There was a recent new yorker article about guitars.

Suffice it to say that there is a large market in new guitars based on old designs that have been distressed so that they look authentic.

It's all boomer crap.

Tut, tut man. Next you'll be saying I don't need Monster cables to carry a digital signal. Trust your ears fella!

I have this weird conversation a lot with boomers who love rock 'n' roll. Many of them seem absolutely convinced that everything---instruments, amps, tuners, speakers---sounded better in the 50's and 60's. Even live concerts! They will maintain, against all rational argument, that rock music sounds worse now. Not just new music, but old recordings have been corrupted, and don't have that vibrant quality they had back in the day.

They blame digital mastering, transistor-based (not tube-based) equipment, modern speakers, speaker wire, etc. etc.

They blame everything except their older ears and more experienced minds.

Some of it is talk, but there are discernable differences. Many guitars go through different builds, which does change the guitar's sound even though the basics are the same. The parts change, advance and the sound does change. To be surpassed, that's a statement of preference. Seeing as it means a lot to him, it's likely that he's just being a fan of his favorite guitar more than making a legit statement.

Background, acoustic guitar nerd and hi-fi geek. I use a vacuum tube amp because I love the sound and that's what these guys are chasing, "the sound."

These instruments cannot be replicated just by talking to Les Paul. What makes the sound are the old electronics, the craftsmanship (like Stradivarius). You can ask Les Paul but you cannot recreate the craftsmen of the past nor the vintage electronics they were using.

Well it is marketing in regards to making a new guitar to old specs to some degree. But an old guitar, with time proven pickups, great craftsmenship on the neck, and the aging of good pieces of wood is surely not crap, except to a novice who probably doesn't know a Les Paul from a Stratocaster to a Harmony Rocket. The reasons why an instrument take on legendary proportions is more than hype in most cases. There are clearly quantifiable ways to test it, the same as there is for a Stratovarius violin.

It's hard to describe, but there's a feeling to the wood, particularly in the necks of some old guitars that's unlike newer instruments. Part of it may well be the craftsmanship (not that modern craftsmen aren't good, but they're taught different methods of how to do things), and I really wonder if part of it is a different quality of wood in the bodies. I have two Fender Teles ('59 and an '77 (my first "real" guitar)), and they're totally different instruments, despite their geometry and their electronics being basically identical. There's a tonal difference I can hear and feel. It's probably the same with the Bursts.

I can't tell you what it is, but if you spend a lot of time with your instruments, the really subtle differences between them become very apparent, even to an old punk rocker like me.

What TRM wrote.

Their value is due to rarity after so many years (the ones that survive without mods) and the particular combination of woods and other components (not least of all the pickups) that were put together in particular configurations in particular years. In addition, older wood has lost moisture, thus "settling", and gains a stronger, purer sound. Replicas don't have that advantage (unless some old wood is found to build them).

That's crap. The sound of an electric guitar is dependent on a lot of things, and isn't inherent to the instrument, which is just wood and components.

The strings, the height of the pickups, the distance of the pickups from the bridge, the amp it's playing through, the length of the cords; all these are factors. You can tweak it all you want. Or you can just push a button on your amp.

So yeah, it's all just boomer crap.

Demisod - stay away from that monster cable crap! It's overpriced and that company is a snake. Also, it's a digi-cable - there's a real low price point of diminishing returns when you're just passing 1's and 0's. Put some money in nice silver-clad speaker cables and interconnects, your ears will love you.

Brent - I'm a young guy (28) with very good ears. I've done studio and live sound work, I've got a nice hi-fi system at home. Trust me there is a difference between albums that were recorded on old analog gear and the over-compressed digital recordings of today. Musicians pay big bucks to record in studio's with vinatge analog gear!

But if someone called my Stratocaster 'just wood and components', them would be fightin' words. Rephrase that when you read it, if you would.

Well said R S Buchanan

This is all crazy shit. I am a guitar player and a Boomer, and IMHO Ace has it right. They're different. For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like. All the mystical crap is nonsense. Like what you want to like.

Total boomer phenomenon. Like bringing back the DeLorean. The Edsel even experienced a resurgence of interest a decade or so ago.

The PAF (patent applied for) humbucking pickups on the '59-era Les Pauls were hand-wound and were all unique sounding. What everyone else said about the wood, etc. Gibson radically changed the Les Paul in 1960 and introduced the SG-style Les Pauls. Still a great guitar, still the same PAFs, yet they didn't sound like an original single-cutaway, maple-top, mahogany-body Les Paul guitar.

A lot of it is hype, of course. Years ago, it was a lot of work to get a good consistent guitar sound. Nowadays, there's no excuse for not having a good guitar sound. If you're a shitty guitar player, it doesn't matter what instrument you're playing, and if you're a great guitar player, it *almost* doesn't matter what instrument you're playing.

I think it's part standard those-were-the-days nostalgia by some people (most older, some younger), and part ongoing reaction to a lot of bad equipment built in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, you can buy guitars and amps just as good (or better) as those made in the 1950s or 1960s. Some are built to sound the same, but most are not. The real difference between now and then is the cost to get a guitar or amp built by hand.

TRM, I think Demisgod was joking about the Monster cables... but I agree with you about analog recordings. I've spent a lot of time in studios, and haven't been able to recreate on ProTools the "pure" sound of a 16-track. I'm not saying analog is better or worse, just different.... well, and better.

As for guitars, I'm not a fan of Les Paul's in general, but I've owned/used some pre-CBS Fender gear and I like the amps better than the circuit-board stuff that came out later, but haven't found any major advantages in the older guitars.

Now that people are manning the barricades, I'd better clarify. Yes, they're different. Yes, the wood's drier, or whatever. It is the sentimental preference that leads one to declare the vintage inherently superior and attack the Philistines who dare to prefer the new that's crap.

The quality control at Gibson was higher back at that time--employees were very experienced. This would include everything down to the winding of the picup coils. The quality of the instrument plus the aging of the wood yields a nice warm sound, true for most guitars, not just Les Pauls. However, the incredible prices for guitars these days is out of proportion to the quality. It's mainly a function of the collector's market, which is fueled by baby boomers' money and speculation.

It varies by brand. Gibson Les Pauls were significantly changed at the end of the 50's by changing both the body style and the pickup design. They can probably be replicated fairly faithfully, but that's a new guitar rather than a collectible.

Fender, OTOH, was sold to CBS, which promptly degraded construction quality to save money. Again, newer ones can replicate the construction quality, but it's a knockoff rather than the real thing.

So it's not just BS that the 50's guitars are different and, in some ways, better. Does that make these guitars worth what people pay for them? Not to me.

I know nothing about guitars and I'm sure there are significant differences in construction, materials, etc. over time that affect sound.

But I do know something about human nature. Let 100 guys listen to two identical new guitars, but tell them that one is an original from the 1950s, and that one will sound better to well over 50% of them.

Especially if they're stoned.

The electric guitar is second only to an Abu Gharib interrogation for destroying human minds.
They should've been banned after Hendrix.

It's all boomer crap.

Yes, and no. Making a new guitar look distressed is of course the most fatuous sort of bullshit. But my '67 Telecaster definitely sounds better than the new ones. (I didn't buy the Tele as a collector's item. I bought it in 1978 for about two hundred bucks. I unknowingly reduced its value by refinishing it so it wouldn't look distressed.) I think it's a matter of craftsmanship and materials.

It's not just a matter of knowing how, it's a matter of willingness. Take the gingerbread decorations on Victorian-era houses. I'm sure there are people who know how to do that kind of work, but who's going to take the time? If you want fancy woodwork we'll mold it in vinyl for ya.

Thersites: Nice to know the guy who likes our cats is a Fender guy too. :) I did the same thing to a pre-CBS '65 Stratocaster. I ended up with a beautiful natural wood guitar, but I sanded off the value.

There is a definable difference between Analog and Digital. Sound waves are naturally analog (curved waves of information) and hence earlier recording using analog sound waves captured a more 'real' sound that digital (bits of information) recording clipped off. Digital recording techniques have improved and narrowed the disparity but a squared off soundwave is never going to be identical to a curved soundwave. So the boomers are right.

That said, none of the above applies to guitar manufacture since the soundwave output was and is still analog. So if there is a difference, it lies somewhere else.

I don't play, so I'll leave the guitar comments to the experts, but as far as analog vs. digital, I don't think there's any serious doubt that analog recording produces a warmer fuller sound. Most of my records are now digital, but I still love to pull out the old turntable and vinyl. There's no comparison, really.

Re analog versus digital: If you know what you're doing (big IF), you can record a warm analog signal path onto digital equipment and have it sound fine, even wonderful. You don't have to record to 2-inch 16 track with Dolby S (or whatever) to get a good sound.

Of course, not the senator explained it much better than I could.

TRM: I do trust you. I doubt my ears are as good as yours, but I'm a recording engineer myself and have worked both analog and digital since about 1989. Yes, modern recordings are way over-compressed, just as vinyl singles in the early 80's were intentionally distorted. The loudness wars are annoying. And there are discernable differences between older techniques and newer ones. Though most of those differences are small, and good engineers know how to get good sound out of either. You know that. Yadda yadda.

But when John and Jane Q. Musiclover tell me that their Bee Gees LP from 1978 doesn't warm their insides like it did when they first heard it on their fathers' wooden record player, my first reaction is of course not: A moldy attic doesn't make me feel as cozy as my grandfather's once did. But I don't blame this crazy modern mold.

Kevin's right to be suspicious. Maybe Ed King can tell a 1960 Les Paul from a 1990 Les Paul in a blind taste test. But he's probably one of a thousand such people on the planet.

Wow. I started my comment, went & ate lunch, came back, finished it, pressed "Post" and found a religious dispute in progress. Will this generate more heat than the great iPhone battle of last week?

I remember hearing that many of the finishes used on older guitars are now banned. Don't know if that's true. Aren't there any small companies that make guitars by hand? For the right price someone must by willing to hand wind pickups.

Well sure analog vs digital is not crap, but for my money I would rather have a brand new Mesa Boogie triple rectifier then a vintage fender twin any day of the week. For me it's a lot more versatile. But if you looking specifically for a fender twin sound nothing else is going to get the job done. Besides, most people throw on so much signal processing it's hard to get any of the nuance to come though. Now if I want to simply reproduce sound, like form an acoustic or a piano, of if I want a jazzy feel without the amp getting in the way then I'm going to use a solid state amp like a Roland jazz chorus so the amp doesn't get in the way of the guitar sound.

The jagged edge of a digital sound wave produces a very high transient sound that can be incredibly annoying.

Unless you're a human being. In that case, the transient is way out of your hearing range, and any differences you detect between a recorded analog signal and it's digitized twin through the same output equipment is either your imagination or ESP.

That's just playback, of course. Digital remasters do have all sorts of multiband compression and sh*t smooshed into them before press. Gotta add value, after all.

And recording to analog does introduce all sorts of wacky non-linear effects to the signal. Digital, not so much. So that "warmth" you love in analog recordings is like the taste of charcoal on your steak. It can be quite charming, of course, but it ain't fidelity.

Just one more comment. For 99.9% of all the music produced in America the quality of the instrument is irrelevant. I give you Billy Squire as an example--do we care if he plays a vintage Les Paul or a Korean knock-off?

For a tiny handful of players, Les Paul himself, Willie Nelson, BB King and Joe Pass come to mind, the actual sound of the guitar itself comes through. Certain guitars only belong in the hands of masters.

You can build a guitar very close to the exact specs of a 50's Les Paul (and Lord knows, Gibson is trying to). But it still is going to be a new guitar. There's something about a guitar that is 40 or 50 years old, especially if it has been played over those years, that a new guitar just won't have, at least until it has been broken in over a number of years. And fake "relicing" isn't the same thing (and should be banned, IMHO).

Does that make a 50's Les Paul worth half a million bucks? Not to me, but who am I to tell someone else how to spend their money?

New idea: Natural selection.

I imagine there's variance in sound quality as guitars roll off the assembly line. They get randomly shipped off around the market where they are non-systematically abused or cared for, depending in part on their sound.

So after 50 years, the nice ones remaining are more likely to be the good ones from their time, while a new one is equally likely to be relatively good or bad.

So sound quality ratings by trained players, blinded to the true age of the instruments, should show not only higher means, but lower variance among the vintage ones.

Anyone ready to write a grant?

boomer crap? yeah, mostly--but not all the way. Early electonics could produce some cool variations between examples of pickups (the PAF mentioned by an earlier poster is a good example)--and these could sound sweet, or crappy. What makes an older electric valuable is less the (ften beat to heck) finish than the sense of having been "played in"--a neck and fingerboard showing the traces, the reconfigurations of long use. The resonance of the wood body makes a difference, too--esp. in the acoustic/electrics or semiacoustics.

"Vintage" makes a lot more difference in an acoustic guitar; the maturation of the tonewoods over time can markedly improve the sound--certainly matures it, changes its timbre. Earlier construction techniques produced in some cases freer top movements, leading to different, maybe preferable response. And, to be honest, old wood, treated well, is just plain beautiful--to one who cares. I wince at the prices asked for vintage instruments, and paid by boomer gullibles who didn't go out into the pawn shops twenty years ago to pick up their LP Juniors when they were a bit more reasonable. If old instruments had been as inflated back when I started playing as they are now, I would have probably stayed with that first Harmony and my finger pain would have cured me of guitar ambitions four decades ago.

shnooky is right on target. Those Sunburst Les Paul's with the PAF humbuckers can't be replicated. You can get clone pickups that get close. Then there's the aged wood, thin coats of lacquer.

Yes, you could probably put it all together and get to the point where the ears can't tell the difference. The distressed market is sad, though. For example, who would want to buy a copy of SRV's strat complete with cracked necks. EVH's strat's with cigarette burns. THat part of the market's just selling an image. But, the real deal is not being made anymore. Hence, the vintage market. What's truly sad is the collector who collects just for the money and doesn't play the instruments.

$500,000 for a guitar is obscene and ridiculous. Period. Don't care if the thing could make the sky itself cry...

"King eventually got his Burst back. Today he keeps it in a vault." Hmmm, if Ed King doesn't play his 58/59 Les Paul on a regular basis, I doubt that few if anyone else who pays up to $100K for a guitar plays them either.

The 58/59 LP thing, and 51 Fender Nocaster, etc are really a supply and demand phenomena. Too many people with too much money chasing too few guitars.

Now that said I really like the fat neck on a 58 Les Paul and the 52 Telecaster (the Nocaster neck is too big). But the Re-issues will do for me, and I won't have to be worried about being robbed in my home at gunpoint.

Analog over digitel.Albums over disc.That's all there is to it analog you hear evrything,digitel evrything above and below certian dp is left out.That simple.

Digital,Sorry.

Glad I chose this as my first comments thread to participate in around here. Great stuff in here...

TRM: "These instruments cannot be replicated just by talking to Les Paul."

Well said. Les Paul wasn't in the workshops in Kalamazoo after the first prototypes came out. And he actively sought to have his name taken off the followup model, the SG, which represented a cheapening of the product in every way, just as it gained perfection. The closest automotive equivalent is the 1966 Mustang.

As Lee suggest above, there's also the whole mojo-of-history thing, which is not just about marketing. Aside from collector's value attached to big names, a great (or even good) guitar contains the story of everyone who ever played it, plus the really important factor that the instruments were played! The vibration of metal against wood "opens up" the guitar over the years, one reason a Martin acoustic, let's say, from the 1940s or '50s is far more prized than one from the '60s, apart from bracing and other construction elements.

In the case of LPs, they only made the really good ones from '56 to '60, so that obviously makes them more valuable. Eric Clapton always tells the story of Cream's first visit to the U.S. (in '66, I believe) and going to Manny's in New York to ask if they had any pre-SGs. The clerk took him to a back room full of bursts, and he bought seven, for friends in the UK, at 100 dollars each!

Yeah; most of the previous posters get it.

There are vintage guitars that are worth a lot more, because that's what The Market is willing to pay. Plenty of wealthy yuppies out there who went to business school instead of playing in a garage band - now want a second shot at their youth, and are willing to outbid eachother for it.

Same for vintage Mustangs, Camaros, etc.

My cousin made his living through most of the 1980's and 1990's buying and re-selling vintage guitars, and in the 90's, he quit the business, and moved on to building houses, because there was more (stable) money in it. He kept a few key pieces, but now, he's kicking himself, because the bulk of what he liquidated in 1998 for about $100k, would now be worth about $5 million.

So; are there "old skool" techniques of manufacturing that make for "better" sound? Sure. But for the vast majority of these guitars, it's really not the case. Only for a very few models, are they any better than a good, quality, modern guitar - but there's the rub - most modern guitars are cheapo mass-produced junk. But there are good brands of modern guitars that are fine - and there's also a wide range of really cool signal processing and effects that wasn't even dreamed about 50 years ago, that do things to the sound that make any differences in source-quality moot.

"There is a definable difference between Analog and Digital. Sound waves are naturally analog (curved waves of information) and hence earlier recording using analog sound waves captured a more 'real' sound that digital (bits of information) recording clipped off. Digital recording techniques have improved and narrowed the disparity but a squared off soundwave is never going to be identical to a curved soundwave. So the boomers are right."

I'm curious about this issue. I can easily
believe that "CD-quality" digital audio is
inferior to really good analog equipment - 16bits
is a little tight on dynamic range, and 44/48KHz
leaves the Nyquist frequency close to the limit
of human hearing. The big win from digital at
that level is consistency - no dust, no pops and
clicks and scratches, no analog component
variation.

However, now that studio processing - and even
semi-pro gear - can work at 24bit and 192KHz
sampling, is there any real basis to this
"digital is bad" meme any more ? Except perhaps
that the capabilities of digital equipment tempt
producers into ever more elaborate multi-tracking
and over-production, whereas with analog equipment
there's much more pressure to keep it simple.

Meanwhile, the Ipod and the internet have caused
much music now to be heard at compressed worse-
than-CD quality.

We also have to distinguish between different
kinds of music: in classical music, clearly the
goal is to reproduce the sound of a live
unamplified concert. But in the 60's and 70's
popular music flipped this around: the heavily-
multitracked and produced recording is viewed
as the authentic cultural artifact, and "live"
performance is often an attempt to recreate the
studio sound.

Lots of issues here. But really, whatever sounds
good to you is just fine and is "worth" however
much pleasure you can get from it.

I have a slightly technical question: I know
humans can't "hear" frequencies about about 20KHz.
And I also understand that any sound waveform
can be expressed as sum of sinewaves of different frequencies. What I'm not sure about is whether
the psycho-acoustic mechanisms of human sound
perception respect that linear process: can you
hear the difference between a 10KHz tone with
harmonics above 20KHz, and the same tone with
those high-frequency components filtered out ?

I give you Billy Squire as an example

and i give you an example of Billy Squire

I think the most interesting case might be Paul Reed Smith... PRS emerged in the early/mid 80's at a low point for american guitar makers to become one of the most respected builders around... craftsmanship, materials, attention to detail all will shine through... a lot of the PRS guitars made today are closer to having "it" straight off the line, and a much greater chance at having "it" 50 years from now than any "pre-aged" wonder out of Gibsson's custom shop... interestingly, Paul Reed Smith sought out Ted McCarty who was president of Gibson in the late 50's early 60's for advice and inspiration and named a line of guitars after him...

Richard Cownie,

Apparently, Rupert Neve and most of the current high-end designers of studio electrronics think so. Neve's classic Class-A circuitry designs and op-amps from the 60's and 70's are able to pass bandwidths exceeding 200 kilohertz.

Here is that "New Yorker" article (in pdf. format) that Adam mentioned in the first comment. It's fairly comprehensive, yet not overly long.

http://www.kenparkerarchtops.com/NewYorkerArticle.pdf

Like all wooden instruments, each individual guitar is different. My Goodall acoustic (a small shop in Hawaii) sounds different than my friend's, which was bought a year later after hearing mine. Each hunk of wood is different.

Now, part of it is simply aging. A guitar starts to come into its own sound after about 5 to ten years, depending on the hardness of the wood used. (Koa backs take a full ten years, for example, while spruce sounds as mature as it ever will after 5.) Older instruments sound better - richer - than younger ones.

But part of it is selection. The crappy 50's and 60's Gibsons were refurbished, or lost, or redone. The ones you can buy now sounded good. So the owner kept it in good shape and played it lovingly. It still sounds good. My electric is a '63 Barney Kessel. I don't, in general, love Barney Kessel's, but as soon as I heard this one, it was a sound I had been looking for forever. It's not that I love the brand or make. I simply love this particular guitar.

For me, I would never pay what some people pay for these guitars. I love mine, but if I hadn't found it, I wouldn't miss it. The instrument is beautiful, but I still am the same guitarist I've been for 20 years. Leo Kottke could make a student $200 piece of junk sound better than I can make mine sound on a great day. But for some people, that sound is worth pursuing. More power to them.

In short, it's not completely bogus, but it's also not reproduceable. If two new guitars sound different (and the good ones each do), certainly two 40 year old guitars will each sound different.

What is all this crap about "boomer" gullibles? It's nothing but sheer speculation. I personally know of a dozen "trust-fund" twenty and thirty somethings who own vintage instruments and studio gear I could never consider acquiring- not that I would, in any case.

The vintage market really didn't start to heat up until the mid - late 80's because Gibson and Fender were building such crappy pieces of shit...

Mutt

Initially I thought electric guitar differences were bogus but when you consider the fact that the sound is coming not from some pure waveform but from the vibration of a complex system including the strings and the frame I can see how there can be subtle (and not so subtle) differences between guitars.

Regarding vinyl - I babied my LPs like crazy and when I took a few out and played them on my original equipment awhile ago I was amazed at the sound.

The hiss and cracks and scratches were unbelievable. It was nearly impossible to get the perfect silence one can easily get with CDs.

This is not to say that all the new stuff is an improvement. When did we decide to settle for crap quality in order to save money or space? I'm talking about MP3s specifically but also any poor sample rates used for audio.

I suppose there is a place for everything but even so . . .

I'd like to add that the nature of wood(which the vast majority of guitars are made from)is extremely variable. Even wood from the same tree can have variations in it. You can buy guitars made in the same year that sound different even though they're the same model.
One of the best guitars I ever bought came from the seconds pile from the Gibson factory in Kalamazoo. Even though it had a couple blemishes on it I'd give my left nut to have it back now.
Collecters are wack jobs anyway. They really don't appreciate the instruments there just hoarders.

Thanks, R Mutt. I just googled around: orchestral
music definitely does contain significant energy
up to 100KHz; and some research indicates that the
presence or absence of harmonics above 20KHz affects
EEG responses and subjective evaluation of sound
quality - even though the high-frequencies on their
own are not perceived as audible.

I believe with 24bit/192KHz sampling, we're
probably getting to the point where the fidelity of
the digital signal path is as good as almost-all
humans can hear - though you'll still run into
the usual problems of inaccurate loudspeakers and
room acoustics. However, 16bit/44KHz (CD-quality)
isn't that great, and the profusion of cheap
portable devices with MP3 compression is probably
giving digital a bad name.

I also remember reading that a lot of 50's guitars went to Japan during thier economic boom. Took away a lot of the supply.

So if I understand what everybody has been saying, older instruments have a certain je ne sais quoi.

Apart from coins, stamps, and the B.S. quotes from 'Antiques Roadshow,' there are a limited number of items that actually appreciate in value, aka collectables.

There is only one type of collectable that I know of that will appreciate in value, while simultaneously being well-worn, and that is a quality crafted stringed musical equipment.

Drum mentions the Stradivarius, but why stop there? How much does a '30s vintage Martin dreadnought fetch these days? How much does a Steinway M-class run after a 60-year stint in grandma's parlor? One doesn't need to go prior to Les Paul to find a fun example: anyone know where I can find a working Clavinet that costs less than my car (caveate, I drive a 1996 Honda Accord whose every day is a victory and a miracle)?

Perhaps a Roth IRA linked to a good fund will outperform any of these items, but when was the last time anyone has used their 401(k) to get laid or keep their neighbors up on a Saturday night?

Why do these things appreciate in value? I think the answer probably has to do with the value human nature places on inherently beautiful, rare, and wonderful items.

I'm a lifetime Gibson man, so I guess I'll chip in my 2 cents. Yes, quality of manufacture varied dramatically, especially after CBS bought Gibson. The first new guitar I ever owned was a 1976 Les Paul Standard, unfortunately it was made just after the takeover and quality was notoriously poor. I recently took it in for some maintenance, and the guitar repair guy took one look at it, noticed a particular detail of carving near the head, and said, "oh yeah, this one was made during the dark years." I asked him to assess its value and he said it wasn't worth as much as nonCBS Gibsons, but it was still worth about $2000. I guess that's OK since I overpaid $700 for it in 1976.
But the best guitar I ever owned was a 1959 Les Paul Jr. It was a cheap single-pole single-pickup guitar made as a practice guitar or for kids. It had an SG body, it was thin and easy to play, but no serious guitarist would use it in performance due to the single pickup not offering enough range of sounds. Oh but it played like a dream.
So I've seen a little of both sides. The old guitars were a different design, without modern technology like double-humbucker pickups, and some people like that older sound. I saw a recent documentary on PBS about Les Paul, he said that the old designs were easier to overdrive to distortion, to get the rock sound everybody loved. I also recall reading a story about Les Paul visiting the modern Gibson factory, he examined a few guitars coming off the assembly line, and he said he'd identified flaws in all of them, to the point where he wouldn't have released them without major rework.

This is the reason I play drums.*

(*Which disqualifies me from participating in any discussion involving actual musicians.)

:-)

Interesting thread. Professional musician here (shameless bona fides: http://www.myspace.com/soulcoast )

Guitars are "tools in the toolbox" to me so I'm inclined to agree that it's mostly boomer crap, particularly regarding the monetary "value" of certain instruments.

Example: I once had a Gretsch 6120 that's probably worth around $6,000 now but I sold it for $200.00 in 1973 because while lovely to look at, really only made one sound (think Buffalo Springfield) and I wasn't getting a lot of calls to make "that sound".

Horses for courses. Analog vs. Digital; used to love to have that argument but I think we're past it at this point

Richard,

In the not distant-at-all-future, digital music reproduction will, with the ongoing refinement in transducer and amplifier technology, permit a listening experience indistinguishable from actually hearing the music performed live.

I think with the advancement in miniaturization of digital storage technologies even small hand held devices will see a great improvement in bandwidth.

when was the last time anyone has used their 401(k) to get laid

*blush*

Manufacturers today can mimic the engineering of old guitars and they can mimin the "old-timey" electronics. But the one thing that they cannot mimic is the age. Old guitars just sound better.

A guitar teacher once counseled me to always buy a used guitar rather than a new guitar. A guitar sounds better as it is "broken in" Wear patterns develop--particularly on the neck--and the guitar developes its own "personality". Conversely, barring some sort of quality-control problem, new guitars rolling off the assembly line will all sound exactly the same. They are like empty shells waiting for somebody to imprint a personality onto them.

A quality guitar that was made in the '50's and has been well maintained will have a sound that cannot be replicated. Especially one that has been heavily played.

A little bit of history. They stopped making Les Pauls in 1960 because nobody wanted them; they had lost the solid body wars to Fender. It was only after Clapton's association that they became cool again, and Gibson started making them anew. By this time, the late 60s, Gibson and Fender were corporate owned and the business of making guitars had changed. Specifically, Fender and Gibson would (in the 50s) literally THROW AWAY any guitar that didn't play well. The corporations said, OH NO YOU DON'T. As a result, there are far greater numbers of shitty instruments after the golden age. That is not to say that there aren't great guitars being built now. There are people making pick-ups as good as the old PAFs (Timbuckers, Lollars) and as good as the old fender pickups in those blackguard teles. There are specific luthiers making instruments as beautiful as the old LPs and teles and strats. The issue of old wood is real and it does make a difference to the sound of the instrument. The thinness of the nitro laquer (as someone pointed out) makes a difference too. The aging of the magnets in the pickups. Etc. etc.. I happen to think that the wood in the amp cabinets makes more difference to overall sound (there is a guy who salvages wood from old churches and builds amps with them; and they do sound better). But does that make a '59 Les Paul 200 times better than a late 80s Japanese knock-off? I remember someone telling me a story about a club owner who found out Clapton was going to sit in at his club, and the guy went around trying to procure all the best equipment for EC to impress him with his vintage prowess. The club owner got the super fancy rig all ready for EC; that night, EC shows up and plugs into the band's rhythm player's cheap amp and crappy modern guitar. And -- voila -- sounds like Clapton.

One important element in the construction of the older, or any, guitars, is proportions: the ratio of mahogany to maple in the body and burst-top, of mahogany to ebony in the neck and fretboard, of the overall mass of metal components to wooden ones, of fret size to string gauge and height, etc. Tonal quality is a matter of physics: vibration, resonance, etc. Did the older guitars have thicker maple tops? Maybe they just don't make them like they used to.

I'm a guitar n00b, but I was over at Guitar Center yesterday looking at amps and I was amused to see a Peavey amp that advertises a "tube-like" sound, although the actual electronics are solid-state.

Heh. There is a similar phenomenon, Kevin, in ham radio (de AD5NL). You get old guys insisting that there old tube hallicrafters and swans sounded better than the modern solid-state, computerized radios (which are, inflation-adjusted, much more affordable, capable, and better-constructed). True, I can't self-repair my busted Icom 703, whereas I could self-repair my old Yaesu FT-7, a 70s era solid-state HF rig without any ICs. I miss that. But the sound on the new ham radio is just infinitely better than anything I ever had with a boatanchor.

I think there are differences, I'm not sure they are bad though. In ham radio the nostalgia is definitely boomer crap... but ham radio is science whereas guitars are art, musical sound preferences are a bit more arbitrary so I'm going to be agnostic as to whether new Les Pauls are worse (or better) than the old ones.

I guess it's true. Rock and roll does rot your brain.

Quisp makes a good point; it's the hands on the guitar that matter most. Give three different guitarists the same rig to play and they will all sound different from one another.

The quality of an instrument like an electric guitar has nothing to do with its vintage; in fact thirty year old pickups, especially if they've been played a lot, ain't gonna sound today like they did thirty years ago. Magnets deteriorate over time, capacitors dry out, amplifier valves lose their vaccuum...and that adds up to a loss of tone, not a better sound.

Don't get me wrong, I love those old axes; especially the cheap ones like the Kay and Harmony Silvertones, they do have their charms, but there are great instruments being made today; if you want a player and not a showpiece there's no reason to go vintage.

I think the market has been ruined by "collectors" who buy instruments which they will never play for more than they are really worth. Even a Sears catalogue guitar in mediocre shape sells for hundreds of dollars on E-Bay. It's ridiculous. Just because a guitar is forty years old doesn't make it magically sound better.

And in a noisy club (which is where real music happens) no one's gonna notice, or care, if the soundwaves you're producing are slightly digital or not.

Charlie Don't Surf said:

I'm a lifetime Gibson man, so I guess I'll chip in my 2 cents. Yes, quality of manufacture varied dramatically, especially after CBS bought Gibson.

It was Norlin that bought Gibson. CBS bought Fender. ;-)

"In the not distant-at-all-future, digital music reproduction will, with the ongoing refinement in transducer and amplifier technology, permit a listening experience indistinguishable from actually hearing the music performed live."

Hmmm... I agree with you about the increase in
storage capacity and bandwidth, even in portable
devices. But at a live performance you can turn
your head from side to side, look up and down,
even - to take this to an absurd extreme - put
your fingers in your ears, and the sound changes
in response to your movements. What we're going
to see is more like the change from analog TV to
hi-def digital - there's way more quality and
detail, but still what you see depends on where
the director points the camera.

I also think speaker technology has quite a way
to go (or maybe the real-time DSP algorithms and
horsepower to allow a smart amplifier to
compensate for the coloration introduced by your
speakers and acoustics of the room).

Another factor to mention here is that analog
technology has advanced quite a bit - not
necessarily at the audiophile end, where you
could always get good stuff at a price - but in
the ability to get very good and consistent
results from cheap components - e.g. I was just
reading about a Linn amplifier selling for $8K
which is basically driven by a PC-like switching
PSU and 3x TDA7293 integrated power amp chips
per channel, about $30 for the active components.
That's quite amazing to me. Or read reviews of
the $30 T-amp using a Tripath chip.

I think the market has been ruined by "collectors" who buy instruments which they will never play for more than they are really worth

Amen.

Hey Tim -- Pete Townsend used a 6120 on Who's Next. That album sure doesn't sound like Buffalo Springfield to me.

Analog is digital when you get to the quantum level.

I'd like to see him pass a double-blind test.

That said, tube amps distort different (better) than transistor amps; than op-amp amps, than mosfet amps, etc.

It's all about tone, and tone first and foremost comes from your fingers - how they fret, where they fret, how they push down on and move about the strings.

Your picking hand and style is also a big part of your tone. Do you use a pick, or just your fingers? Or a combination? Jeff Beck hasn't used a pick in years (or put out a decent album in years, but I digress). Big Al Anderson, former NRBQ guitarist and one of the true living greats, uses a pick but also uses the three fingers below to strum, snap, or pick the strings.

Equipment is an important part of your tone, but it won't make up for an inability to work the instrument WITH YOUR HANDS. And that takes time and effort.

To sum up, yeah, it's a bunch of boomer crap. You can buy a perfectly fine new guitar - a good one will cost you a couple grand, of course - and it will stand up to any vintage axe.

Get a bunch of audiophile together and have them take an auditory "Pepsi Challenge". Identify the guitar through the electronics. I doubt that distinctions can be found.

Now, a guitarist might have a preference for playing a particular guitar, but that depends upon lots of other factors than the sound that's being produced.

An aside to Mark D:

On his "Theme Time Radio Hour" program, I heard Dylan say:

"There's one type of person that hangs around with musicians. And those are drummers."

When did we decide to settle for crap quality in order to save money or space? I'm talking about MP3s specifically....

When we decided to transmit them over 33.6K modems.

If that era started today, when folks have throughputs that are 100x faster, maybe the standard would be different.

I guess it's worth mentioning that the sound you're hearing, if you're inside, is a combination of the sound that comes directly to you, and the sound that bounces off the walls or ceiling before it reaches you. IOW, because of the temporal difference, some of the sound waves cancel each other out or reinforce each other. You can damp this effect by putting carpet on the walls or enhance it with porcelain tile.

That's why so many opera houses are rebuilt soon after they open. Getting the sound right isn't an exact science.

Of course, if you're outside you have a different situation.

So I guess it's all kinda like wine- most of us neither know nor care, but to some people it's very important.

"Hey Tim -- Pete Townsend used a 6120 on Who's Next. That album sure doesn't sound like Buffalo Springfield to me."

Didn't know that. On all the tracks or just for certain parts ?

Agree it's not Springfield (or Setzer for that matter) at all. I was describing why I "had" to have one.

"Now, a guitarist might have a preference for playing a particular guitar, but that depends upon lots of other factors than the sound that's being produced."
Posted by: Jeffrey Davis on August 21, 2007 at 4:43 PM | PERMALINK

Exactly! For me it's how the guitar feels in my hands that matters. The sound can be affected by so many things, and like I said in a noisy bar those subtle nuances in sound really don't matter.

-------

"There's one type of person that hangs around with musicians. And those are drummers."

Bass players are almost as bad. Ours was late for rehearsal again this weekend. Turns out he'd locked his keys in the car again! Had to break a window to get the drummer out....

Great post, quisp. A question to Thor: sure, PRS guitars are well made but do they have the slightest hint of personality or originality to them?

On another note, and one to which quisp alluded, while the high end of the market has skyrocketed in expense, the low end has moved in the other direction. That is, the entry-level stuff, both electric and acoustic (and in-between), have never been better or cheaper. Brands like Cort and Aria make guitars, designed here but assembled in Korea or China, that deliver an encouraging instrument for under $300 -- a far cry indeed from the knuckle-busting barnwood planks of our youth.

Depends on the person making the statement. A lot of oohing and aahing about 50s instruments and amps is just wankery from people who can't actually play. But I know a few top-knotch guitar players who don't go in for hyperbole or hype who will tell you that as a rule a 50s Gibson or Strat or Tele really does sound better. And they'd say it's about choice of wood, that more of the work was by hand. Others will tell you it has to do with varnishes and lacquers (or lack thereof). Others will say that none of that matters; it's all in the pickup and the strings.

So there is a genuine issue here, and a lot of knowledgeable people have valid reasons for saying those guitars are better. But there's still a lot of mindless 'oh yea man you gotta get that '56 tele -- they just don't make 'em like that today' bullshit from people who more are impressed by what the guitarist is playing than by his sound. In other words they don't actually care about the "it" they're talking about; they just want people to think they do, and the only way they can make any kind of claim to caring is by relying on proxies for the "it" -- things that are thought to be correlated with it. In that kind of world, you don't need to be able to do anything or even know anything; you just have to look as if you do.

"In that kind of world, you don't need to be able to do anything or even know anything; you just have to look as if you do."

Which brings us back neatly to the world o' George W. Bush.

kenji: the knuckle-busting barnwood planks of our youth

I love that line. Almost perfect iambic pentameter, and just about as good as Dylan Thomas.

Thanks. That was taken from "A Child's Christmas in Albuquerque".

kenji --
very good
"the dogs in the wet-nosed yard" is one of my favorite lines

I don't think we will ever get the sound qulity from digital as you can with analog.There is the ambiance that just can not be recorded with digital.Put on a album, the 4 seconds before the music starts the room fills with a sound or ambiance,I have never heard that with a CD.Anyone understand what i am trying to say?

One reason those vintage Gibsons and Fenders became valuable is because there really weren't all that many of them made in the first place. Few people this side of Chuck Berry knew what to do with an electric guitar in the mid-50's, and those old Telecasters and Les Pauls weren't a big source of profit for their manufacturers.

After the British Invasion, every other kid on the block wanted an electric guitar, and the ones who stuck with it and became serious musicians came to value those vintage models over the mass-produced guitars available off the rack. Once in a while you'd hear somebody like Clapton rave about finding some old Les Paul in a pawn shop in some backwater town, and that added to the mystique.

As a former guitar player, as well as an electrical engineer specializing in analog stuff for the past 33 years, I've had the pleasure of chuckling derisively at some of the psuedo-tech statements some poeple make about electronics and guitars of old, vs. new.

I'm not arguing that old Gibsons and Fenders weren't fine instruments, or that the newer ones are often not as good in many ways.... but there is one, and only one way to prove it: double-blind testing.

I'm willing to bet that, when subjected to double-blind test, the differences would be far, far smaller than most people claim.

I am now totally convinced that, for example, the '67 Telecaster sounds different from than the new ones. And different from other new and old guitars, which sound fifferent from one another.

And that in many cases (though we have no double-blind studies quoted here--and damn you, Norm Bernstein, for saying it first) I am now pretty sure that analog and digital "stuff" sound different from one another.

But "better?" Just try to remember that it's just your preference, not a law of nature.

"But the best guitar I ever owned was a 1959 Les Paul Jr. It was a cheap single-pole single-pickup guitar made as a practice guitar or for kids. It had an SG body, it was thin and easy to play, but no serious guitarist would use it in performance due to the single pickup not offering enough range of sounds."

Oh, there might be a serious guitar player or two who could make a few good sounds with a Jr:

http://www.thewho.net/whotabs/images/gtrs/twiceafortnight-19671015.jpg

http://www.altmanphoto.com/mountain.html

As for me, I'm a Strat man and still regret selling my pre-CBS model. I haven't found one that plays as well, to my ears and hands, since.

john john,

I know exactly what you are saying. Some Philistines would call it "noise" but there's more to it than that.

I have to admit, though -- some remasters of classic albums have enhanced my enjoyment of the music. "Forever Changes" ring a bell with anyone? Alas, many great albums have also been butchered in the process.

I suspect the successes come about as a result of careful preparation in the analog domain before the sound is digitzed, but I'm only speculating.

Thersites--nice to know you're a fellow strat player. I've currently got two electrics and they're both reissues. One's a '72 reissue strat that's about 15 years old now and quite naturally distressed: the previous owner had a studded wristband apparently. But they did a very nice job of replicating the sound of aged pickups and it's very sweet. T'other is a gold top les paul that's also a reissue--basically replicating the one I bought new in 1969 (boomer, yup) except the pickups are wound way hotter than they were back then. I'm currently using a blues deville with 4 10's, and that too is a kind of reissue--Fender getting back to certain basics that made people love the tube amps of yore with a couple of modern conveniences.

Point being that, sure, I wish I'd held on to my original gold-top, my original '67 tele, etc. But they are quite capable of building really great stuff now when they return to some of the old principles. There are lots of nice electrics around by newer manufacturers, but there's a reason a couple of the original groundbreakers are still the standard for virtually everything else. I wouldn't make a fetish of the old stuff though, nice as it is.

Somebody asked Pete Townsend once about all the guitars he smashed and didn't he have a personal relationship with any instrument that he really loved. I believe the answer was along the lines of "I don't make love to it; I play the fuckin thing."

Guitars as investments; it's all Nigel Tufnel's fault, you know:

[discussing Nigel's Guitar collection]
Nigel Tufnel: Look... still has the old tag on, never even played it.
Marty DiBergi: [points his finger] You've never played...?
Nigel Tufnel: Don't touch it!
Marty DiBergi: We'll I wasn't going to touch it, I was just pointing at it.
Nigel Tufnel: Well... don't point! It can't be played.
Marty DiBergi: Don't point, okay. Can I look at it?
Nigel Tufnel: No. no. That's it, you've seen enough of that one.

Nigel: Listen to that sustain.
Marty: I, I don't hear anything.
Nigel: Well you would if it were plugged in.

Just a bunch of boomer crap--I play guitar semi-professionally and the guys spending big dough on guitars are all guys who can barely play.

Wow. This is how the internet is supposed to work. From the collective, relevant, informed experience of a diverse group of people a complex yet absolutely accurate answer emerges.

Lots of variables in Kevin's question, and each one has been addressed.

Personally, I really like the "natural selection" explanation as the dominant variable because all of the other causal factors are subordinate. However, there definitely is a bullshit factor whenever the adjectives "authentic" or "original" are used to describe anything that appeals to the senses.

Ever tried to defend your version of an "authentic" chili recipe against a partisan from another school? Pointless.

I also think that the distortions and imperfections caused by aging of any component - not just the wood have a discernible impact on sound. Sometimes it just happens to be pleasant. I have a late 60s Japanese knock-off of a Gibson ES 335 with a counterfeit Bigsby tremolo that is configured completely bass akwards. I picked it up for $100 15 years ago and it's by far my favorite instrument. The unamplified sound is very warm, but the electronics, which are probably NOT very skillfully constructed, have that charming "charcoal" flavor someone mentioned. Action is superb, and I purposely let the strings get nice and dirty.

Overripe fruit and cheese sometimes taste better, why not electronics?

Anyhoo, best thread yet on this site. I suspect that's because many of us have actually played and recorded guitars, but very few of us have served as Secretary of State.

I have been a roadie for the same San Francisco rock band since 1968. We only do a few shows a year now, because our double-Grammy frontman is also a member of Chicago, which takes up a lot of his time.

One of my friends is a Bay Area rock guitar legend, and when I was at his house a few days ago he showed me his new axe, a $400 Ibanez that he swears kicks ass on his old Gibson L-5, which currently goes for about $10,000 if you can find one.

Another friend has a 1955 gold top Les Paul, worth who knows how much, and I hate it. The neck is like a tree.

Tube amps sound better than solid state, and I have a couple of '50s Danelectros that sound great, but are crap when it comes to durability.

I don't own any "classic" guitars. I play a '90s 50th Anniversary Stratocaster through a modern tube amp (Rivera). Best combo I have found, except I also like my modern Godin strat with the Humbucker in the treble position.

It's no harder to make a guitar than it is to make a car engine, and a lot of people seem capable of making car engines.

Oh, my sweet lord.

Isn't this sort of chat best confined to the dinner table?

Sons Of Champlin, Repack !

Haggerty "woke me up" in '68 !

FWIE, I spent 20 years on the road and in the studio, and have seven gold records to my credit. I now sell guitars, so I have a bit of expertise in this area. There's no doubt in my mind that some vintage guitars are special, but there are superb instruments being made to day that are just as good.

My theory is that the pre-1960s guitars were pretty much hand-made by veteran builders. In the early 60's, the british invasion blew the roof off the guitar market and Gibson and Fender just couldn't keep up with the demand. So they hired a bunch of newbies and trained them. Quality slipped a bit, but few of the new guitarists could tell the difference.

Then the capitalists took notice, and in 1965 Leo Fender sold out to CBS for $7 million and a promise to stay out of the business for 7 years. He later said it was the dumbest thing he ever did. Four years later, in 69, Norlin bought Gibson, and as was the case with Fender, the cost-cutters came in and quality went down even as sales figures went up. So yeah, the quality of the pre 1965 Fenders and pre 1969 Gibsons was higher.

Also, Cheddarhead's comment about natural selection has some truth to it. What ever dogs were produced in the old days were modified or trashed. In the late 70s I got a great deal on a 1958 Stratocaster, and it was months before I could admit to myself that it was a dog. So I flipped it and doubled my money. Dumbest thing I ever did. Today I could sell it to some collector who can't even play the thing for 30 times what I paid for it.

And in the 70s, Eddie Van Halen developed his style of playing on a home-made guitar made of parts that third party complanies were selling to improve the second rate Strats that Fender had bee cranking out. And he put in one Gibson style pickup. And he;oed develop a tremolo system that didn't come out of tune with heavy use. A Japanese company called Hoshino ran with the concept, selling similarly hotrodded strat copies under the brand name, "Ibanez". The hyperfast, hypertechnical "shredding" style of the 80s pioneered by Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, and host of big-haird players was based on Ibanez guitars.

In the mid 80s, a bi-polar, millionaire guitar aficianado named Henry Juskiewicz bought Gibson from Norlin, and Bill Schultz and a bunch of other Fender sales reps got venture capital funding and bought Fender from CBS. And they put the quality back in.

I say that the golden age of guitar building is now. I've seen some superb new instruments from both companies and from a number of new companies like PRS that are as good as any vintage instruments I've played. Sure, you have to go to the custom shops of the big companies to get the really good stuff, but you can get an instrument for $3000 to $5000 that will eat my old Strat, which in probably worth $30,000 now, for lunch.

Collector guitars are no longer instruments, and as far as I'm concerned, the collectors can have them and play their collector games. I'm a player, and when I'm done here, I'll go play my 1990 MusicMan Silhouette and be a happy man.

Apologies for the typos. I should wait until after I've gone offline to have that afterwork beer

Slideguy: the Musicman Silhouette, especially the 90-ish ones before they changed the bolt-on neck, are an excellent example in my opinion of a great modern guitar that does the strat thing and the tele thing as well as vintage fenders. proof that great guitars are still being made; reverend is another company doing great things on the cheap. this thread is reminding of so many great guitar stories, like the fact that the beatles played rics and hofners and gretsches because that's what they could afford, and fenders in england were few and far between. george harrison had that great facetious line, "imagine what we could have done if we had strats." yes, i know they got two in '65.

the comment (I can't find it now; this thread is loooong) about how the low-end of guitars is so much better than it was "when we were kids" is so so true. the folks who are players on this thread undoubtedly remember the days of learning licks by picking up the needle and dropping it over and over again on the same spot of the song, back before "the amazing slow downer" and other brilliant (free) apps. also, does anyone remember making demos on cassette players and then overdubbing to a second deck by literally playing the first one in the room and playing along with it? i'm going to have to agree that, in principle, digital is not as "warm" as analog, and if EMI wants to bring the original beatle master tapes to my house and play them for me at my command, that will be dandy...but failing that, it's pretty great to have virtually every song I ever dreamed of having residing on one paperback book sized hard drive next to my laptop.

On the other hand, it's also true that if you want to experience rock and roll as it was, you have to get a clean chuck berry 45 -- I would recommend "Almost Grown/Little Queenie" March 1959 -- and play it cranked on a phonograph, you know, the kind with the speakers built into it. No bass, just nice compressed Chuck. It was a different Chuck that came out when the Chess Box came out digital, but (even then) I was happy to be able to hear all the little details you could never hear back in the day.

And while we're digressing into a digital/analog vintage/modern debate, I would just like to point out that the Beatles hated stereo and only ever approved (or paid any attention to) mono mixes of their records, and the mono mixes are VERY different, different mixes, yes, but also sometimes different takes, mastered at different speeds (and therefore in different keys) with different effects mixed in or out and in some cases with entire sections of songs completely changed, or even absent (e.g. no "blisters on my fingers"). According to the living Beatles engineers and producer (Geoff Emerick, George Martin et al) there is only one Sgt. Pepper, and that is the MONO mix. Which most of the world has never heard, as it was never released in this country, and has been out of print for forty years. Same with the White Album, Revolver... Talk about differences between analog and digital!

But I always used to scratch up my records. At least now I can make a back up copy. Also, with pro tools, I can edit the drum solos out of most of the 70s. Just my own personal preference.

Sorry for the extreme digression. At least in my head it's all of a piece.

Great posts. Now, only two more and we'll have beat the Iphone thread. Come on guys (and girls.) Surely guitars are more interesting than fucking tiny telephones?

BTW, I loved the Tele but the best guitar I ever had was a Harmony 12-string acoustic. I don't know if it was a mutant, or what, but strumming a E-minor was like visiting