Official Luthiers Forum!

OK, at the risk of being slightly off-topic, I wanted to post this here and see what builders think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNnuUZ_lSg4


James says in this video (from a couple of years ago) that "guitars wear out over time... (unlike violins and the cello) guitars just don't last that long... the stresses on them wear them out". I assume he's talking about the stresses of string tension, primarily.

A friend mentioned this video to me, and sent me the link. I told him (before seeing the video) that most builders and players would say the opposite, that instruments get better with time. I went into as much as I knew about the physics of it, which isn't much. But what I do have a sense for is that most people would disagree with JT, all due respect aside.

Even one of his Olsons? Are you kidding me?

I would love to hear other members' take on this.

_________________
Ken Mitchell
Durham, NC

I tend to agree with him. Flattop guitars will all eventually (to quote Alan Carruth) 'try to swallow themselves through their soundhole'. Archedtop is a different story, since their building structure is quite alike violins and such. But flattop will last a considerably shorter time than violins. It is true that they get better with time, soundwise, in the first few years of their lives. One easy way to see this is the tremendously low amount of old guitars that are still playable, compared to the amount that were actually build. On the other hand, it is quite common for violins to last more than a century.

_________________
Alain Moisan
Former full time builder of Acoustics, Classicals and Flamencos.
(Now building just for fun!)

And with the introduction of CF into modern work, perhaps guitars can too!

I agree that guitars have a life. They may continue to be OK after a certain point, but they pass their peak. Another reason NOT to use a ToneRight for break in. Who knows if you might put years of wear into an instrument in a matter of days.

_________________
Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

All Olsens have a short life, and we should not discourage JT from that opinion.
Now, MY guitars, or YOUR guitars will last the above mentioned 3/4 century. And we need to shout that from the roof tops.

By the way, we tell our clients to bring their guitars back after the first 100 years for an evaluation and possible top replacement. Thankfully, that hasn't happened too often.

Steve

_________________
From Nacogdoches...the oldest town in Texas.

http://www.stephenkinnaird.com

you've seen fire/ and you've seen rain,
you've played shows/ people thought would never end,
you've been locked in cars/ while i partied with my friends,
but I always thought that I'd play you/ again....

I can't say if I believe this or not. I have a CF Martin from 1857 that sounds very good. I have heard and worked on Martins and Gibsons that were 70 years old and sound fantastic. I am sure some that are built very light will have a short life. I am sure there are exceptions to the rule also.

_________________
John Hall
blues creek guitars
Authorized CF Martin Repair
Co President of ASIA
You Don't know what you don't know until you know it

I think everyone missed the key point: "They get a certain amount of abuse on the road", and then he goes on to say that's why he keeps them in the climate controlled environment. I think he's exactly, 100%, dead on the money. Pro musicians need to play in tropical rain forests and in desserts. The instruments fly on airplanes, they're in busses, they get dropped and abused. Do that to a guitar for 10 or 15 years and it's actually pretty miraculous that you don't see more cracked tops, bridges popping off, etc. I didn't get the sense at all that he meant they just wear out from being played, and in fact he said that he tries to play them from time to time to keep them in good shape....which I don't think does anything to keep them in good shape other than force him to change the strings when they start getting rusty.

I also notice that he keeps everything strung up to tension. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but most boxes eventually collapse under string tension so why hasten the almost inevitable neck reset on those older instruments?

To that point I may have to agree , there is a big difference between a pro , 270 gig a year player and a couch strummer. A touring musician will have his instruments stressed to the max between temp and RH shock , travel bumps and just plain over use. After all , in his case they are tools and are as much abused as used.

_________________
John Hall
blues creek guitars
Authorized CF Martin Repair
Co President of ASIA
You Don't know what you don't know until you know it

In my opinion and experience, flat top guitars loose tension over the years and slowly dies. If you detune them when not using them, they´ll last a lot longer. How many guitars have you seen that were dishing in front of the bridge and lifting the lower bout behind? Thats the ones that are ready to be retired or at least have done most of their mileage. I suppose you could take off the back and restore most guitars, but its a lot of work and very expensive.
Archtop instruments have their tension built into the shape and the bridge pushes 90 degrees down, so they last a lot longer. Besides, especially instruments from the violin family are pretty easy to repair. There are no bindings etc and the whole concept is bassed on the idea that you can take them apart, so they get restored and so they live longer.

I have had my hands on many guitars I do think the lighter the built the shorter the life. As for classical's , they are made so much more fragile than steel strings. As a repair guy that deals in vintage instruments , some of the older martins are still hard to beat after 75 years and they do bring high dollar values. A 1937 D28 can often go for $70,000 and sound very good , so I think this is more on an individual basis . Martin a few years ago paid over $250,000.00 for a pre war D45.
Granted they may not have been stage guitars , but I still don't believe that a guitar dies in all cases .

_________________
John Hall
blues creek guitars
Authorized CF Martin Repair
Co President of ASIA
You Don't know what you don't know until you know it

Seen/played plenty of great sounding guitars with a bit of bridge roll. As long as the guitar can be set up properly to play well, it doesn't bother me a bit.

Sure, there are some old guitars that sound really nice. There are always outliers, but that doesn't invalidate the rule.

I know that guitars 'play in': I've measured the changes. Vibration is what does it. Some play in faster than others, with the over built ones taking the longest. Given the wide range of variation in wood properties, it's entirely possible to make two guitars with the same scantlings, and have one of them be very much under built, and the other over built. That can account for a lot of the variation we see.

Playing in always does the same thing: it loosens up the top. Guitars that start out loose to begin with tend to become 'tubby', while those that start out tight can relax and sound better. Maybe all those old guitars that sound really good now were 'way too tight in their early days. Maybe that's one reason they've lasted a long time: they didn't get played much early on. At any rate, there's simply no way to know what that 1950's Martin sounded like right out of the box, or how it compared with all of it's siblings that didn't survive as long.

If they play in, I can't see why they would not play out. Why would the guitar be the _only_ machine that doesn't wear out in use? It seems reasonable to me that playing in is, in fact, the first stage of playing out. In that case maybe all of those guitars that have been 'Tonerited' will have shortened lives, like stone washed jeans that are comfortable off the rack.

i think if you had to sum it up, maybe the wood simply loses stiffness and rigidity over time, either from playing vibration, or from the endless cycles of absorbing and losing water.
like if you take a fresh piece of cardboard, and sit there and bend it back and forth while watching TV for an hour...after the show is over, the cardboard is soft like fabric or leather.
my Deep Thought of the Day
-Jack Handy

The string tension on a violin is trying to push the thing together while the string tension on a flat top or classical guitar is trying to put it apart. People often ask me if I can fix their guitar even though I'm not a repair guy. Half of the time the problem is that the action is terrible because the top has bellied up. Sometimes, it's over 1/2" higher than it would be if the top were its original shape. James Taylor might see it a bit more than most because Olson's are truly flat tops and have no arch at all. I think the major problem with old guitars is structural rather than sonic but my tone memory isn't nearly good enough to remember how a guitar sounded last week much less a few decades.

Some violin aficionados are starting to feel that their Strads are waring out sonically. So there may be a finite life to them as well.

A lot of them also have cedar tops. Cedar is not as stiff or as strong as spruce.

According to some of the references I have seen, wood does not have a fatigue limit. It can deform over the years, but as long as it is not degraded from rot or insect damage, the integrity should remain.
In my repair experience, the main reason guitars do not survive is because they have been overheated.

_________________
John

Dam straight. But I wanna see some data on that

Mike

What this really tells us, and the only thing it really tells us is that James Taylor, if he really believes what he's saying, prefers the sound of new guitars. No more, no less.

Nothing wrong with that, either, but implying that guitars "play out and die" is ridiculous. As they age, they will sound different, that's all, and many, many, MANY musicians prefer the sound of a well-worn and broken-in guitar. And at the opposite end, we have some, like JT, that prefer the tighter sound of a new guitar.

The bigger question for me is, if he's serious, then why does he keep all those guitars? Just have the builder replace the top when its "played out" and be happy for however many years it will take to "play out again. All he'd need are two guitars; one to play for a week while the other gets re-topped.

Or maybe it's a subtle ploy to get the many that follow him to buy more new guitars...

I don't know how many of you actually watched the video but I did. I wonder if what he was referring to was that the guitars will change. I know guitars will change over time from stress. I guess unless James Taylor posts here himself we may not know exactly what he meant for sure.
Any of us that work on guitars and I am speaking of steel string guitar , havn't heard an improvement on the instrument when the necks were reset and the bridge geometry corrected . Did this not improve the tone and voice of an old guitar? Then again look at TRIGGER and Willie Nelson's instrument, I sure wouldn't call that dead.
Just my 2 cents.

_________________
John Hall
blues creek guitars
Authorized CF Martin Repair
Co President of ASIA
You Don't know what you don't know until you know it

How long before one's ears wear out?

Anyone seen Willie Nelson's guitar?
It looks like a disaster, but Willie keeps right on plucking it.

I can't say that it sounds like it did when new, but there is still music coming out of it....

_________________
"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

I wouldn't go that far, Chris... Seems out of time, and quite often... JUST KIDDING. I couldn't resist.

Anyway, I wonder if worn-in/worn-out is all in the ears of beholders. This guy seems to be okay with playing a guitar that James Taylor would likely refuse. I know it's been shown here before, but I might have thought he would notice the brace, even if he didn't notice going through the top to begin with.

There is a builder, and friend of mine, here in P'town that has arguably built more, seen more and repaired more "classic" vintage guitars than anyone living today. If you know who I'm talking about, then you know who I'm talking about. We've talked about this topic at length.
Here's the cliff notes.
The best of the pre-war guitars were built very lightly. They were NOT all built this way. It was all a matter of who's bench they came from. They were all essentially truly flat tops - i.e. there was no introduced arch to the top bracing. The arch to the top we introduce now; on those instruments was caused by the relentless pull of the string tension. Over time they took on the dome that we now introduce by arching the glue surface of the X brace. Many of these guitars have had one or more neck re-sets to compensate for this movement. Many of them did not survive, for whatever reasons. The sands of time can be cruel. Also noteworthy was the quality of the materials of that time. In a word exceptional.
Fast forward to WW2 era. Quality spruce was swallowed up for every thing from airplane and glider ( Steinway Piano Co. built them) construction to any number of industrial revolution products. Progress! But availability of high grade Spruce suffered.
Along comes the 70's and 80's and now Martin, Gibson, etc, are corporations with bottom lines and spreadsheets, and those dang lightly built (but great sounding) guitars keep coming back for warranty repairs....Bigger bracing the CFO's say!
Fast forward to today, and we're back to lightly built, great sounding guitars. However, impatient lot that we are, we want them to have nicely domed tops so they behave like a 75 year old 000....and hence we're chasing our tails with exotic dishes and radii computations and the like. One of the consequences is that having "aged" the shape of the top, we have also shortened it's usable effective life. Remember a 1938 Martin has had 74 years to develop it's "mojo". This is not an irreversible condition. A truly experienced luthier can take apart an instrument, re-shape or re-place all the structural elements and re-assemble. Therefore a guitar, theoretically, can live, and sound fabulous(insert British upper crust accent ) indefinitely. It's simply a matter of dedication.
If this quick description has helped you hear the angels sing, you can buy me a beer at Healdsburg; and my friend too, but he's more into single malt Scotch these days....
-C

_________________
Freeborn Guitars
and home of BeauGuard©

¿Do you want to build and play instruments that sound and play well now or do you prefer them to do so when you´re dead and gone?

The problem is that we cant say how an old well playing and well sounding instrument sounded when new and we dont know if its been with string pressure all its life. What I know is that I´ve seen many old guitars that were sounding as if they had at least 1 leg in the grave.
I build 90% flamencos and costumers want a guitar that sounds now. And so I build light and one day those guitars will die. But at least they sounded when they were in use.
Lots of factory flamencos will live forever, but they will never sound.
Lots of expensive American factory steelstrings from the 80th will live very long and might start sounding now, but I remember when they were new... They needed at least medium or heavy gauge strings and a heavy pick driving them hard in order to sound. If I was a costumer, I would never buy such a guitar.

I don't know that I'd say ridiculous. According to Segovia, his Hauser did just that. You may be willing to argue with Segovia, but not me

Steve