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• le corps ne devra rayonner qu'un minimum d'ondes acoustiques, suivant le principe du "solid body",
• chaque partie du corps devra être parfaitement élastique et homogène, mais parfaitement rigide, ce qui n'est pas incompatible,
• les bois devront donc être secs, totalement secs (voire, en "bois mort"), ainsi que les collages
• si le confort le permet, chaque élément "devrait" être le plus massif possible (mais l'agrément indéniable de la sonorité des "solid bodies" légères semble contredire cet impératif)
• les éventuels collages doivent être réduits au minimum et parfaitement réalisés,
• les frettes étroites et les chevalets acérés devaient être privilégiés,
• les cordes "plain" à faible tirants ou "filées rond" devraient être choisies.
• par précaution, on évitera de faire agir les potards dits "de tonalité",
• enfin, il se pourrait que le vernis (tout comme un collage) nuise au sustain (à vérifier, en comparant une guitare "avant" et "après")

Sur ce dernier point, on peut songer à la célèbre Epiphone de John Lennon, "hollowbody" soigneusement "dévernie" et sans pickguard:

- Daprès Valcke Alexander, de Kritz International, je cite:

"Act like nobody else... let's make 'em old !
Why do some artists play a guitar that gives them a super sound although the guitar looks like coming out of car accident? Because they select their "loved one" out of many guitars. They never give up, they travel the world for it. All the time, they look for that one magical sound that makes them feel good. I followed them in that search for the impossible.
I could find out that most artists found their sound into guitars from the fifties. Strange not? Was it for the lower price?
I assure you, no. The guys I travelled with (sorry no names) could afford a hundred oldies. So what could be the difference?
I was left alone with these unknown reasons for many years. And finally I found the answers. One of the major reasons had to do something with the fact that they are "old". But what is "old"? It had to be something that was able to change over the years.
I said: Lets make em old! (And that's where people began to doubt about my mental ability!) So I focussed on the wood and the basic electronics... like magnetic fields. In fact wood ages all the time. Magnets do also. And they both change. Wood shrinks, magnets weaken.
But there was more. Dried wood does not sound like old wood. How about that? You can dry the wood for 30 years.
All moisture will be evaporated. That is no problem. But you can't harden the inside elements like oils and nutritious matter.
This is something that time has to arrange. And it takes a lot of time. You cannot add a catalyser to harden it out, like we do with chemical resins. In fact you can do nothing else but "wait", for a hundred years... I was not planning to wait that long.
I am an impatient man, you know. So, I made some guitars out of old furniture. Their sound was exactly how I always wanted to hear it. Not in one but in all "older-made" guitars. More dynamics, more harmonics and still sweet, soft basses.
I was convinced from then on that all the research had to be focussed on the making of guitars out of old wood.
The combination of wood that has been "dead" for more than 100 years with our special hand wound, aged pickups provides an astonishing sound. But we missed the look! What to do with cracks and holes? Cover it? Maybe, but we never found it a good idea to cover wood with loads of paint, in order to mask faults. Believe me, loads of paint take the sound away. In fact I love to look at the figures in the wood and I personally find them more attractive when the finish is transparent. We learned how to deal with that totally new concept.
We solved the problem by dividing the guitar into parts. One part is the "sound maker": wood that comes out of the 19th century (< 1900).
One part is the "nice maker": which covers the old wood. Our nr 3 goes in between. It's composite stuff (Carbon, diolene, Kevlar and several resins that we developed to bind all these with wood) It's a minor part but it's very important as it serves as reinforcement. It stabilises the wood. We get most of the older wood out of demolitions and old furniture. Belgium, France, you know, its a corner with a living history. Those origins are the safest when we trace the age.
100 years is our minimum age limit. The wood that we use is oak, cedar and ash. Today, we even have ways to define the age.
So nobody can fool us."

Fin ce citation.

Il s'agit donc:

• d'employer des "bois mort", d'au moins 100 ans de séchage, les "soundmakers".
• prenant éventuellement en sandwich une pellicule composite de carbone, diolène, et Kevlar,
• recouverts d'une pellicule de plaquage, le "nice maker",
• finalement recouvert avec le minimum de vernis.

- A la limite, l'idéal pourrait être un manche traversant, sans caisse, en un seul bloc de fibre de carbone, avec le minimum d'accessoires rapportés, et éventuellement des lests massifs optionnels, mais solidement arrimés.

Moyennant quoi, si on pousse chaque trait à son maximum, on obtient une guitare à fort sustain, mais malheureusement d'une sonorité totalement impersonnelle, genre "jolie planche" uniquement apte à piloter des kilos de pédales d'effet.

Le comble de la "guitare sans âme" est atteint par les PRS, superbes planches mortes habilement (sic) maniées par le champion des récompenses américaines pour musiciens de bastringue, l'excellent (quand le fric n'est pas en cause), mais affreux magouilleur, Carlos Santana.