Talk me down!

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Re: Talk me down!

Post by Slowy »

Molly wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 8:08 am Y
As Mr Suhr said, paint doesn't have tone.
Exactly. But my question is, can it restrain the wood; dampen vibrations at all? I assume not or Mr.Suhr wouldn't use it. But the potential (or not) for a finish to restrict the resonance of a guitar never seems to be addressed by experts. All comments I've ever seen have been in the realm of anecdote and speculation.

Anybody seen a comparative analysis of the effects of different finishes on resonance?
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Re: Talk me down!

Post by Dharmajester »

Molly wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 8:08 am You may strip the poly and be disappointed with what's revealed. How many piece is it? Are they uniformly spaced, centralised and sized? It's a gamble.

As Mr Suhr said, paint doesn't have tone.
Indeed paint doesn't have tone, that's the problem no ? The number of pieces constituting the body could well cause some disappointment however I've yet to meet a guitar relieved of it's poly finish which didn't sound considerably better after finish removal. Of course there is the possibility that a body is more suited to firewood than executing a musical role regardless of finish so there's a Clint Eastwood component too. How lucky do you feel ?
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Re: Talk me down!

Post by jhyang549 »

Slowy wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 9:57 am
Molly wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 8:08 am Y
As Mr Suhr said, paint doesn't have tone.
Exactly. But my question is, can it restrain the wood; dampen vibrations at all? I assume not or Mr.Suhr wouldn't use it. But the potential (or not) for a finish to restrict the resonance of a guitar never seems to be addressed by experts. All comments I've ever seen have been in the realm of anecdote and speculation.

Anybody seen a comparative analysis of the effects of different finishes on resonance?
I've read that white painted guitars can affect the resonance Vs non-white painted guitars because the amount of primer that is needed is greater, hence greater dampening

But Slowy, we are talking about differences that is practically negligible and only of scientific interest. There are so many other factors of how a guitar resonates besides paint it becomes impossible to isolate.

Just strip the paint if it doesn't look or feel right to you. That should be the reason why you want to do this. Personal preference should always win over findings in science journals when it comes to guitars.
Last edited by jhyang549 on Sun Aug 07, 2022 11:40 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Talk me down!

Post by Slowy »

Dharmajester wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 10:04 am
Indeed paint doesn't have tone, that's the problem no ? The number of pieces constituting the body could well cause some disappointment however I've yet to meet a guitar relieved of it's poly finish which didn't sound considerably better after finish removal. Of course there is the possibility that a body is more suited to firewood than executing a musical role regardless of finish so there's a Clint Eastwood component too. How lucky do you feel ?
Hmmm. Talk about Cat Amongst the Pigeons. :rofl: This is an American G&L. It has a 2 piece Ash body. Being Ash with a solid finish, I assume it must have a pretty thick filler layer to smooth out the Ash grain. It's also, as you would expect, a very good guitar.
I blame Conway for this disturbance in the Force. He handed me his Novo. That thing is not just good, it's completely off the charts.
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Re: Talk me down!

Post by Jay »

Slowy wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 9:57 am
Molly wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 8:08 am Y
As Mr Suhr said, paint doesn't have tone.
Exactly. But my question is, can it restrain the wood; dampen vibrations at all? I assume not or Mr.Suhr wouldn't use it. But the potential (or not) for a finish to restrict the resonance of a guitar never seems to be addressed by experts. All comments I've ever seen have been in the realm of anecdote and speculation.

Anybody seen a comparative analysis of the effects of different finishes on resonance?
I haven't quite been able to go through the more than 100MB of PDF pages of the most detailed book ever written about everything guitar... but it is bound to be in there... It is also complex reading as the writer uses math as if there is no tomorrow. Below a few pages I copied and pasted to not wet your appetite :lol:

"
7.9 The Wood Determines the Sound?
Mahogany! Maple! Rosewood! Men oft believe, if only they hear wordy pother, that there
must surely be in it some thought or other [Goethe]. And the usual thinking is: “the electric
guitar is a musical instrument made of wood. In all musical instruments made of wood, the
wood determines the sound. The more noble the wood, the more noble the sound.” Goethe’s
witch’s kitchen – a suitable location for deception and magic – holds more such articles of
faith, but let us keep some distance from alchemy, and give physics the priority here: how
does the body of the guitar vibrate, and in what way will the vibration of this body influence
the sound? In the material-science course, every luthier learns about different tonewoods and
their sound-determining material-parameters: “the denser the wood, the more brilliant, treblerich the sound; the higher the stiffness, the longer the sustain (P. Day).” As if that were selfevident, this statement and similar ones are based on the assumption that the findings that are
valid for violins and acoustic guitars apply to electric guitars, as well. If we now add that
board of experts who listen to an electric guitar first of all without amplification, we quickly
arrive at a conglomerate of teachings that, between them, could not be more contradictory. All
the while two simple principles would really help us:
1) Compared to the acoustic guitar, the electric guitar functions very differently. Findings
derived from the one type of guitar may not be sight-unseen applied to the other type.
2) There is a connection between the vibration of the strings and the (airborne) sound directly
radiated by the electrical guitar. There is also a connection between the vibration of the strings
and the sound radiated by the loudspeaker – but this latter connection is very different from
the former.
The fundamental differences between acoustic and electric guitar become evident when we
look at the energy flow: being plucked, the guitar string receives energy that is in part
converted in to sound energy, and in part into caloric energy (heat). A – not untypical –
excitation energy of E = 3.6 mWs corresponds to the billionth part of one kilowatt-hour
(kWh); that’s really very little compared to household appliances but still enough to generate
a sound that is clearly heard. With an acoustic guitar, this energy can generate an SPL of
about 94 dB at the ear of the player; a Les Paul only reaches about 64 dB. A level difference
of 30 dB translate onto a power relationship of 1000 to 1, which confirms quantitatively what
was qualitatively already known: the electric (solid-body) guitar is a very inefficient sound
source – at least as far as the directly radiated primary sound is concerned. However, the
electric guitar is of course not intended to generate primary sound – it is there to generate
electrical voltage. The big difference between the two modes of operation: in the acoustic
guitar, the sound energy needs to travel “through” the body i.e. “through” the wood, while in
the electric guitar the part of the sound energy that is “reflected from the wood to the string”
is captured. Any conjecture that, in the electric guitar, the vibration energy needs to be also
fed to the guitar body as much as possible, is wrong. ”The biggest part of the string vibration
should be conducted into the body. If the latter is fed with unrestrained vibration energy, a
maximum of tone and sustain develops [G&B 12/05]." How should the string ring for a long
time (i.e. have a lot of sustain), if its vibration energy has gone into the guitar body? The law
of energy conservation dictates that energy cannot appear out of nowhere. The excitation
energy is present only once; the part of it that is fed to the guitar body is missing to keep the
string ringing. The banjo is a good example for an instrument that withdraws a lot of energy
from the string within a short time. However the sound of a banjo (and in particular its
sustain!) is not much like that of an electric guitar.7.9 The wood determines the sound?
© M. Zollner & T. Zwicker 2019 Translation into English by Tilmann Zwicker
7-103
From a systems-theory point-of-view, the string represents a mechanical waveguide on
which waves propagate. As these waves impinge on the bridge and the nut (or the fret where
the string is fretted), one part of the energy in the wave is reflected, the other part is absorbed
by the bridge/nut/fret (and adjacent structures). Again, the law of conservation of energy
holds: the sum of the reflected and of the absorbed energy corresponds to the energy in the
wave impinging on the bridge/nut. We get a high rate of absorption if the wave impedance
and the impedance of bridge/nut/fret have comparable values. The wave impedance of the
string (see Chapter 2) depends on the diameter and on the material: typical would be 0.2 Ns/m
(E4-string) to 1 Ns/m (E2-string). These are very small values compared to typical bridge
impedances (100 – 1000 Ns/m). The situation is comparable to an airborne wave that hits onto
a concrete wall: because the wave impedances again differ by several orders of magnitude,
almost all of the sound energy is reflected. The same happens with the string: the vibration of
the string is, for the most part, not fed to the guitar body but it is reflected. In the solid-body
guitar, a degree of reflection of 99.9% for low-frequency partials is not untypical: of the
vibration energy arriving from the direction of the nut, 99.9% are reflected and only 0.1% are
absorbed. There is no other way a vibration could remain for any extended periods of time: if
for the E2-string 50% of the energy would be absorbed at each reflection, only 0.1% of the
initial energy would remain after only 10 reflections – and 10 reflections have happened after
a mere 60 ms for the E2-string! Given a 99.9%-reflection, 37% of the initial energy will
remain after 1000 reflections (that’s 6 s)♣. Therefore, a simple connection exists between the
decay time (the sustain) and the degree of absorption: the higher the degree of absorption, the
shorter the sustain. And here we arrive at an explanation that is not so easy to refute: if the
sound depends on the sustain, and the sustain depends on the absorption, and the absorption
depends on the bridge/nut/fret, then the wood of the guitar body will determine how the guitar
sounds, won’t it, after all?!
Given the intense and controversial discussions about the “tonewood”-topic, let us make a bit
of room for some fundamental considerations: if a string is struck once, its vibration energy
decreases over time. The main reasons for this decay are: sound radiation directly from the
string, internal absorption within the string, and absorption at the string bearings. The first
effect is so small that it is normally neglected. The second effect is significant in the middle to
high frequency range for unwound strings; this is elaborated in Chapter 7.7. The third effect is
the only one that can be connected to body-parameters. If we neglect the first two effects, the
string vibration – and thus a component of the sound – indeed is completely determined by
the guitar body. That is defining the “body” very extensively, though: it would have to
include everything that abuts to the string, in particular the bridge that for example consists of
18 individual components in the case of the Gibson ABR-1 bridge. There is much wailing all
over the place that the super-rare tonewoods of the early Les Pauls are not available anymore,
and thus the sound of these originals will never be duplicated. Interestingly though, the
question rarely asked is to which extent the individual pieces of the ABR-1 bridge were
deburred, and how clean the force fit between the movable bridge saddles and the base is. The
bearing impedances at the bridge and at the nut (or respective fret on the neck) strongly
influence the decay of the individual partials of the sound. Before the vibration energy arrives
in the body, it needs to traverse the bridge/nut/fret; the stronger these elements reflect the
vibration, the less important the material of the guitar body is.
All this is, however, valid for the acoustic guitar, as well – so what is basically different in its
sound generation compared to the electric guitar?
♣ We have neglected other mechanisms of absorption in this exampl"
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Re: Talk me down!

Post by Litterick »

Wood is painted for reasons. Stripping the paint reveals them.

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Re: Talk me down!

Post by Slowy »

Jay wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 11:08 am I haven't quite been able to go through the more than 100MB of PDF pages of the most detailed book ever written about everything guitar... but it is bound to be in there... It is also complex reading as the writer uses math as if there is no tomorrow. Below a few pages I copied and pasted to not wet your appetite :lol:
I've recently been working my way through Legal documents from the 1970s. As a result, this is an easy read! :rofl:
The selection you offered refers to the mechanics of sound production rather than the effect of finish, but it was really interesting. Could I have a link to the remaining 100MB please?
Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who so survive.

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Re: Talk me down!

Post by Jay »

Slowy wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 11:34 am
Jay wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 11:08 am I haven't quite been able to go through the more than 100MB of PDF pages of the most detailed book ever written about everything guitar... but it is bound to be in there... It is also complex reading as the writer uses math as if there is no tomorrow. Below a few pages I copied and pasted to not wet your appetite :lol:
I've recently been working my way through Legal documents from the 1970s. As a result, this is an easy read! :rofl:
The selection you offered refers to the mechanics of sound production rather than the effect of finish, but it was really interesting. Could I have a link to the remaining 100MB please?
Wow, I thought I had put you off.... the writer is a very interesting person and has done a PHD on the guitar and everything else that connects to it. His knowledge, research and presentation of his findings is absolutely superb. If everyone guitarist would read his book, guitar cork sniffers would be a thing if the past....

The files are hard to find on the web and require a bit of trickery to download. To save you the hassle, I will put them on a memory stick for you...

I recall there are about 20 different PDF chapters and a must read for anyone who believes in the science of guitars and loves associated maths :D
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Re: Talk me down!

Post by werdna »

Good thinking but the real barrier between the instrument and you is your clothing. Play naked?
In life, don't sweat the petty stuff, and don't pet the sweaty stuff.

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Re: Talk me down!

Post by olegmcnoleg »

jhyang549 wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 10:08 am
Slowy wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 9:57 am
Molly wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 8:08 am Y
As Mr Suhr said, paint doesn't have tone.
Exactly. But my question is, can it restrain the wood; dampen vibrations at all? I assume not or Mr.Suhr wouldn't use it. But the potential (or not) for a finish to restrict the resonance of a guitar never seems to be addressed by experts. All comments I've ever seen have been in the realm of anecdote and speculation.

Anybody seen a comparative analysis of the effects of different finishes on resonance?
I've read that white painted guitars can affect the resonance Vs non-white painted guitars because the amount of primer that is needed is greater, hence greater dampening

But Slowy, we are talking about differences that is practically negligible and only of scientific interest. There are so many other factors of how a guitar resonates besides paint it becomes impossible to isolate.

Just strip the paint if it doesn't look or feel right to you. That should be the reason why you want to do this. Personal preference should always win over findings in science journals when it comes to guitars.
Also grain filler, which is applied to most electric guitars. Can't imagine that being resonant.

But to think of it another way... What if the finish helps to lock the vibrations inside the guitar, rather than letting them escape... not much use for an electric guitar to radiate

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Re: Talk me down!

Post by jeremyb »

Why are any of you concerning yourselves with the paintjob when tone is in the fingers!!!!

I'm reading an interesting study at the moment on the different finger tones you can get through utilising various types of nail varnish, fascinating!
Slowy wrote: That's the problem; everything rewarding is just such hard work. Regret takes much less effort.

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Re: Talk me down!

Post by Slowy »

olegmcnoleg wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 2:23 pm
jhyang549 wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 10:08 am
Slowy wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 9:57 am

Exactly. But my question is, can it restrain the wood; dampen vibrations at all? I assume not or Mr.Suhr wouldn't use it. But the potential (or not) for a finish to restrict the resonance of a guitar never seems to be addressed by experts. All comments I've ever seen have been in the realm of anecdote and speculation.

Anybody seen a comparative analysis of the effects of different finishes on resonance?
I've read that white painted guitars can affect the resonance Vs non-white painted guitars because the amount of primer that is needed is greater, hence greater dampening

But Slowy, we are talking about differences that is practically negligible and only of scientific interest. There are so many other factors of how a guitar resonates besides paint it becomes impossible to isolate.

Just strip the paint if it doesn't look or feel right to you. That should be the reason why you want to do this. Personal preference should always win over findings in science journals when it comes to guitars.
Also grain filler, which is applied to most electric guitars. Can't imagine that being resonant.

But to think of it another way... What if the finish helps to lock the vibrations inside the guitar, rather than letting them escape... not much use for an electric guitar to radiate
An excerpt from the tome Jay posted. This theory is expanded in the text but in essence it says,

".......in the acoustic guitar, the sound energy needs to travel through the body i.e. through the wood, while in
the electric guitar, the part of the sound energy that is reflected from the string to the wood is captured.

Any conjecture that, in the electric guitar, the vibration energy needs to be also fed to the guitar body as much as possible, is wrong."[/i]

Ah, wormy cans everywhere! :D
Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who so survive.

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Re: Talk me down!

Post by Slowy »

werdna wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 1:24 pm Good thinking but the real barrier between the instrument and you is your clothing. Play naked?
I do. I never play in gloves.
Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who so survive.

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Re: Talk me down!

Post by Slowy »

jeremyb wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 2:26 pm Why are any of you concerning yourselves with the paintjob when tone is in the fingers!!!!

I'm reading an interesting study at the moment on the different finger tones you can get through utilising various types of nail varnish, fascinating!
Black sounds best. Period.
Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who so survive.

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Re: Talk me down!

Post by Slowy »

jhyang549 wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 10:08 am Just strip the paint if it doesn't look or feel right to you. That should be the reason why you want to do this. Personal preference should always win over findings in science journals when it comes to guitars.
To be clear, I'm quite happy with the look of this guitar (a bit shiny but). And I'm happy with the guitar; it's the perfect vintage Strat for me. In fact, I wouldn't even be thinking about this if it wasn't such a good instrument (could it be even better? :think: ).

Because it's a brand name in excellent condition I don't feel the liberty to experiment in the way afforded by my partcasters. But If I can be convinced that something will make a good guitar even better, I'll do it.
Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who so survive.

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