Pickup gurus...a question

[Rick Turner]

SoCal is much tougher than where I am if you want a legal spray booth. The Monterey Bay Air Pollution Control Board really doesn't give a rat's ass what we spray since we are so under the radar in quantities of VOCs compared to, for instance, your average surf board shop or auto body repair shop. Plus we're 1 1/2 blocks from our local fire station, and the firemen all know our shop and think we're the coolest thing in the neighborhood other than WAMM...the local medical marijuana distributors two doors away in our building. One of the nice things about Santa Cruz is the constant air cleaning winds from the Pacific. The Salinas and Pajaro Valley farms put out much more air pollution than any of us measly guitar shops.

[Possum]

Hey Curtis good to see you here. I dumped Shrapnel 2 years ago and full time at this stuff now. Sent a couple guys your way for problem vintage pickup repairs now and then.....

[Ronsonic]

I bet if you had two identical unfinished guitars and finished both in same thickness nitro and poly and had some instrument that could measure accurately the resonance and frequency response of the wood you WOULD hear a difference. Most of us probably wouldn't notice, but take someone like Eric Johnson and I bet he could hear it. I bet violin makers aren't using poly finishes for their high end stuff, and there is a reason why.

Violin makers have different problems than guitar makers. They select a finish for the purpose of stopping the screech. Guitars don't have that problem. And for an acoustic we know that the finish makes a big difference like it does for a violin. Still, gotta wonder how much it changes things on a two inch slab.

Still think nitro looks and feels better and that's enough for me.

[David Schwab]

Still, gotta wonder how much it changes things on a two inch slab.

My experience says it doesn't. I've built instruments and played them with no finish, then finished, then refinished with a different finish.

Still think nitro looks and feels better and that's enough for me.

Nitro is very easy to work with. But you have to spray a lot to get a thin layer. Other finishes can look and feel as nice, all depends on what you are doing with it. My polyester finished Ibanez bass looks and feels very nice. Doesn't feel like plastic anymore than my nitro finished basses.

[Possum]

Guitars don't have a problem with screech???? Do what I did, buy a cheap Squire strat, they sound like a glass brick, real trebly hard edged. Now remove the finish and play it, nice and warm and wonderful sounding.

[RedHouse]

Guitars don't have a problem with screech???? Do what I did, buy a cheap Squire strat, they sound like a glass brick, real trebly hard edged. Now remove the finish and play it, nice and warm and wonderful sounding.

Oh that's rich, that's going into the archives!

"Stephens Design advising a simple refinish of a Squire Strat will change it's tone to nice and warm and wonderful sounding".

You're a pickup maker and you think the screech is caused by the guitar's finish? that's beautiful Dave, just beautiful .

(here is where you tell me I misread your post or something)

[ken]

If I remember right, John Lennon had an Epi Casino that he removed the finish from in the 1970's for the same reason, and George stripped one of his guitars too.

I am working on some prototype guitar bodies myself, and I have to preassemble and play them to test their parts' fits before finally painting them. I am also finding changes in the tone before and after paint. I have a red proto here that I actually wish I didn't paint after all, because it lost some of the wood's resonance that it had before I painted it. I think I'm going to strip it to test this theory.

For the interested, I'm using airdried locally grown pine for my bodies, a coat of Minwax wood stabilizer to counteract the physical softness of the body, and after sanding two color coats and two coats of clear. I'm not really fond of bodies with paint so thick they look like jelly beans.

ken

[RedHouse]

If I remember right, John Lennon had an Epi Casino that he removed the finish from in the 1970's for the same reason, and George stripped one of his guitars too.

I am working on some prototype guitar bodies myself, and I have to preassemble and play them to test their parts' fits before finally painting them. I am also finding changes in the tone before and after paint. I have a red proto here that I actually wish I didn't paint after all, because it lost some of the wood's resonance that it had before I painted it. I think I'm going to strip it to test this theory.

For the interested, I'm using airdried locally grown pine for my bodies, a coat of Minwax wood stabilizer to counteract the physical softness of the body, and after sanding two color coats and two coats of clear. I'm not really fond of bodies with paint so thick they look like jelly beans.

ken

Sure there is a difference, specially in a hollow body guitar like the Casino/Sheridan/ES335 etc.

That difference becomes very small in a 1-3/4" thick Alder/Ash/Basswood Strat body, and hardly makes a Squire warm and wonderfull sounding IMHO.

I have tried it on an early testbed guitar, a Squire Strat which I stripped intending to modify the body for other purposes. I was curious as to the tone difference so I re-strung it and played it and found very little difference acoustically, then I re-installed the cheezy-ass pickguard assembly and played it, yep still sounded like a cheap chinese screeching guitar, no warm and wonderfull sounds to be had I'm afraid.

[David Schwab]

Guitars don't have a problem with screech???? Do what I did, buy a cheap Squire strat, they sound like a glass brick, real trebly hard edged. Now remove the finish and play it, nice and warm and wonderful sounding.

How did you remove the poly finish? Did you sand it off?

Also the tone of solid body guitars improve the more you play them.

But I have a poly finished 1987 Ibanez bass, and it was never overly bright or hard sounding.

Either way I'd never call a Strat warm sounding.

[Possum]

Well RH, since you've never tried it yourself, making a remark based on "air" is what future readers are going to read :-) Yes this guitar sounds freaking great, Nick Curran of the Fabulous Thunderbirds played it at our jam several years ago and loved that guitar. I burned the finish off with a heat gun and sanded it, there is very little of that plastic crap left on it. I got it as a test guitar from a guy for $100 and hated it, it sounded glassy and hard edged and no pickup was going to make it playable. I decided to "relic" the cheapest quickest way and if it turned out bad it was going in a dumpster.
Actually I recorded Nick playing it and made a set for one of his guitars:
http://www.sdpickups.com/audio/curranone.mp3
Someone got a shot of him and the TBirds bass player with my guitar, thats my Deluxe Reverb he's playing through. You can see the guitar has a cool cheapo relic look, Kirk Flecher and Nick both signed it for me after their set.

[RedHouse]

....Well RH, since you've never tried it yourself, making a remark based on "air" is what future readers are going to read ...

WTF?

You needing some air yourself Possum? ...ie;

...I have tried it on an early testbed guitar ...no warm and wonderfull sounds to be had I'm afraid.

I wouldn't worry about future readers Dave, it's all here, years of it.

[Possum]

Try it on a REAL guitar. It blows my mind you guys think an unfinished guitar sounds the same as a body dipped in 40 gallons of polyurethane half an inch thick. Let me guess, at band practice you stand right by the cymbals???

[RedHouse]

Try it on a REAL guitar. It blows my mind you guys think an unfinished guitar sounds the same as a body dipped in 40 gallons of polyurethane half an inch thick. Let me guess, at band practice you stand right by the cymbals???

What blows my mind is you finally acknowlege the wood after all these years and posts.

For several years you insisted your Epihone Les Paul copy and that ($99) Stellar were good vehicles to demonstrate your "accurate PAFs", then last year you came up with the notion that all they really need was a control harness upgrade.

Now you git'in cocky with those who have been dealing with real wood for decades?, geez it's like a B-movie on the sci-fi channel The world according to Dave Stephens, or a discovery channel epic fantazine Possum the Myth-buster.

[David Schwab]

Try it on a REAL guitar. It blows my mind you guys think an unfinished guitar sounds the same as a body dipped in 40 gallons of polyurethane half an inch thick. Let me guess, at band practice you stand right by the cymbals???

A real guitar? Really Dave? First off that Squire is borderline being a real guitar. But you know what? I get them in the shop all the time to have new pickups and stuff installed. None of them sound glassy and ice picky. They aren't bad sounding guitars with new pickups. And all guitars sound different. Some are brighter. In my opinion, if a guitar sounds too dull unplugged, it's not a good guitar.

Second they don't put 40 gallons of polyurethane, and in fact it's polyester. Explain how the finish will alter the tone on a solid body? Not some vague ideas... tell all of us how it affects the tone. That's as silly as people who say nitro allows the wood to "breathe" ... or that it allows the wood to dry out. Of course wood doesn't breathe, and if a finish can let moisture out, it will also let it in. But such nonsense is rife on the Internet.

And what about all those vintage Fenders dipped in Fullerplast? They truly suck, right? That stuff is harder than any polyester you will find on a cheap guitar.

Now you said:

I burned the finish off with a heat gun and sanded it...

You sanded the guitar. Do you think you removed any wood there? Also you don't know how dry the wood was before you started. The heat gun might have made a difference too. You can't say for sure it was the finish.

Now try it on a real guitar that never had finish on it.

Here's an example.

before:


After:


That's about 15 coats of catalyzed nitro. I played the guitar before it was finished (and obviously after I had frets in it). It didn't sound any different.

How many guitars have you built and finished?

[ken]

Here's one of mine...

an Angeltone prototype guitar. Well, the body, controls and pickups anyway, as the neck is Indo Tele. I couldn't get a new neck before I took the photo and it's actually a nice feeling neck.

I needed to make a guitar that would take P-90s so I could test my new prototype pickups, and I needed to make the pickups to test my guitar. Weird.

ken