I was reading in an article that if you take away the paint you will get a better primary tone, is this true or just voodoo?
Article here: http://www.premierguitar.com/Magazine/I ... _Tone.aspx

The majority of that article is utter garbage. lets go through the points made.

1 ensure all screws are tight. Its obvious.
2. Remove the tremolo cavity cover for better tone. WTF should we all lose our pickguards too. Utter bunkem.
3. Block the trem has. It no effect on sustain or tone.
4. Neck cavity. Free of paint, I'll come to that junk later. There is a point for having wood shims. I cant see 0.5-1mm of wood making a difference in tone. I've shimmed plenty of guitars with leather. Never heard it make a difference one way or the other.
5 Neck stickers. Sorry im not taking mine off, how about we all sand our logo's off the headstock.
6. Let the guitar breathe. I really hope that wood isnt still breathing after its been hacked, sawed and routed. Guitar wood is dead wood it doesnt breathe ever, if it did it would sprout leaves. Paint doesnt affect guitar tone. I've nitro and urethane guitars that i cant hear a difference between them, they have the same pickups.
7. the top of the inertia bar should be as close and tight fit to the tremplate as possible. I've never seen one painted though.
8. How can nut material make a difference to fretted notes. The strings speaking length is shortend away frowm the nut. Saddles and trem, yes. Nut no.
9.Increasing the mass of the guitar does make a change. You need an awfull lot of mass to make a noticable change though. A wooden tables worth of mass. I own a fat finger it was the biggest waste of money i've ever bought.
10. String trees. If you alter the pressure of a string tou alter its tension and pitch.

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No no and no

Superb! Can't add to that - but it's great to see the "breathing wood" thing demolished! Excellent post...

- C

Dead on, Niki.

That article amused me when I read it in the magazine... just a pile of stock myths from the Echo Chamber put down as fact. It reminded me of something that was said, tongue-in-cheek, by a wise man on another forum a long time ago:

"Every guitar modification enhances tone and sustain."

That is, every time to fiddle with your guitar, your perception is that it now sounds "better."

However, I do have a Stratocaster Tone Tip that sounds like voodoo but actually works: clean the pots, the pickup selector switch and all the contact points with DeOxIt D5, which is not an ordinary contact cleaner, but a contact "conditioner" that improves conductivity. If your guitar is more than a couple of years old, you will not believe how this cleaning will restore signal (and this IS an electronic device after all, is it not?). D5 has been a the electronics tech's secret weapon for many a years: I know dozens of stories of guys restoring old amps or non-working outboard gear by simply opening it up and soaking every contact with it. AMazing stuff. I recently opened up with own super-Strat to change the internal setting on the onboard pre-amp, and while it was open, hosed it down with DeOxIt on the advice of a trusted friend. Unbelievable result.

The only thing wood on my Supro is the neck and bridge. It sounds really unique and the color is built into the fiberglass body.

Paint and finish does not effect the tone at all. It's nothing more than a urban myth and marketing gimmick to sell more guitars. Anyone who believes it either fell for the hype or is a relative of Eric Johnson.

I think that in this case, Jay, "breathe" would mean "interact with the air while resonating." An acoustic breathes when the wood vibrates freely when played. There's a point where the wood is dry but not too dry that it vibrates best.

Since the resonances of a solid body guitar are almost entirely internal, the concept of "breathjing" is kind of silly... a Stratocaster doesn't have a resonating chamber. It has an amplifier.

On the breathing thing, there's a further serious point. The moisture content of timber does indeed go up and down in relation to atmospheric humidity. But if that happens too fast or unevenly the wood will warp. Bad on a body, fatal on a neck.

Much of the point of all types of wood finish is to constrain that process and so protect the timber from atmospheric changes. In other words, you could say that an important function of a guitar's finish is precisely to prevent the wood from breathing - too much, at any rate.

That's why we don't leave guitars unfinished - regardless of the superstition that less finish is better for tone...

Cheers - C

And defining "pure" would be like nailing Jello to a wall.

In another thread the other day, someone tried to explain how a certain effect works by quoting the manufacturer's voodoo-speak, including the idea that adding this thing to your signal chain would allow the "natural, unamplified signal" of your guitar to reach the speakers.

The wh-wh-whhhha? You mean an electric guitar creates a natural signal without an amplifier? Well, that's news to me.

I don't think you're hearing yourself, BigJay. "Pure" means "without any extraneous and unnecessary elements; free of contamination."

If the goal was purity, then a synthesizer producing a pure sine wave at a given frequency would be considered ideal. No string will ever produce such a tone. So even the concept of what is "pure" would be arguable.

Oh, yes, we do agree, Jay... "different" is not "better." I fear that too often SRV's wonkiest tone is used as the Unofficial Stratocaster Benchmark for Superior Sound, and when people are saying "better" or, even more ghastly "more vintage-y" tone, they actually mean, "more like that SRV record."

For my money, I wish more guitar players would learn about audio (since they are playing an electronic device), so they could discuss instrument sounds in terms of frequencies boosted or cut. Thinking of "tone" in this way kind of forces you you stop thinking of one sound as superior to another.... they're just different.