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Originally Posted by eddiez152
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Thanks Eddiez, you saved me the bother of searching again.
I remember reading about this some years back and - as I have have worked with wood quite a lot over the years - I thought it was an interesting idea.
At the time, the results seemed to suggest that something was happening, but it didn't seem to be controllable enough to be all that useful in practice. Naturally enough, the people who felt that they could hear or feel an improvement were reported. Some felt that there either wasn't a lot of change,
or that the change was simply change and not necessarily an improvement.
The task seemed to be to develop the 'art' in such a way that you could control what was being done, not just make some sort of alleged change. So far as I know this hasn't really got all that far yet. That article is ten years old and, as far as I know, the idea hasn't been widely adopted yet. It would be easy enough for all makers to stick their guitars in a tone generator as part of the manufacturing process, but I don't think that's generally done. This is possibly because the difference is not large enough or controllable enough to be worthwhile. And perhaps the players who
can hear a difference might like to do their own 'breaking in' anyway.
There's nothing new in this sort of exploration. Musicians and scientists have for centuries been trying to work out the details of why violins made by certain people such as Stradivarius seem to age better than others. Wine makers also know that some wines age better than others, and they put a fair bit of effort into working out ways of speeding the process up.
Of course, the other side of the coin is that if you accept that the properties of wood can be changed by age and use (which is clearly correct in its way) then you also have to accept that the change is not automatically going to be an
improvement. Nor is it necessarily going to keep getting better and not start going backwards again as the wood loses its ability to be flexible. Some instruments just get 'old'.
Folklore says that people get wiser with age (in fact many stay just as stupid as they always were, and some get even stupider...) and it's somewhat the same with anything made of wood. You hope to get a gem that ages into a treasure, but reality says you may also just end up with an old guitar, no matter how you play it. I'm still hopeful though, and I think the research is worthwhile and interesting.
Cheers,
Chris