Not often comes a guitar like the Sansone. The guitar that immediately comes to mind is the Lucas, a stylistic brother, radical in design and at the same time a useful but different in sound and appearance. They are brothers in this boldness.
Whatever is the sound of the spruce classical guitar, regardless of it can be five, seven or nine fan it is of wide tonal color. These fan bracings have been most of what existed under the top and the body dimensions have differed from the Torres to Fleta. There have been few aberrations and aberrant guitars fell out of the hands of most people.
I have good reason to play something like 7-fan spruce because they are the best sounding guitars for the spruce guy I am. I am the character with this guitar and not the guitar because I can drive this kind of guitar in many directions in the variation of sounds along the string length. I've come many years, through various new technologies and only a few have been satisfying; the double-top standard braced and the radial. Now I have come full circle to what I started with and over a 35-year span have lived with an ear that has changed preferences. With age comes a refinement of hearing or a loss of some of it or both. Beethoven bit his piano after being deaf to get something, anything. I am fortunately not in this situation of biting a guitar but will get bite out of it.
The Sansone is innovative for purpose although the small hole seems like alchemy to me at first. I placed my hand over the secondary hole and I could not tell difference but it can be that it works away from the instrument so I checked with a very fine player at the academy of music I teach at. Here are the results. It does make for the basses to be more vibrant otherwise it does not increase the volume, which is quite substantial.
The guitar is made with Italian spruce and Indian rosewood. This is getting to be my favorite wood combination because Indian rosewood, by all of my accounts, mellows the spruce sound. Not that it provides a sweetness akin to a cedar topped guitar but there is a lessening of the cut a good piece of spruce provides. Sometimes Brazilian or other such rosewoods makes for a harsher sound, which may mellow after some time.
The beautiful and useful sound of the Sansone, I believe is first predicated on wood choice. Besides being warm and rich it is loud and forceful. The guitar is a 9-brace with the perimeter braces quite small. There is a pronounced "beer belly" to the top that makes the guitar quite loud and keeps the basses bold and pianistic. The trebles are clear and actually quite sweet for spruce. I believe that the perimeter braces leave a certain amount of the tone of a looser braced guitar and it is not quite tight enough to give the lattice brace's nasal sound. There is much tonal width here, which is usually sacrificed on spruce when you tighten the bracing so I am intrigued with Roberto's vision.
Besides the elevation, the end of the fretboard does not touch the top. This is a feature I haven't encountered yet. The elevation is high and the playability is of course easy at this point of the guitar's range but as I well know the elevation does submit the top to a different pull at the point of the bridge and also interacts with the built in "beer belly, which I will submit to you that this may also interact with the fretboard's clearance from the top.
The guitar, for me is effortless to play. The finishing is in French polish and as the Italians are so supreme in design the guitar is a striking to look at, the headstock in particular is asymmetrically interesting but all this wouldn't matter if the sound wasn't so good and highly impressive.
No doubt the Italian virtuoso, Antonio de Innocentis, chose the Sansone for his over-the-top performances and his recent recording of his arrangements of the 24 Caprices of Nicolai Paganini. The Sansone provides more than the usual guitar for this unusually gifted player.
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