridge is cantilevered through the top to two carbon fiber arms that don't touch the top at all. One arm is longer and is attached to a thin piece of carbon fiber that is mounted almost transverse of the top...

I put the pieces in place to try to create an asymmetrical drive of the top and try to give a more uniform tonal response. The whole thing has been an intuitive experiment, but I think that it has worked out pretty well...Still more experimenting to do along the way. This is kind of my own private limb to be out on, as I don't know of anything else like it." Okay. There are no policing of luthiers so not much of a limb to be on, but the limb is if the guitar is stable, and if not, the limb must come crashing down and a refund forthcoming. So far it is stable.

With all tweaks, it seems, the play-length of the string in the articulation hand reacts differently. Dolce is about where all guitars are but pointicello is not exactly at the same place and it seems a bit further towards the bridge. I have found this with the Lucas, Redgate, Kasha, Reynolds and some double-tops.

I have also found that the pointicello from the Robinson and these others, except for the Lucas, to be a milder sort and that crystalline treble, not as present and bell-like.

Be that as it may, there is nothing lacking in the tonal palette of the Robinson. As with these afore mentioned modern guitars, as some of them are nasal in quality, the Robinson has no nasal sound. It is "open" as Paul has intended it to be, but not an openness that a 7-braced Hauser type. It is full voiced and powerful.

Paul wandered into this innovation through the traditional route. "My first guitar was from the Cumpiano book sort of, didn't come out real neat but sounded better than I thought it would. Then I built a flamenco, also fan braced, and that was so-so sounding. Then I built a Fleta replica, and it came out sounding pretty good. I had read a lot about the Kasha, so I tried my hand at that and I thought that was an improvement over the fan bracing. I built three of those and decided there must be some other way to get more punch and still have the guitar look "normal." I gave it a long thought in my head and decided that the minimum bracing would be the way to go. I built a prototype and was amazed at the performance I was getting. I did a little tinkering here and there and made a little improvement also. I have built about sixteen of these guitars and have made a few minor changes here and there but the original design still stands up. Trying to "tweak" these things has been a little difficult to understand sometimes, and also trying to get the right amount of preload on the braces has been a lot of patience testing. Still, I have learned a lot and forgotten even more so far, but I like building them, as they are not the same as what is being built elsewhere and therefore doesn't sound the same either."

Sometimes it is hard for a luthier to really know what they've got, especially when an innovation is in place and the number of guitars with this innovation is low. The exact number of guitars produced, with this new innovation, will likely depend on what this innovation entails. I would say, in the case of this brace-less design, this is inherently "quite a bit different."

This is unprecedented although I can point to the French builder, Jean-Luc Joie and Jean Cavalie and their composite layered toped guitars. In the words of Jean Cavalie, "The tops are made with a sheet of wood (red cedar or spruce), which is deposited on a material of our own (industrial secret). Doing this way, all the braces can be removed and we get a homogeneous and highly capable performance. The neck has a very light Truss road so that we eliminate all deformation problems and a precise tuning. It is a Spanish foot."

I've sampled the Aldeca and the Alegria models of these two builders, although, "the tops are manufactured in our workshop, in Bordeaux, and then, sent to our subcontractor in Spain. Following our instructions, the Spanish subcontractor manufactures the rest of the guitars, until they are completed. The guitars finally return to Bordeaux, where we tune and test them all before they are sent to retailers," this is not exactly a luthiered guitar, at least not by one builder.

These guitars sounded, like the Robinson, different than a traditional braced guitar, but a wholly fine classical sound. Contained in both the Robinson and the Aldeca/Alegira is a beautiful and full sounding guitar with the same play-length differentiation in the articulation hand. Pointicello, on all, happen with about an inch to two inches variance. I will continue to play all three guitars and let you know what my findings are but I will say, at the outset of my tests that the sound is different, highly classical and thus highly usable, and the excitement of having instruments, so well thought out and respecting the classical guitar sound, is one I relish.