Solid body electric guitars do not imp;rove with age. They just get older. You can actually improve the sound of an old guitar by cleaning the pots and switches with D5... vintage mojo is a dodge invented by guys who want to sell old guitars.

"They take on the character of the owner?" Oh, brother. No, they owner just gets to know them better.

Sound is more 'pure'?" What, precisely, does "pure" mean?

They become more "beautiful?" That standard of beauty is based on the idea that a guitar that LOOKS real old is going to sound better. How times have you seen, online, someone post a picture of their lightly relice'd old Tele and everybody on the board exclaims, "Oh, my god, what an awesome guitar!" Really? Have you played it? Have you heard it? Then what the heck do you know about it's relative awesomeness?

The previous posters who mentioned the feel of the neck, and the fact that an electric guitar does not derive its sound from wood in the the way an acoustic does are exactly right. All this mysticism about how solid bodies make their sound is pure eyewash.

Check out this video -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgbgUMqUMns

Paul Riario from Guitar World is reviewing some DiMarzio pickups, but he plays a 59 les paul and a new '59 reissue - UNPLUGGED - and the difference in tone is amazing. Maybe 5 or 10 years won't add much to tone, but 50 sure does.

That '59 sounded that good when it was new. 50 years did not improve it, and seeing two guitars played side by side (out of the millions and billions already made) should not even lead one to a hypothesis that the older one sounds better because it's older.

I believe that vintage wood instruments like guitars electric and acoustic, pianos, violins, drums, and any other instrument that is made of wood and that wood is decades old will sound way better just because of the fact that the wood aged a lot of time therefore it is dryier and it is OLD ... so my answer is yes "I believe" vintage wood resonates and vibrates better.......

they just sound better with age, asumeing you mean a strat, tele, les paul or other quality guitar.

We've been round this block many times and no doubt will again. So just to put a different slant on it for once we could make a comparison with the field of violins, where some instruments really are old and have vast value attached to them accordingly.

Every so often fiddle enthusiasts cook up blind tests (and nowadays double blind tests too) which more often than not compare famous old violins to new ones.

In one such the instruments of three modern Swedish makers, including the excellent Peter Westerlunds, were set against old ones including a Stradivari, a Gagliano and a Guadagnini. Surprise surprise (you saw it coming), the modern Westerlunds violin scored the highest. Rather touchingly, he's such a fan of the old violins that Mr Westerlunds was more dismayed that the Strad came last than pleased that his own instrument won.

There's an article available on it on Peter Westerlunds' website. Four rather tiresome PDF downloads, but interesting because it discusses the problems of testing subjective factors such as "tone" in an even vaguely objective way:

http://www.westerlunds.se/

(Because of the annoying "frameset" construction of that website I can't link direct to the relevant page: you have navigate: -> English -> Articles -> Strad -> click on PDFs. Can you be bothered...?)

BTW. So happens my dad is a good amateur fiddle player and has a nice (not famous) violin that's over 200 years old. Unfortunately, none of us was around when it was made and so can't say if its sound has improved with age...

Cheers - C

For 300 years musicians and scientists alike have puzzled about what makes violins made by the Italian Cremonese masters Antonio Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesu so special.
But with a single instrument being worth £1million or more the risk of damage has made it impossible to carry out thorough testing on wood samples.
The new study involved adapting a technique originally designed to calculate lung density in emphysema patients. A computer program which produces 'density maps' from CT scans was used to analyse the wood in violins instead of lung tissue.
Three Guarneri and two Stradivarius violins were scanned, together with eight 'modern' violins made in the US.
One clear difference was seen between the classic and contemporary instruments.
Variations in wood density determined by tree growth cycles were significantly larger in the modern violins. Early growth wood, produced during spring, is more porous and less dense than late growth wood which mainly has the job of providing structural support rather than transporting water.

Heres another intrusting article;

In a study published yesterday in Public Library of Science ONE, Dutch researchers ran five of the peerless instruments, made in the early 18th century by Italian craftsman Antonio Stradivari and synonymous with harmonic perfection, through a CT scanner.

The resulting three-dimensional X-rays revealed that wood used in Stradivari's violins possessed an exceptionally uniform density, with little variation in growth rings added by trees each season.

Summertime growth typically outpaces wintertime growth, producing broad rings of relatively permeable wood that alternate with narrow, dense winter bands. That differential affects the wood's harmonic qualities
Fortunately for Stradivari, he lived during the Little Ice Age: trees grew little more in summer than in winter. Hence the uniformly dense wood, hence three centuries of experts baffled by the resonance of Stradivarius violins, which have been variously attributed to varnishes, boiling and submersion in ponds.

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The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

Thomas Jefferson

So, how good would a guitar made solely from the wood of Bonsai trees be?

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I'm not an expert, but I play one on the internet.

I no those guys that are pulling these 100 and 150 year old logs off the bottoms of lakes are getting tens of thousands for them.

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The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

Thomas Jefferson

I think Bonsai timber is only used for making the very small violins ZZDoc was asking for over on another thread...

Cheers - C

darn!! i was hoping to rub my future 1000 piece body in the single piece purists faces!!

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I'm not an expert, but I play one on the internet.

It's actually a bit of both--how you play a guitar and how you set it up determines--in part--how it ages--so it does take on some characteristics of its owner--so the guitarist adapts to the guitar and the guitar ages in relationship to the owner.




The wood used does affect the guitars tone--the pickups do the work in translating the sound to the amplifier (via a cable and often times other devices)--BUT the wood resonates and that affects the signal--That's why my friends two identical Les Pauls sound different--they have the same pickups & electronics in them, but the wood, while both being mahogany with maple tops, is not identical--so there are differences. No--the solidbody electric guitar top does not resonate the same way an acoustic guitar top does--and it doesn't directly affect the tone in the same way--but it does make a difference.

Older guitars are not necessarily better by virtue of their age, but if they are better it's for other reasons--which may or may not be related to their age.

With guitars there is always the matter of taste. And that will determine a lot--although try to tell that to someone who thinks his guitar sounds better without the pickguard...

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It wasn't Willy-Nilly, it was at crows.

The frets are kinda sticky to the bend.

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-Kc
"Payin' dues."

One thing that I have not heard mentioned is the modern building techniques and wood curing techniques. With CNC machines and modern wood curing techniques, I believe that we can now mass produce instruments that can sound and be built as well or better than hand made instruments of old. I wonder if a modern acoustic will see the same "improvements" as the old did? I bet not, but I also bet they are closer to that aged sound than ever.

This is why we have not seen the cost of instruments go up with inflation. We have discovered ways to make a better instrument cheaper, its called technology and its a great thing.

What some people don't realize is that wood actually takes away certain frequencies, it does not add any. It tends to absorb higher frequencies, to the degree that it does this is based on the density and other factors of the wood. When one guitar sounds "warmer" than the other, we may perceive this as more bass. However, what is really occuring is greater absortion of high frequencies. A guitar of steel would sound very bright but sterile, because it would not absorb the highs and the frequency curve is flat. But if you compared a recorded frequency curve of the same chord, you would see that the bass frequencies of the brighter guitar are still there, but the extra high end makes us perceive less bass.

The harder the wood, the brighter the sound. This is why mahogany sounds warmer than maple. Maple is much more dense. Ever notice that most every bolt on neck is maple? I believe that a bolt on mahogany neck would not be as stable, do to the fact it is not as dense/hard. I think it needs to be glued so that you get a maximum amount of the wood connected, instead of 4 holes where the bolt would go. In my estimation, a bolt-on maple neck guitar will sound brighter than a mahogany set neck every time, partly from the wood, but also due to the metal plate and torque applied to it, which adds density at the joint. There is more to it than just the wood, the construction also plays a part. As a matter of fact, not only is the maple top on a LP there for aesthetics, but I believe that a gibby LP without that top would be even darker sounding....say like a SG;)

Feel free to discuss or rebutt, some of this post is from facts gathered and other parts are conclusions I have drawn from the facts. I would love to hear any information to the contrary

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Guitars:
1. mid 70's Ventura MIJ Gibson l6-s clone (Pre-lawsuit) in Black with Rosewood FB and EMG 81 BR/ 85 Neck
2. ESP KH2 Neck Thru
3. 2008 Am Std Strat in 3 tone sunburst