Artificially aged guitars... what do you think?

[Gnasty]

ooh err missus. i like milfs.

tennis anyone?

What the hell are you talking about?

[bazz-t-bass]

If you are of the mind that the sound (tone) of a guitar is improved with age, then an artificially aged guitar isn't going to sound any different any other brand new guitar.

The only advantage is tha at least you can let the kids knock em over and not get up tight about it. ......and perhaps bragging rights if you're trying to kid new acquaintences that you've been touring for the past 30 years

[steelguitar]

An artificially aged guitar can be a pretty thing... but for me, it's not the most important thing : the sound of this guitar.
Even if I love a beautyfull looking guitar,  a false aged guitar is not going to turn my head.

Jean-Sébastien

[Speed Demon]

Artificially aged electric guitars will not play or sound any better than any other electric guitar. Electric guitar sound is generated by the pickups and the amp being used. Acoustic guitar sound comes from the body.

Many old guitars are for the collector and as museum display pieces. New instruments are better built and have much better hardware.
Of course, there will always be the select few that enjoy using an old guitar that is virtually impossible to keep in tune and produces
that muddy, undefined sound they seem to like so much. A simple high-pass filter would clean them up considerably but none of the
big guitar manufacturers bothered to add that feature on the early electrics. The cheapskates didn't have a clue.
I wired my own tone controls for the cost of one capacitor and one resistor per instrument. Less than two dollars per guitar.

I can't wait to remove my Dimarzio X2N humbuckers and install some old, noisy pickups that can pick up radio transmissions from low-flying aircraft. I've actually had that happen on an old Les Paul and another lesser-known guitar. They also nicely amplified
electrical noise if they were anywhere near power cords and/or fluorescent lights.

To each his own.

[AndyR]

To each his own.

Amen!

They're just tools, and we all use them differently to get what we want.

Eg, I'm the opposite of you on high-pass volume controls. I CURSE the big guitar manufacturers who decided to add the small cap to volume controls turning them into a high-pass filters

OK, it don't take too much to snip the thing off. But it does mean that if I'm trying a guitar in a shop, and don't realise it's there, then I think the guitar gets rather weedy when I roll the volume off... (In fact, a couple of years ago I pulled the trigger on new pickups for a guitar because the stock ones had no substance to them with volume roll-off... When I opened it up to install the new ones, I found the treble-bleed cap in there! ... luckily, the new pickups kicked the old ones into touch anyway.)

I'm guessing the lack of high-pass, for you, makes the guitar close to unusable... addition of high-pass, for me, makes the guitar close to unusable... (well, "unusable" is probably a bit strong for both of us - "uncooperative and dissatisfying to play" )

I spose it all depends on what a player's trying to achieve with a tool, and probably on the type of music he/she wants to make with it.

And sometimes you want those police channels coming through your guitar solo (Can't think why, though, off the top of me head...). Incidentally, the only time I've had that problem, it was the amp, not the guitar. We took the guitar lead out of the amp and the radio stuff just kept going.

[Speed Demon]

Andrew, here is instructions for fixing the roll-off problem on electric guitars.

Problem: You may have noticed that as you turn your electric guitar's volume pot down the sound loses treble becoming progressively bassier. This is particularly noticeable with single coil pickups - humbuckers are not affected nearly as much. This treble loss is not a problem for everyone, as many guitarists prefer to roll off the volume slightly to get a slightly darker and less overdriven sound for rhythm playing. Turning up the volume for leads then not only boosts drive, but brightens the sound too, helping it cut through the mix better. So I'd say the golden rule is - listen to your guitar, if the loss of treble is too extreme for your taste, start tweaking. If it sounds fine to your ears - leave things as they are.

Why it Happens: This is due to the way the pickups, pot and the capacitance of the cable work together as a lowpass filter circuit similar to a tone control. Lowpass filter circuits have a cutoff frequency, above which they cut all frequencies. With the volume control up full the frequencies being blocked by the filter circuit are very high and do not have much audible effect on the tone. When you change the resistance in the circuit by lowering the pot (raising the resistance), the filter cutoff frequency moves down into the audible range and starts cutting audible higher frequencies from the sound, making it less trebly.

The cure: Higher quality, low capacitance cables have less affect on the treble as they move the cutoff frequency to a higher frequency. Unfortunately these cables tend to be very expensive and in many cases almost unusably thick, stiff and heavy. A shorter cable has lower capacitance, but that obviously can affect your movement onstage. However, you can compensate for the treble loss by using a capacitor to "bleed" more treble frequencies into the signal as the volume is turned down. This effectively makes a highpass filter to offset the high frequency losses of the lowpass filter.

Wiring with treble bleed cap

How to do It: Simply solder a capacitor from the live terminal on your volume pot (where the wire from the selector switch attaches) to the centre wiper terminal. When the volume is up full, this cap has no effect on the tone, but as the volume is turned down, more treble frequencies are bled to the output. The capacitor value sets the frequency above which the capacitor passes signal, The higher the value, the lower the frequency. It's impossible to say exactly which value will work best for your guitar, as the effect is dependant on pickups, exact pot values, cable capacitance and amplifier input impedance. However common values to try are between 680pf and 2000pf (0.002mf. The type of capacitor used is usually a ceramic disc or a mylar film.

The downside: There is one small drawback to a simple treble bleed capacitor is that the guitar can actually become too bright as the volume is turned down. To offset this, a resistor in series with the cap will lower the amount of treble being bled through. Once again the exact value is impossible to predict for every situation, but resistance values between 50% - 100% of the pot value will usually do the trick. For the ultimate in tweakability, use a preset trimpot (a small pot which you can adjust and leave set at a fixed value) to set the exact amount of resistance you like.

Treble bleed with series resistor

Common examples
For those wanting to just solder on a few parts without the need for experimentation, there are a few accepted values that often give the desired results or near enough for most folks. Australian noiseless pickup maker, Chris Kinman recommends a 130K Ohm resistor in series with a 0.0012mf capacitor, which works well for most Strats. Also for Strats, pickup guru Seymour Duncan likes a 100k resistor in parallel with a 0.002mf cap. The parallel resistor actually changes the taper of the pot to better match the amount of treble bleed. My preference is for a series resistor as I do not like the change in volume taper. For humbucker guitars, I like just a 0.001mf cap with no resistor.

Good luck.

[AndyR]

That's really well explained for folks wondering what these things do, nice one. I'm not sure I've read it that clearly before.

I tried these things out years ago and discovered I didn't like what I lost when I used them (I'm one of the guys who wants the thickening as the volume rolls off - and I usually set my amps with a guitar volume on 8 or so, and guitar tone on 6).

What I would say, to anyone else, over this stuff is "Don't follow my choices, GIVE IT A GO - you might like it..."

In my personal experience, I've got exactly the same "where's my top-end clarity gone?" as everyone else. But when I tried these things in the 80s/90s, I found the solution was, for me, worse than the problem - I lost too many good things I'd been relying on, just to get a bit more clarity (and during gigs I found myself having to turn the guitar tone down at the same time as the guitar volume!!)

But everyone's situation is different. One person's "oh good grief, that's naff" is another person's "that's how I want it to work". I love how you can mess with the things to get them to behave more like you want them to (and how you get p1ssed off with a previous fix when your tastes change a few years down the line - eg I have a couple of teles/strats that got subjected to humbuckers in the late 80s, absolutely no way would I do that now, I just didn't like the effect, and I have humbucker guitars anyway, so I went the path of exploring what strats and teles sound like themselves and used that...)

By the way, slightly related, have you ever tried this 50s versus 60s wiring stuff that people talk about? It's one of the areas of "vintage" that I DO NOT like!!

In the 60s, "they" changed how the tone pots were linked up to the pickup/volume circuit - and that's what I've used for most of my life. A few years ago I found out about 50s wiring on another forum. All it really needs is the tone control to be a parallel circuit to the volume control, but there's a couple of ways of hooking it up that, apparently, make a difference... The 50's method is said to be more organic, open sounding, better, etc, etc...

I'll have some of that!! I thought...

I tried it for a bit, on a Les Paul and on an SG - HATED it on both!

Yes, it does seem slightly more "open" sounding, but it makes the controls interract a bit more - especially on a twin humbucker guitar on the middle switch position. All my carefully worked out moves with two volumes and two tones, learnt over years, were gone!!

I went back to the, er, apparently "inferior" 60s wiring pretty quickly.

I think it was round then that I realised that "better" and "inferior" were the wrong words to be bandying around with all this stuff - "different, you might like it" is the way I look at it.

[Hook]

I like to artificially age all my instruments. In fact the first thing I do is usually take a small hammer (the small gem ones) and firmly tap all over. Then some fine sandpaper will add a good 20 years. For smaller instruments like harmonica or soprano uke, I just put in the dryer for 20 min. or so... & I always leave my instruments out in the rain for a minimum of 48 hours. That "new instrument " look is so passe!
Hope this helps.
Age On!

[Speed Demon]

Artificial aging carried to an extreme. This puppy plays much nicerer and betterer now.

[fenderbender]

 

I like to artificially age all my instruments. In fact the first thing I do is usually take a small hammer (the small gem ones) and firmly tap all over. Then some fine sandpaper will add a good 20 years. For smaller instruments like harmonica or soprano uke, I just put in the dryer for 20 min. or so... & I always leave my instruments out in the rain for a minimum of 48 hours. That "new instrument " look is so passe!
Hope this helps.
Age On!