Been following up a long standing interest in why acoustic guitars are so quiet when compared to other instruments of a similar body sized (the cello being the obvious example). This orginally came about at kalbakken practise when we noticed just how much louder Kirsty’s violin could be at full pelt compared to my guitar, which considering the different volume of the sound boxes seemed pretty wild.
It seems to be something to do with that alot of very careful design and consideration has gone into the exact shape of the body of the violin to create natural resonaonces which produce a bigger sound; also a bowed instrument is louder due to the nature of the sustain.
All this to lead me to look at the design of most acoustic guitars today; flat back and front, round sound hole, which is relatively inefficient as a means of projecting sound but appears to be the most usual design. With this in mind I started looking at the possibilities of archtop guitars which maintain some of the features of the violin/cello style in the angled back and sides and f sound holes; as luck would have it Ive ended up with a lovely framus archtop fromt he 60s on loan from Pascal which sounds great.
Eventually as i continued thinking around what other possiblities of guitar design there were it struck me: the amazing metal resonators used by blues players. The potential for volume and sustain could be incredible. A quick scrabble around the web and what do i find? The video above of Booker White playing resonator. Seriously, he does more in the first 30 seconds of this video than most musicians could ever hope to….
x
David Birchall 
what a great video! I love the ‘drum fills’ he does! Archtops are definately the way to go for acoustic volume – the loudest acoustic guitar i’ve ever played is a pre-war gibson archtop, really small bodied but still very loud and clear. Seems strange that more guitars don’t use violin techniques – why no sound post on a guitar?