elisha wiesner wrote: Tue Apr 26, 2022 7:05 pm

bishopdante wrote: Tue Apr 26, 2022 6:54 pm Should also be noted that if the top is a softer sort of wood with a harder varnish, you can't get the varnish off without severely damaging the top.

Putting a new or much improved spruce top with a french polish finish on a guitar is an inexpensive and substantial upgrade for any guitar, and can be done by a professional luthier for the retail price of a top flight hard case (£350 or so in the UK).

It's especially advisable if you buy a guitar with a cracked soundboard for the purpose of hot-rodding.

Bitch please

I know it's his thing but I wrote and erased a lot of frustrated responses regardless. I like yours far better.

I'm always shocked at the condition of the guitars some shops allow out the door. I'd say I get 1-2 guitars a week from the big box or even the local boutique acoustic shop that are essentially unplayable. Usually as simple as some fret dressing, truss rod adjustment, maybe getting the right set of strings on it and getting the saddle shaved a bit. would take them 10-15 minutes.

Also, so many perfectly serviceable guitars out there- with a bit of care almost any $200 piece of shit can be a fine player. When a truly great acoustic comes through the door we all appreciate it...but cost and quality aren't as neatly tethered as you'd expect. Cannot tell you how many dogshit high end taylors and montana gibsons have come in.

elisha wiesner wrote: Tue Apr 26, 2022 7:01 pm Takamine guitars do have a thick finish. They're also over built and yeah, they rarely sound all that great. They're designed to be played live. Half the bar room guitar players here have them because they're affordable, reliable, have decent electronics, and are overbuilt, including a thick finish, which protects them from the abuse of endless live shows and seasonal changes. You could put the thinest french polish in the world on a Takamine and it would still sound like crap but now wouldn't last a year on the bar circuit.

I know this is off topic, but would Takamine be the recommendation if someone who cannot will not remember to humidify an acoustic to save his life wants a relatively stable sub $800 used acoustic that can take a little bit of a beating at home and live in the humidity shifts of the midwest? (tl;dr - I want something I don't have to baby). I don't mind seasonal truss rod adjusting but I feel like every older acoustic I've owned ends up with a maxed out truss rod even with 11s on it (which I feel is too light for an acoustic anyway). I'm not going to use any electronics. I'd sacrifice some tone to have something with graphite rods in the neck and a top that won't go convex behind the bridge if it means more rigidity.

That (bishopdante's suggestion) just seems like an awful lot of work and chance involved for something that may or may not turn out any better than a decent Yamaha off the rack..

tommy wrote: Wed Apr 27, 2022 10:13 am

I know this is off topic, but would Takamine be the recommendation if someone who cannot will not remember to humidify an acoustic to save his life wants a relatively stable sub $800 used acoustic that can take a little bit of a beating at home and live in the humidity shifts of the midwest? (tl;dr - I want something I don't have to baby). I don't mind seasonal truss rod adjusting but I feel like every older acoustic I've owned ends up with a maxed out truss rod even with 11s on it (which I feel is too light for an acoustic anyway). I'm not going to use any electronics. I'd sacrifice some tone to have something with graphite rods in the neck and a top that won't go convex behind the bridge if it means more rigidity.

Tyler would probably know better than me but judging by what I see come through my shop, the answer is yes. Thicker wood, heavier bracing, thicker finish etc.... all make for a more stable guitar. This is one of the main reasons the big American manufacturers overbuilt their guitars in the 70's and 80's. They were trying to cut down on warrantee work. One thing I have noticed is that some guitars seem to move around like crazy and others are almost impervious to humidity. And I'm talking about guitars with more or less the same woods, from the same manufacturer, where one will just sort of stay fine no matter what and one I'll need to make a winter and summer saddle for the customer. Yamaha's always seem to be pretty good to me in this regard and you can get a totally nice one for under $800.

That (bishopdante's suggestion) just seems like an awful lot of work and chance involved for something that may or may not turn out any better than a decent Yamaha off the rack..

Yeah, he's in dreamland. Nobody is doing that. The bulk of import guitars from the 80's have epoxied in necks, which makes removing the neck in order to replace the top next to impossible. I mean, it can be done but most techs won't even take on a neck reset of one of those guitars due to difficulty and expense.

I'm absolutely terrible with keeping up on controlling humidity at home, even though I have to be part of doing it for a whole factory - so I understand your pain. Those case humidipaks are a good investment in that , if you notice your guitar is swelling, take it out at that time of year, and vice versa.

I was going to say Yamaha, or Takamine or get a guitar with *eek* laminate sides and a 3-5 piece neck. They can sound good and withstand abuse. Usually if it's bought in your area, they're older and look like they haven't been re-sprayed then you have something that's most likely survived your climate and been enjoyed.
I think some Guilds have laminate necks and who doesn't want a Guild acoustic. I had a 90s rosewood Yamaha that couldn't be abused despite my extreme level of ignorance. Finish doesn't keep THAT much moisture in or out (neither does the case after a couple days), and while I have absolutely no stats for it, I would suppose that a thick finish may actually increase the chance for random density related cracks as the finish won't expand and contract similarly to the wood, and a thicker finish will be less flexible. Again just theorizing there (I'll try to get some answers there, we spray generally the same thickness). Thicker wood and bracing design is huge in stability, not just thicker braces but how the thickness extends and how they meet the sides - which no-one is going to look for in a guitar but that's part of stability.

It's all trees, and they're motherfuckers. There's good work being done right now to quantitatively assess wood material structure to grade based on sound and stability but that's still a way out.

c jury wrote: Tue Apr 26, 2022 9:31 pm I'm always shocked at the condition of the guitars some shops allow out the door. I'd say I get 1-2 guitars a week from the big box or even the local boutique acoustic shop that are essentially unplayable. Usually as simple as some fret dressing, truss rod adjustment, maybe getting the right set of strings on it and getting the saddle shaved a bit. would take them 10-15 minutes.

yeah some of that is set up in a certain way as they're expected to be going to certain climates - we have specs we set things to but then if we're sending a bunch of guitars out to Louisiana or brazil in the summer, they might get the truss rod set up a bit differently to expect a ton of humidity that.... then doesn't really happen. Then strings are just spec'ed per design and some particular guitars could sound better with a different set on it, absolutely. Saddles - people will stick to the high part of the spec because they don't want to take too much off...

c jury wrote: Tue Apr 26, 2022 9:31 pm Also, so many perfectly serviceable guitars out there- with a bit of care almost any $200 piece of shit can be a fine player. When a truly great acoustic comes through the door we all appreciate it...but cost and quality aren't as neatly tethered as you'd expect. Cannot tell you how many dogshit high end taylors and montana gibsons have come in.

That sucks - let me know the serial numbers haha.

bishopdante wrote: I currently play a couple of Yamaha steel string guitars with some sort of shiny finish. It's fine, they are good instruments.... (cont) They are perfectly good guitars nonetheless, and I'm not messing about with them.

Welp, there ya go. Sounds like the way to go from the get go.

but it does have just a hint of that plastic "click" to the sound. You can really hear it if you tap a hard pick onto the soundboard.

Well sure.. you should avoid hitting the guitar with a pick. Which I realize is a little bit harder on modern acoustics with tight clearances set up like shredder guitars, but it's still doable.

bishopdante wrote: Thu Apr 28, 2022 10:46 am The only thing I do with a pick on an acoustic guitar is investigate the acoustic properties of the instrument's body by tapping various bits of the body with a heavy gauge pick. You can also use a bit of nail and tap with your finger, basically a flamenco "golpe", but I cut my nails pretty short, so I use a pick to sound out a guitar body and ascertain "clickiness", or high frequency response.

Yeah, this is akin to people to take the skins and hardware off drums and hit the shell with a mallet. It's a thing you can do, I suppose. I'm not sure how it tells you more than just playing it how it will be played and how others would normally hear it.

Also, some of the 'plastic-iness' may just be a bad string fit for that guitar, or not to your taste.

The obvious answer in all of this is buy an aluminum neck and slap it on whatever you want as it will solve all of your problems (any given day this is a pervasive thought)