Acoustic Instruments & Dirt

[pozz]

Gearslutz thread a few might find interesting: link. Apparently the OP had a prized guitar cleaned of a patina of grime (along with replacing tuners and frets), and it lost its tone.

 

[Fregly]

Mike Campbell of Tom Petty won' t ever clean the fretboard of his favorite Tele because he says it will mess up the tone.
1. The guitar looks like a biohazard
2. Many artist types are nutty

 

[Rja4000]

I'm surprised no audiophil-magic brand created a dirty-by-design-because-it-sounds-better DAC already.
Do you think grease will lead to euphoric distortion?
(Android dictionary corrected euphonic into euphoric. Has to be the same then.)

 

[pozz]

euphoric distortion?

probably.

 

[pozz]

1. The guitar looks like a biohazard.

You don't say...

 

[KSTR]

Gearslutz thread a few might find interesting: link. Apparently the OP had a prized guitar cleaned of a patina of grime (along with replacing tuners and frets), and it lost its tone.

The replaced frets are dominantly responsible for this. When you re-fret a guitar neck, especially one with vintage style trussrod (compression type), you change its mechanical and vibrational behaviour: resonances will be shifted and their Q-factors will have other values as well. Replacing tuners can have a similar effect, if they're not the same exact mass than the original the low order bending (and torsion) resonances might change. Neck resonances "pull off" energy from the vibrations, that's why they have huge impact on tone.
IME "good" guitars have necks with lot's of low damping (high-Q) but well distributed resonances which just happen to not be exited (or least only very little and well balanced accross the fretboard) because the notes on the neck that have those specific resonance frequency also happen to appear were the vibrational pattern has a null/minimum and thus cannot be exited much. Preferably the peak frequencies should lie in between a semitone interval (a quartertone off).

Removing the dirt doesn't change anything (well, maybe the strings may age now less fast) unless you have soaked the fretboard with whatever detergent and/or fretboard oil used.

 

[pozz]

The replaced frets are dominantly responsible for this. When you re-fret a guitar neck, especially one with vintage style trussrod (compression type), you change its mechanical and vibrational behaviour: resonances will be shifted and their Q-factors will have other values as well. Replacing tuners can have a similar effect, if they're not the same exact mass than the original the low order bending (and torsion) resonances might change. Neck resonances "pull off" energy from the vibrations, that's why they have huge impact on tone.
IME "good" guitars have necks with lot's of low damping (high-Q) but well distributed resonances which just happen to not be exited (or least only very little and well balanced accross the fretboard) because the notes on the neck that have those specific resonance frequency also happen to appear were the vibrational pattern has a null/minimum and thus cannot be exited much. Preferably the peak frequencies should lie in between a semitone interval (a quartertone off).

Removing the dirt doesn't change anything (well, maybe the strings may age now less fast) unless you have soaked the fretboard with whatever detergent and/or fretboard oil used.

I'll post this to Gearslutz. From what I read of the thread this will probably be the most useful response he'll get.