Modern versus older guitars

ThePrettyDamned

georgenadaintl;145923" said:

This thread, so much bullshit. Old wood sounds better. LULZ. Listen to yourselves. Oils rearranging in a plank of dead wood. Finishes affecting tone. Oh dear. Thanks for propping up the collectors market, somebody is paying their rent with this crap.

Yeah... Fairly certain I said I didn't actually agree with that - but it is something I have heard which acts to fuel the market.

Actually, I concluded modern build is generally better. You won't catch me paying through the nose for an all original guitar (which is the vintage market - Nout to do with how good said guitar actually is).

But I do think finish affects tone. When I stripped my Sg and redid it in poly (but thin) it was louder acoustically and less muddy through an amp. It still sounded pretty naff! But it did change, to the point where my dad noticed it.

There was a myth buster thing recently where a shop recorded the same thing using the same pickups etc but in 2 bodies. They concluded the wood made no difference...

But the evidence (spectrum analyser) actually proved otherwise - they just chose to ignore the evidence, or they don't know how the decibel scale worked. Some frequencies were 3-6db louder in one than the other, and that equals a doubling or tripling of volume at a human audible frequency.

Yet they ignored it. I suspect they just don't know how the db scale works.

p90fool

Tex Mexico said:

The way I look at it, the people who have the luxury of playing vintage instruments are established, wealthy rock stars who have people who will source the best examples for them and other people who will keep those items in playable condition. Other than that, I'd suggest that the private citizens who own vintage guitars are not necessarily playing them. I seriously doubt they're gigging with them in any case. I honestly don't think there's any reasonable justification for your average hobbyist muso to own anything other than a replica of an old guitar.

Lol, not around here they're not. I was jamming with a local hill farmer in his barn a while ago, me on my battered '63 Olympic white Strat (refinished neck, routed for extra 3-way switch, 70s tuners, all badly done by John "Butcher" Birch) , him on his stripped-finish ex-sunburst '63, when the milkman turned up with his battle-scarred red '61 Strat. The bass player has a lovely, growly-sounding '62 Precision and a pretty good 64 Tele.

Now admittedly we're all old farts, but we're all pretty poor, not one of us anywhere near the national average wage, but that's five pre-CBS Fenders in one draughty barn in mid-Wales, all getting used and abused as Leo intended.

One interesting point about quality though, every one of 'em sounds exactly like you'd hope they would, as to be fair, has every modern Custom Shop relic I've tried. It's not magic, it's just about design and materials, and it can (and is) still being done today.

frankus

p90fool said:

I started playing pre-CBS Strats in 1980, when they were 16 or so years old and lively, light and responsive. In comparison, 1980 Strats were clunky, dead and muddy-sounding.
34 years later and they still are, so the "aged wood" theory is utter bollocks.

Fender and Gibson (along with Harley-Davidson and, er, British Leyland) all seriously lost their way in the 70s, either by terrible QC (Fender) or making unwanted changes to a much-loved design (Gibson), thus giving rise to the "vintage" guitar market.

Seriously, it was that simple, the only Strat you could buy new was a clunker compared to a 15-year-old one, they didn't even look alike, so all the good players played old ones.

The lines are totally blurred now, you can get decent ones at most price points, but when I was starting you couldn't even buy a new Fender with proper body contours, a 4-bolt neck join or staggered pickups, they absolutely looked and sounded like something you'd get from Argos for a kid these days.

The current vintage market is based on myth, "mojo" and wishful thinking, but it started out as a genuine need for usable guitars which actually sounded like the ones on records.

That raises an interesting point - if this is looked at from an economical point of view then in the 70s the West was facing an onslaught from the East and attempting to compete by reducing production cost because it couldn't do much about labour costs..

Fast forward 20 years and it's got newer threats in the East as Japan is undergoing financial issues (that we can probably expect their successors to have learnt from and avoid) at this point the solution is to increase production costs (because it still can't do much about labour costs) but attempt to discredit their competitors more?

57Deluxe

...it all depends on your age. If you were a kid growing up in the iconic 60s and 70s (maybe a bit of the 80s) and loved the sounds of music and wanted to become part of it, then you wanted the gear to make that sound. Whatever the models - a Strat then sounded like a Strat and a LP sounded like a LP.

But now, with modern technology, modelling etc, almost anything can be made to sound like summink else - even a cheap chinky copy through an amp modeller can do a job. So, if you want ONE guitar to sound like everything and everybody, you probbo think that is great! But some of us still only get that satisfaction from owning a piece of our shared history...

JohnnyPlectrum

It's all about desirability rather than playability imho. When Fender turned up with those two relics at the '94 NAMM they boarded a gravy train that still shows no signs of stopping.

In Britain 60's strats were unobtainable and desirable. Then they became available, then 2nd hand and cheap then desirable again.

The CBS downturn and the similar horrors from Kalamazoo all piqued the interest in earlier instruments.

Now, if you can't afford a '62 strat you pay fender to build you a relic one of your choosing for a fifth of the price and the mojo is all yours.

It won't play any better than a mexican standard but it's oh so pretty.

Pickups that were ripped out and tossed away are now worth the same as a decent 2nd hand car. Their sound hasn't improved for spending 35 years in a box in the garage yet that still goes on today.

I still wonder if there's some weird afterlife of brass nuts somewhere too... :-)

Skipped

If I had a time machine it would be fun to take the younger members of the forum (everybody under 40) back to..........No - not 1959. That is too obvious.
No - we would head for 1972, Leeds or Manchester maybe.
You would all notice that  the guitar shops had several Fender Jazzmasters and Jaguars from the previous decade hung on the wall. The first shock would be that nobody had bought them despite the ridiculous low price tags (and I mean low for 1972). The second shock would be that they are all covered in dust - completely ignored. That is how unloved those guitars were.

kelvinburn

New guitars feel sterile to me. Id rather buy 2nd hand as the guitar at least feels like it has a story to tell. The relic concept was born out of this as Keef also wanted the new guitars "bashed up a bit"

marantz1300

In 1959 I was in a pram.
:O)

Adam_MD

In 1959 my dad was in a pram :-h

Bucket

I've been playing my dad's '76 Ibanez Iceman all afternoon and it's fucking fantastic. It rings so much more than most new guitars I've played, not sure if that's because it's old or just a better guitar. It's fab though. I want one of my own now

UnclePsychosis

crunchman said:

georgenadaintl said:

This thread, so much bullshit. Old wood sounds better. LULZ. Listen to yourselves. Oils rearranging in a plank of dead wood. Finishes affecting tone. Oh dear. Thanks for propping up the collectors market, somebody is paying their rent with this crap.

I've got guitars that I've had from new that now have some age on them.  They have definitely improved.  Whatever the physics behind it they do get better.  Same with Violins.  With modern facilities and techniques you could create a new Stradivarius but all top violinists seem to prefer old ones even if they are not Strads.  Like it or not it is about the age of the wood.  It's probably more than just pure age else you could get some 300 year old furniture and turn it into a guitar or violin.  It might be something to do with how vibration affects the wood over time.

Except if you do properly controlled double blind testing, where in fact it appears that professional violinists prefer modern violins to old ones.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/01/02/1114999109

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/science/in-play-off-between-old-and-new-violins-stradivarius-lags.html?_r=0

I've got a PhD in musical acoustics and know a fair bit about musicians and their perceptions of their instruments and it turns out that a lot of musicians are very fond of making definitive blanket statements like "trumpets made from white gold sound completely different to trumpets made from brass". However, subject these ideas to double blind testing and the results are never conclusive. Musicians are very perceptive, but a lot of the time they are just victims of psychoacoustics and confirmation bias.  

Old guitars are just inherently cool. We guitarists love "mojo". Some old guitars are absolutely fantastic, but that doesn't mean that modern guitars aren't capable of being equally good. Same goes for violins---you may need to play an old instrument to be taken seriously as a solo violinist, but thats got just as much to do with societal pressure and expectation from within the musical community as it does the quality of the instrument. Even classical musicians love a  bit of "mojo". 

We should also bear in mind that the guitars that have survived from the fifties and sixties in playable condition are almost certainly the good ones. The ones that weren't as good haven't been taken care of, been cannabalised for parts, or just plain forgotten about and lost. The good examples are far more likely to have survived the years than the rubbish ones. 

Don't get me wrong, I'd love an old guitar. But more for the inherent coolness of owning a piece of history, rather than because it was better than a modern equivalent. 

Fretwired

Check this out:

http://www.award-session.com/pdfs/Why do many old guitars sound mellower than new ones.pdf

ToneControl

@UnclePsychosis great references there

p90fool

UnclePsychosis;147114" said:

crunchman said:



georgenadaintl said:

This thread, so much bullshit. Old wood sounds better. LULZ. Listen to yourselves. Oils rearranging in a plank of dead wood. Finishes affecting tone. Oh dear. Thanks for propping up the collectors market, somebody is paying their rent with this crap.





I've got guitars that I've had from new that now have some age on them.  They have definitely improved.  Whatever the physics behind it they do get better.  Same with Violins.  With modern facilities and techniques you could create a new Stradivarius but all top violinists seem to prefer old ones even if they are not Strads.  Like it or not it is about the age of the wood.  It's probably more than just pure age else you could get some 300 year old furniture and turn it into a guitar or violin.  It might be something to do with how vibration affects the wood over time.














Except if you do properly controlled double blind testing, where in fact it appears that professional violinists prefer modern violins to old ones.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/01/02/1114999109

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/science/in-play-off-between-old-and-new-violins-stradivarius-lags.html?_r=0



I've got a PhD in musical acoustics and know a fair bit about musicians and their perceptions of their instruments and it turns out that a lot of musicians are very fond of making definitive blanket statements like "trumpets made from white gold sound completely different to trumpets made from brass". However, subject these ideas to double blind testing and the results are never conclusive. Musicians are very perceptive, but a lot of the time they are just victims of psychoacoustics and confirmation bias.  

Old guitars are just inherently cool. We guitarists love "mojo". Some old guitars are absolutely fantastic, but that doesn't mean that modern guitars aren't capable of being equally good. Same goes for violins---you may need to play an old instrument to be taken seriously as a solo violinist, but thats got just as much to do with societal pressure and expectation from within the musical community as it does the quality of the instrument. Even classical musicians love a  bit of "mojo". 

We should also bear in mind that the guitars that have survived from the fifties and sixties in playable condition are almost certainly the good ones. The ones that weren't as good haven't been taken care of, been cannabalised for parts, or just plain forgotten about and lost. The good examples are far more likely to have survived the years than the rubbish ones. 

Don't get me wrong, I'd love an old guitar. But more for the inherent coolness of owning a piece of history, rather than because it was better than a modern equivalent. 

I agree with this. It's hard to explain to anyone who wasn't around that Fender and Gibson simply stopped making what we wanted for a while, but they've since corrected it. Age has absolutely nothing to do with it.

marantz1300

Its the feel of an old guitar I like.
http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii98/marantz1300/P1020684_zps98c32dc2.jpg
http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii98/marantz1300/SDC11461_zps3f2904c0.jpg