Official Luthiers Forum!

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

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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

I asked Stefan Grossman the same question a few years ago, he agreed that a guitar will peak in its lifetime and then die off.

Ryan asked:
"How long before one's ears wear out?"

Except for the nerve endings on the basilar membranes, your ears can repair themselves. Most of us do lose our hearing gradually as the nerve endings are destroyed by loud sounds over the years. I have yet to see a self-repairing guitar...

There seem to be two points of view expressed here on how guitars "wear out." One is that over time the top wood fatigues and gets too loose, and the guitar can only be restored by replacing the top with one not fatigued. The other idea is that the pull of the strings distorts the shape of the guitar, making it unplayable and (some believe) reducing the quality of the tone.

I'm not a very experienced builder, but I have been playing and listening to guitars since I was 10, and in that fifty years I've had experience with a lot of instruments. I have a many limitations as a luthier: for example, my ability to visualize things in three dimensional space is mediocre. However, I do have the good fortune to have an excellent memory for how things sound.

I certainly agree that steel string tension normally limits the life of a guitar to about the life span of a human. As decades go by, repairs increasingly become like building a guitar from a box of beautiful twisted splinters. However, if money is no object, a really skilled repairman can restore almost anything.

Having heard so many lightly built old instruments that, once restored to reasonably correct geometry, have a wonderful tone, I am skeptical that the tops fatigue and wear out. There is the counter-argument that the old instruments that sound good now were originally built especially sturdily and sounded too tight in their first decades. This is in practice a "non-falsifable hypothesis"--it sounds logical, but there is no way it can be disproved. To me, it seems to be an unnecessary speculation. In my experience, most older well-made instruments that don't sound good have a problem with the set-up. Accepting that there may be a few cases where that isn't true, I am more comfortable saying their are a few exceptions due to "unknown causes" than postulating permanent wood fatigue which seems inconsistent with the great majority of examples I've encountered.

Until the average lifespan of a human being is extended far beyond that of a guitar, no one is likely to have the opportunity to know the answers to these questions for certain.

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Tim Allen
"Never hurry, never rest."

Fire and Rain + Guitar =

Alex

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"Indecision is the key to flexibility" .... Bumper sticker

What is the science behind the statement ?

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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