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 God and nothing I've owned has sounded that good

"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?"

That "ambience" is noise from the vinyl and rumble
from the turntable bearings. And then wow and
flutter pitch variation once the music starts.
Unless you've got an extremely expensive turntable
very carefully set up, and top-quality vinyl in
good condition. And yeah, a digital medium *could*
duplicate those artifacts, with some effort - but
why the hell would you want to ?

Analog can be very good, though usually it isn't.
Digital can be even better, and often is.

Also, with pro tools, I can edit the drum solos out of most of the 70s. Just my own personal preference.

Heh. Nothing worse that a long-winded, self-important, pretentious drum solo. I hated them back in the day, and it's good news to realize that they can be edited out now.

Quisp, my husband bought his mono copy of Sergeant Pepper's in Jacksonville, Fla in '67. He's told me the stereo records usually cost a dollar more.

Aside to Quisp: my Silhouette has the five bolt neck, and a DiMarzio PAF Pro at the bridge. It's the most versatile instrument I've ever owned, and I've been at this for over 40 years. I play in two bands, one jazz and one country, and use this guitar for both. My hope is that maybe 30 years from now, some kid will find this thing, maybe in a pawnshop, and buy it cheap, because it's not a prized brandname. But this is a special guitar, and if he (or she) has music in them, it will bring it out.

But as for the question on Kevin's mind when he brought this up in the first place, the "Burst" is no longer a musical instrument. It's a financial instrument. The fact that King keeps his in a safe should be the giveaway. The gujitar's value is based on it's rarity and iconic status, and not on how good it sounds. You can buy how good it sounds for $5k or less.

This is a great discussion, BTW. Thanks, Kevin.

Actually, the original premise of Kevin's argument is wrong. We now do have a pretty good idea of what gave a Stradivarius violin its unique sound, and someone actually managed to make a modern-day replica that sounds about exactly the same in a blind test:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/03/31/wviol31.xml
http://agnews.tamu.edu/dailynews/stories/BICH/Sep2203a.htm

Terrific thread, a welcome mid-August respite from Washington nonsense.

We tend to take it for granted, but the U.S. dominated music in the past century like few countries have ever in any art form. And I say that with great reservation. The last thing we need is more jingoism, but starting with Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, etc. in the '20s, it's an impressive accomplishment. And American music is preserved through recording, not notation, so the switch to digital and the, at least temporary, decline in recording quality is meaningful. 30 years ago, I played a fresh LP copy of Armstrong's Hot Fives through a state of the art analog system and I was astonished at how much more information those recordings held that previously was unretrievable by available playback equipment.

A few points: microphones and mic pre-amps are pretty important, too. I know a few studio owners who've spent a lot on vintage mics and tube pre-amps and they're not interested in boomer bragging rights.

No doubt the vintage market is driven by wealthy boomers. I suspect the bubble will burst as we boomers shuffle off to that great concert hall in the sky and leave our cherished guitars and amps to our children and grandchildren for whom these objects hold no fascination.

Prices will probably decline for stuff without superstar provenances, but there will still be a demand. There are already jazz repertory bands driven by musical values rather than nostalgia. That movement is led by W. Marsalis, who learned a bit about maintaining a performance tradition for music created hundreds of years ago. And we're starting to see the same thing in country, blues and rock 'n roll. bands dedicated to performing the songs the Beatles only recorded (e.g. The Fab Faux) and entire Grateful Dead show setlists. (Dark Star Orchestra)

The music will live on in performance as well as recordings, and the appeal of those old instruments and amps to those players will be obvious.

I finally decided to RTFA and I was astonished. WTF is a "burst"..?!? Answer: it's NOT a "burst," it's a '59 Les Paul Standard. Same basic model as the one I bought in 1976. It would be more commonly referred to by the short name "Standard" than "Burst." I don't know where the hell they got that name from. Yeah it had a sunburst finish, so did dozens of other Gibson guitars.
But anyway, the article is correct, that was a very unpopular model. And it doesn't have some golden perfect sound. The mini-humbucker pickups on this model are generally considered inferior to the Les Paul Custom, which had full sized humbucker pickups. The only reason I bought a brand new '76 Standard is that I couldn't afford the several hundred bucks more it cost for a Custom and the guitar store had a Custom in stock and was practically giving it away. My guitar playing buddies used to laugh at my Standard (even the Gibson fans). I bet the guitar salesman laughed at me for buying the guitar they couldn't get rid of.
Anyway, now I'm on the side of the people who think this is damn ridiculous. Yeah I can see the collectible value of some guitars with legendary sounds like the Explorers, or rarities like the Flying Vs, but a Standard?!? Sheesh.
The article takes a few more liberties with the truth. No, Clapton and Jeff Beck were not known for playing the Standard, they were both known for playing Strats. I have never seen a serious pro guitarist on that level who played a Standard.

Re mono pepper: yeah, an english friend of mine had the mono pepper on vinyl -- belonging to his older brother -- and I can remember we put it on one day, having only previously listened to our own copies...we didn't know it was mono. Frankly, it made me feel insane. My head just about fell off. crowd laughter in the wrong places, guitar solos that continued when they weren't supposed to, paul vamping at the end of reprise, she's leaving home at the wrong tempo in the wrong key, flanging on the vocals of lucy in the sky, and of course the now famous inner-groove infinite repeating "message."

And, as someone mentioned the Fab Faux, two things:

1) their cover of "I Don't Wanna Face It" -- which I believe is available only on iTunes as part of the Lennon benefit album, actually made me cry it's so good.
2) there is some great stuff of them on youtube with Conan O'Brien singing lead on "too much monkey business."

...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)...
Posted by: quisp on August 21, 2007 at 3:33 PM

Now *that* could be another interesting topic altogether. Just out of curiousity.. what type of wood is it he is using from those old churches-where does it come from? Pews, structural wood?

re old church salvage wood, i believe it's pine, and I think it's from floorboards, but i would have to check. there was another story, come to think of it (and now I'm going to forget all the details) about a sunken ship in one of the Great Lakes that had been salvaged something like a hundred years after the fact, and the ship was full of big logs of some rare wood that you can't even harvest any more because the trees are endangered...i forget what the wood was...but all these luthiers were freaking out trying to get the wood in order to build guitars that you haven't been able to build in decades. it would be a cooler story if i could remember the details, but you get the idea.

Yes, Sgt Pepper was available in mono in the U.S. I got mine at White Front, in Northern California, for $1 dollar less than the stereo, as Tilli mentioned. Then, I eventually traded it for a stereo version, a few years later. The only thing I did stupider than that (in this vein) was to only buy one copy of the "butcher cover", a year earlier, because I couldn't come up with more than the $1.98 I needed for that. Why didn't I borrow ten bucks from parents? I could have repaid them many times over with five copies of that thing.

Repack and Tim, the Sons of Champlin reference intrigued me. Aside from some pretty great acoustics from the '40s and '50s (a Martin 000-18, Gibson J-200 and LG-1), my best vintage electric is a 1963 Gibson ES-175, which I bought from Bill Champlin in 1973. I am the third owner, and only changed the binding on one side, which got damaged in a fire -- most likely from one of Bill's ever-dangling cigarettes (ah, the '60s). The PAFs alone are worth the price of admission.

At the time, Bill was kind enough to give a suburban kid some lessons in music and life, and after years of me admiring it, and just before he moved to Los Angeles (and the rest), he agreed to part with the thing on the condition that I sell it back to him if ever I should want to get rid.

I never did, but thanks to the internet(s), I was able to contact him to say that I still had the blonde baby, and to ask if he ever missed it. "Nah," he answered, "I picked up a Jap copy years ago and it's just as good."

That little tale somehow fits well with the whole discussion, doesn't it? In any case, it would be great to the SoC again one of these days? I have to agree that Terry Haggerty's eclectic jazzifizing definitely opened my ears at the time and has proved to be seriously ahead of its time. Bill was a great player, too, which is sometimes forgotten -- mainly because his voice was, and is, so damn good!

Have to quibble with Charlie Don't Surf's:

"The article takes a few more liberties with the truth. No, Clapton and Jeff Beck were not known for playing the Standard, they were both known for playing Strats. I have never seen a serious pro guitarist on that level who played a Standard."

Clapton broke onto the mid 60s scene in Mayall's Bluesbreakers playing a Les Paul. He played an SG in Cream. Hendrix converted him to Stratocasters around 1970. As for Beck, take a look at the cover of "Blow By Blow".

Other relatively serious Les Paul players were Freddie King, Duane Allman, Dickie Betts, Steve Miller, Boz Scaggs, and Robben Ford Jimmie Page used Les Pauls, SGs, and Teles. Bloomfield used both Les Pauls and Stratocasters. Ted McCarty, the man who actually designed the Les Paul, attributed its re-popularization to Bloomfield and Clapton. I spent the 70s on the road with a mid level pop band and saw as many Les Pauls played by real hotshots as I did Fenders.

Kevin,
Sorry to break the news, but Les Paul died within the last year. :(
-- Joel

a Stratovarius violin

But what about a Stradicaster guitar?

Age has a quality all of its own. Gibson's custom shop is making Les Pauls that are accurate reproductions of the vintage pieces. What they don't have is the quality imparted by age. Forty or fifty years from now they'll sound wonderful, but I'll be dead. That said the recent prices for these things are crazy, a combination of boomer nostalgia and general asset inflation that has infected everything of perceived value in this country. They are perceived as another piece of retirement portfolios. Bubbles all around.

"Sorry to break the news, but Les Paul died within the last year. :("

Not so. He's 92 and still gigging once a week at Iridium, in New York. He may be a bit stiff and arthritic, but he can still burn, and he's a much a wiseass as ever.

The article takes a few more liberties with the truth. No, Clapton and Jeff Beck were not known for playing the Standard, they were both known for playing Strats. I have never seen a serious pro guitarist on that level who played a Standard.

I guess Duane Allman doesn't meet your definition of "serious pro guitarist"?

Correction to my previous post. Mike Bloomfield played Les Pauls and Telecasters, not Stratocasters.

McCarty attributes the Les Paul's resurgence and resurrection to Bloomfield and Clapton. Hendrix got everyone playing Stratocasters.

quisp,

I think you were referring to the sunken wood salvage documented here: http://www.american.edu/TED/sunkwood.htm

The story is pretty fascinating.

I should have added the wood being raised up is soft wood such as pine and hard woods like red oak.

The species isn't what is so special. What makes this wood special is that it grew very slowly over a very long time, giving it an extremely fine grain that you can't find in any wood today.

Also because the water is so dark and cold the waterlogged wood was nearly perfectly preserved.

Just a followup to the Les Paul thing: Les Pauls were almost unknown in England until Clapton brought those seven back with him. Beck played teles and LPs about equally after that, until the Strat thing kicked in. And Hank Marvin famously had the very first Strat in the UK.

"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"

The Ibanez "Artcore" series are pretty sweet instruments, and dirt cheap.

I had a Les Paul for a while. The reasons I sold it were: 1) it's monstrously heavy, and even though I'm a big guy, after an hour standing up with it my shoulder was ready to fall off, 2) I prefer the out of phase sound of a Fender, and 3) I prefer the Fender pickup switching arrangement.

A Les Paul does not hang with the same balance as a Stratocaster. It's made to be played sitting down. See any photo of Les Paul playing.

No one will ever match the elegance of the original Les Paul, which is essentially a boiled-down version of a carved-top jazz guitar, with unbeatable sustain. But yes, sitting down is the way to go.

The Firebird is another one that is infinitely better when sitting. It's hard to imagine a more comfortable standing-up guitar than the Strat, of any vintage, although the raw plank of the Tele is oddly comfy in its own sweet way. (Leo Fender, you magnificent bastard!)

It's interesting that jazz boxes hardly came up in this whole discussion. Although Super 400s and L5s are now (and always) incredibly valuable and finely made instruments, they just don't seem to excite the same passion as any of the solid bodies with their own chipped and checking paint jobs. Guess the automotive comparison works there, too.

"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?"

That "ambience" is noise from the vinyl and rumble from the turntable bearings. And then wow and flutter...

One man's noise is another man's ambience. Of course it's noise, from a technical standpoint, but it serves the same emotional purpose as the muttering hush when the lights go down and dim shadows move into position on the stage...

True, thersites. Eliminating that noise is a bit like wiping the applause off a live album. Of course, sometimes that's actually desirable. Not usually. Amplifier hum might be another literal "signal" like that.

Repack, I assure you the Les Pauls are just fine played standing up. Sure it's heavy, and oh my aching back. But what you consider a flaw is what I consider a virtue. The Les Paul is carved from a single piece of wood, it's heavy and as stable as a rock. All my friends who played my Standard couldn't believe how well it stayed in tune even over long heavy playing sessions. And the intonation was perfect (although it did take some setup by a pro guitar tech). Remember Les Paul's first electric guitar prototype was made from a steel railroad rail.

And "Fair and Balanced," I never really listened to Duane Allman, not my sort of music. The pic in your link doesn't look like any Standard I ever saw, it doesn't have mini-humbuckers, it has full size pickups. Maybe he modded it. Anyway, I always associated the Telecaster sound with Allman. I used to own a vintage Tele and I got rid of it, I hated the sound, it was too shrill and too much high end, it made my ears hurt.

Wow, this thread is still alive today !

Kenji re: jazz box, if you want an affordable, high quality arch top, I highly recommend Epiphone's Broadway. Actually I highly recommend the current Epiphone guitars with the caveat that you've gotta go play a bunch and find the one that's "yours".

I have a 2001 Broadway (Korean) that is exquisite. It's a ridiculously good instrument that you might enjoy even more than Bill's 175.

Forget about electric guitars. I have a 1954 D-28 -- the best-sounding D guitar I've ever played -- that I'm willing to sell because I hardly play it any more (that old arthritis is taking my fingers). $10K, with the original battered case. Leave me a message here.

Actually, Both Beck and Clapton early careers were built on LP Std.s - Clap w/ J. Mayall. Even in Cream Clap played Gibson's. the Strat didn't become his signature instrument until the Delaney/Bonnie/After Midnight period (the introduction of 'Brownie'.)

Beck's incredibly successfull late 70's Albums were all LP. He was quoted as saying "Fender's are Toys"

An LP Burst does not have mini-humbuckers; the mini's were designed to fit into finished LP bodies already carved to hold the smaller P-90 single coil pick-up.

Townshend's late '70's gutiars were heavily modded LP's w/ the mini's.

Allman was an LP man, but also played an SG shaped guitar which may have been a post-redesign 1960 LP. When Gibson brought back the orig design the re-Christened the 'new' LP's 'SG's.

Sticler point: LP's are actually 3 pieces of wood: The mahagonny body and the two matched carved maple top pieces.

Yes, the minis were Gibson's strange attempt to update the LP in the late '70s. It took them until ten years ago to start recreating what they had perfected by 1958. And, as someone said, it took the Japanese to goad them into it.

My own LP is a fat-necked faded-honeyburst Orville by Gibson from about 1989, I think. They were only made for a decade, with Japanese exacting woodcraft, nitro finish, and US Gibby parts and electronics. It cost me $600 on ebay, plus $110 shipping from Japan.

When I sent it to me regular luthier for a new setup (and it had a crappy nut to be replaced), he said it was exactly as good as the $3500 "Tom Murphy-aged" number he worked on the previous week. There are fewer of these now, of course, but they are still out there for under a grand -- much less for black standards.

By the way, all guitars need personalized setups. I wonder how many intermediate players have traded away perfectly good instruments because they just didn't have the right combination of intonation, string gauge, and action adjustment. (Anything less than 10s and it almost doesn't matter what axe you are playing. But maybe that's just me.)

I recently caught a PBS "American Masters" special on Les Paul that was really wonderful. May be out there in bit-torrent land for you downloaders.

The Ibanez Artcores are fairly nice guitars, I seriously considered buying one...but ultimately, they aren't 335-quality instruments. Would be nice if they were. I'm holding out for the real thing.

I bought a '57-reissue Mary Kay strat in the 80s, and one of the first Bassman reissues around the same time. That's been my rig ever since, and it's a great combo. The reissues seem to be a bit more fussed-over, in general. Good deal for the money, in my experience.

My current jazz box is a white Gretsch "Historic" with cat's-eye f-holes, DeArmond-style pickups, and a Bigsby. It's a Korean-made item, similar in fit and finish to those Artcores, but man it really plays well. So I don't take my 175 anywhere. And also there's an Orville by Gibson 335 that's very nice, but I still prefer the LP for almost the same sounds.

A Les Paul does not hang with the same balance as a Stratocaster. It's made to be played sitting down. See any photo of Les Paul playing.
Posted by: Repack Rider on August 22, 2007 at 12:55 PM
-----
Hmmm. Maybe that explains why Robert Fripp plays his guitar sitting down all the time. What's that black one that he plays, anybody know?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klnog_IKzTM

All these youngsters who refer to us older folks as boomers better listen up. Tubes are far better to listen to, more organic, smoother, lush and more musical and that goes for stereos and guitar amps. My Les Paul Custom sings on my Ampex Reverberocket 2 that I bought 40 years ago on my 12th birthday. Show me a solid state amp that still sound good after 40 years and I'll show you a amp that sat in a closet. The nice thing about tube amps is being able to "Roll Tubes". Different tubes have different sonic personality's, and you can hear them. Any professional musician will tell you that tubes sound better then solid state and the heavier a guitar the better it will sound. The Les Paul is a little bit harder to play due to the fact that the strings are closer together then most other guitars. I wish I could find a Burst, I would certainly think about buying it.

Frankly, I think it's a bit of both boomer vintage collector mania AND the sweet sound of aged wood. The tube sound is undoubtably impossible to simulate, that's why they are STILL making tube amps. A Burst guitar would be nice to have but IMHO I wouldn't pay the price since I'm agreement with one of the other posters that a great guitar does not a great guitar player make.

I've tried for years to like the sound of Martins and the old solid Gibsons, but they really don't do anything for me. I even tried on an antique Martin to see if I could hear its merits, but no go. Hand me an old Fender, and you can tell the difference between old and new issues. Most Guilds and the higher grade Ibanez guitars also have a satisfying feel to them. The Chinese made Ibanez feel like a piece of junk, however.

It's not even a sound thing, it's more of a feel.

I am a vintage collector & player.I have a 1958 Gold Top and a 1957 Custom both with original P.A.F's. I also have a 1993 Tom Murphy Vburst and a tobacco 1997 1960 R.I. There are NEW guitars that sound better than alot of vintage guitars.
People are nostalgic and sometimes judge with their eyes instead of their ears. The thing I think vintage has over new is the playes in necks & boards. With modern technology the sound on a solid body has been achieved. Just my un-biased opinion.

The above comment should not have a letter V in front of the word burst and it should read played in neck. They were typos.