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estebanana -> RE: Lester Devoe has Stopped Building (Jan. 6 2025 9:04:15)
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I sold a guitar to a friend in San Francisco in 2016, a really good guitar, perfect action. It never develop because it was kept in a damp below ground level concrete walked basement. I said, hey, put that in dry room on the second floor in a window where it will get indirect sunlight, they live near the beach which means 6 months of fog per year.
My gut instinct is the top is a couple 10ths of a mm too thick, and it’s not developed as it should had it it been pounded by Ricardo and dried out by being left out of the case. If that guitar lived in Sevilla or Arizona it would dry out and het meaner sounding.
By contrast, 2014 I sent a guitar to a player in NYC who hated the guitar on sight. He trashed it verbally, allowed his students to trash it verbally. I told him I wasn’t taking it back because he was nasty. Eventually it was sold on eBay and bought by a foro member most of you know and he emailed me he had it. So traded that guitar back to me plus some cash for a new guitar. We were both happy.
With the guitar I received back in trade I learned a lot of lessons, but what I learned is don’t let the customer tell you to lower the action beyond your better judgment. I made a new saddle and nut for that guitar and brought the action up a bit. Then I played it for 5 years. I still have it and it’s the guitar I use daily. It’s not one of my best and it’s not particularly powerful, but it’s got a beautiful voice to those to play it with a light touch and don’t over play it. It’s loud enough, it’s not a guitar you can force. It has gotten better since 2017 when I got it back it’s become more open and mature.
The first guitar I mentioned, I don’t know happened to it, it will turn up someday, but it’s going to become a better guitar eventually I am certain. Thanks to the nature of wood cellulose tissue degrades over time, it naturally dries, shrinks and becomes less dense over time. The top of that guitar will eventually over several decades and maybe a hundred years will become lighter as the cell walls of the wood fiber naturally shrink and lose mass. Some lucky person in far distant future will get a guitar with a slightly too thick top, that has lost enough mass to make it lighter weight and seasoned. Less mass means the same amount of string energy driving the bridge when it was one week old will drive a bridge that’s say 80 years old and a top to match that has lost some weight, but is still slightly thicker than it should be.
I think all new guitars dry a bit and get better, especially if kept under string tension, because when a piece of spruce is thinned out to under 2.5 mm thick it exponentially increases in the ability of air molecules to move into the wood and cause the processes and oxidation that speeds up the cellulose decay, what we call seasoning.
The other process that happens under tension is that the top allows or is pushed, to let the bridge rotate towards the sound hole. Even if thus movement is subtle it’s compressing the system and taking up any ‘slack’ that is non intrinsic to the distribution of string energy to the bridge. Think about new strings stretching before they really sound good and stay in tune. That takes two days? Guitars are the same, they have to sit under tension until all the parts agree that they are ‘stretched’ into place and they are not going to move anywhere. The neck moves forward a little bit, the bridge rotates towards the nut, this causes the top to slightly deform. All these micro adjustments happen and until all that stuff settles the guitar is still changing.
Some of this ‘tensegrity’ change happens in the first 30 minutes after you first string up a guitar and it goes on for a couple weeks ( I think) and over time and through seasonal change the guitar eventually settles into a more rigid position. When thats achieved there’s less energy loss in the total structure because everything is ‘stretched and compressed’ no slack. So the guitars that are under the bed or in the closet for 20 years fall asleep and wake back up due to simply being under tension again. Then playing them wakes them up even more because they are being vibrated.
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