Guitar myth and weirdness

Bob-Dubery · 2009-08-09T07:39:41+00:00

I have a DVD of Martin Carthy - part performance and part interview. Carthy talks about guitars like they're a living thing. In particular he talks about finding or acquiring a new instrument. He says something along the lines of the first time you play a good guitar it reveals it's voice to you. Then you buy it. Then it shuts up and you have to figure out how to coax that sound from it again. Any takers? I sort of half believe that actually. When I bought the Morgan I was knocked out by it in the shop, then spent a months trying to figure out if I'd done the right thing or not. I had to learn to like the guitar that I'd thought was a knockout, and had to learn to appreciate it's qualities. Which is a bit odd because I'd already liked it enough to shell out the cash. Maybe it's about internal doubt or something. Same with the Smoothtalker (which, admittedly, has a very distinct character): Every time I speak to Mervyn he asks me how it's sounding and I tell him that I'm still figuring that out and figuring out how to get the best out of it. I allow myself some slack here because it's quite different from my other guitars - it's very responsive and you can overplay it. Mervyn also believes that guitars take a while to "wake up" after you take them out of the case, that they need to be played for 10 to 15 minutes before they sound their best. I suppose hat could be down to the the strings warming up. Several people that I know believe that a guitar CANNOT sound good unless it's played and played regularly. You can buy the best guitar in the world, but if you just stick it under the bed it won't sound good. I certainly think that my Morgan sounds better now than when I got it, but this might be something to do with the original point - finding out how to make the guitar "speak" (or just deciding to trust the thing). I have heard tales of hillbillies sitting on their stoep for hours a day playing their guitars, then leaving them propped against a loud speaker all night long so that the guitar "soaks up" music and musical vibrations. I'm not sure I believe this one because a) in this day and age they wouldn't get the time to sit on their stoep and play all day (well, if they were retired they might) b) They go to bed with the hi-fi blaring? Do they have some kind of soundproofed room used for conditioning guitars by exposing them to music A combination of two previous points is that if you have a really good guitar that is played in etc etc and sounds fab, and it doesn't get played for a few months then it takes a couple of days playing before it sounds good again. To me a lot of this might me about the ear fine-tuning itself to the guitar, though there is no doubt in my mind that acoustic guitars, especially those with sold spruce tops, do improve with time as the wood ages or mellows or dries out or whatever. Mervyn Davis told me he believes that there is a scientific basis to most of these guitar myths, and he thinks of them as things that aren't explained yet.

Bob-Dubery

singemonkey wrote I've got a great editorial from an old guitar player mag from the seventies (when people were still interested in this stuff), talking about the ageing of guitars. Breaks down something like:

Classical: rapid development for 6 months then slowly peak and begin to decline over about 30 years before beginning decline

Flat top steel: slower development and stay good for about 100 years (more heavily built)

Interesting. No allowance made for the top wood. Though perhaps in the seventies it was spruce, spruce or spruce for flat tops.

Bob-Dubery

Bob Dubery wrote
singemonkey wrote I've got a great editorial from an old guitar player mag from the seventies (when people were still interested in this stuff), talking about the ageing of guitars. Breaks down something like:

Classical: rapid development for 6 months then slowly peak and begin to decline over about 30 years before beginning decline

Flat top steel: slower development and stay good for about 100 years (more heavily built)
Interesting. No allowance made for the top wood. Though perhaps in the seventies it was spruce, spruce or spruce for flat tops.

Duh! More like spruce, spruce or spruce for 100 year old flat tops.

singemonkey

Estimated at a hundred years, I should have said. There were (and still aren't?) any flat-top steel strings that age, I think.

But yeah, in the 70's I think it would have been very rare to find a guitar with a laminated top.

[deleted]

singemonkey wrote Estimated at a hundred years, I should have said. There were (and still aren't?) any flat-top steel strings that age, I think.

But yeah, in the 70's I think it would have been very rare to find a guitar with a laminated top.

99 years old? close enough ?

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