Re: Busy Wood / Stable Wood

On Thu, 30 Mar 2006 10:29:22 -0600, Ken Cashion wrote:

Martin makes an all mahogany guitar and now 40 years later, we would
expect the guitar to sound better today than when built. We will
assume it has been treated well and played a bunch.
Ken,
I never have agreed with this part of conventional wisdom. There is no
scientific proof. There was a company that was going to sell 'sound
treatments' and MIT was supposedly doing studies on the effects of sound
on guitars. This was 6 years ago
<http://www.acousticguitar.com/Gear/advice/vibration.shtml> and I can't
find any followup on the 'net. Some people claim it even depends on what
tuning your guitar was in during the 'opening up' process. All of this is
based on anecdotal 'evidence'. If guitars do 'open up', and I'm skeptical,
I've heard 2 explanations that have little to do with wood.
1) the owner learns how to play the individual guitar. I just heard this
one on one of the forums. Wish I had bookmarked it because it makes a lot
of sense.
2) Other things in the guitar age, most likely the glue. This is my pet
theory, especially after opening up a Mexican guitar that is at least 30
years old and finding that all the braces were glued using some
gelatinous, goop type of stuff that was still flexible. Looked like
silicon caulk. It occurred to me that few people have studied the effects
of aging glue. Your scenario has a lot of similarities to the problems of
tracing the age of wood in any guitar. When was it cut, how old was the
tree, how long was it dried, and, just to be cute, was it stored near a
country music bar.
Art

--
12-string instrumentals:
<http://cdbaby.com/cd/artsulger>
<http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=175338>


.

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