makepeace wrote:
This peaking and declining of tone in instruments story at first glance reeks of uncertainty and subjectivity, to me at least.. Surely if an instrument were to "mature" so to speak, you wouldn't be able to predict it and "design it in". Plus, what material characteristics are there to say that an instrument is necessarily going improve in its timbre, as opposed to declining? I can understand that an instrument will change over time, to a very small degree of the whole (which is most likely unnoticeable in most cases), but to know in which direction its going to go, and if the change is going to be meaningful or not? Is this characteristic of "tone-morphing" identifiable and if so how? Is it not perhaps a attractive and cliquey misconception?
Well it's like many things - we know a lot more about it now than we did 50 years ago. And pre-war people didn't have pre-war guitars to examine and to compare against contemporary instruments.
I'll add that I don't think old guitars necessarily sound as good as legend has it - especially when it comes to electrics. I've played a pre-CBS strat that was marvellous, but I've heard and played others that left we feeling all meh.
I think there's more of a case in the acoustic world because the wood keeps on drying and mystical things happen to the crystals in the residual sap in the wood.
Some folks say that guitars (again, especially acoustics) need to be played. So according to that theory if you bought two near-as-dammit identical good quality flat tops today, stuck one under the bed and played the other every day for 40 years, there would be significant tonal differences between the two at the end of that period of time.
Remember that the price of these old guitars is determined by scarcity and by desirability on the collector's market, not by tone and playability.
Production methods change as well. Different glues get used for example.
One of the big changes between pre-war and contemporary (even 70s) Martin acoustics is the bracing. At some point in time acoustic guitar strings got heavier, the compounds changed and so on in an attempt to generate more volume. Which worked, but the Martins being built at that time weren't up to the stresses of the then new-fangled strings, so Martin moved the bracing further from the soundhole and closer to the bridge, and stopped scalloping the braces. These guitars could take the heavier strings but didn't sound the same.
Hugh Cumming has an old D-18 that's been with him through thick and thin. He had it refinished a while back and at the same time he had Andy McGibbon shave down the braces to match the pre-war Martin profile. The sound of the guitar has changed and it's volume has increased, but Hugh has to stick to light strings on it now. My Morgan is strung with 13s, and Sez Adamson has 14s on his Morgan. Hugh's Martin would collapse under that kind of strain.
Martin also make "golden era" re-issue instruments now with forward shifted, scalloped bracing. But you have to go easy on the strings.
There's also the nostalgic school of thought which proclaims some time span or other as a Golden Era and then decides (on what grounds it's not clear) that stuff from that time can't be beat. This isn't confined to guitaring either. Medicine, science in general was held back for centuries by the dead hand of Plato. I read a fascinating book recently about scurvy and the search for a cure. In Tudor times, when people started sailing from Europe to the Americas scurvy started to become a big problem, but there was anecdotal evidence that it was linked to diet and that lemons or lemon juice were a preventative. However this theory got pooh-poohed pretty quickly because if lemons cured scurvy or there was a dietary cause of the disease then why had Plato not made a note of this? (nobody bothered to ponder the point that Plato and his contemporaries were unlikely to have dealt with sea voyages of that length, but I'm not saying that any of this actually makes sense).
We see with acoustic guitars now that some folks are simply trying to recreate pre-war Gibsons and Martins (Collings are a notable example) on the basis that those were the finest guitars ever made. Others represent the march of progress (or at least new ideas). Some people sit somewhere in the middle. Jean Larrivee has modified the traditional Martin bracing scheme and his bridges are identical to the Martin bridge because he thinks that bridge can't be bettered, but his construction methods a very different. George Lowden is probably a little further down towards the "progressive" end of things with his neck construction and "dolphin" bracing. At the far progressive end you get a Mervyn Davis or the guys who have foresaken wood completely and use carbon fibre.
In theory modern instruments should sound consistently better than those of 30 and 40 years ago - because manufacturing methods have improved and can give the modern luthier access to precision that Leo Fender and Ted McCarty and CF Martin could only have dreamed about. Martin used to give their neck craftsmen a pair of templates - minimum and maximum dimensions. As long as you were somewhere in the middle you were OK. At Larrivee and Taylor now where they use computer controlled tools they can make neck after neck to the same dimensions (OK... call me a liar for a thousandth of an inch).
Aging of the wood aside, I think that in many instances new instruments don't sound THE SAME as their vintage equivalents, but to say that they sound better or worse is a horse of a different kettle.
