How do Modern Guitars Age? Myths and Realities

okay welcome back so today we're going to take a look at a somewhat controversial topic which is aging of guitars so right here we are looking at one of my oldest guitars this is an american stratocaster and as you might be able to see there in the corner of the headstock this is a fender's 60th anniversary stratocaster what is that well for starters it means you get a nice little fender 60th anniversary badge there and a nice little fender 60th anniversary badge there now there's some things that are talked about in the guitar industry right some things that people like and don't like um so let's go through those lists and see what's real and what's a myth first of all finish so back in the day right guitar makers used to use nitro cellulose finish um spoiler alert nitrocellulose is very hazardous to work with and it's also very flammable and uh it doesn't hold up that well over time people like that they like the old checked aged look on the guitar and as we're zooming in here you can see that despite this guitar being 15 years old and having the heck played out of it um well there is no finish checking to be seen so taking a closer look at the body here you can see that there's very little damage anywhere on this thing this is not nitrocellulose this is some kind of polyurethane polyester finish one of those two hard to tell which personally basically it's plastic it's plastic varnish that just about everything you buy that's made of wood will be sealed in now of course there are different formulations and things like that for guitars or for other pieces of furniture but for example this table underneath here that's got poly finish on it too and there are some advantages and some disadvantages let's see if i can point out any of the disadvantages to you aha so if we angle it just right you can see polyurethane does scratch now there are some people who think that having a nitrocellulose finish will make your guitar sound better or this or that um that kind of sounds ridiculous to me but i can't prove or disprove it so i'm not going to delve too far into that but i will say this in terms of aging you wouldn't know this guitar is 15 years old and that it's been played a lot and i'm a pretty careful guitar owner but it's had its fair share of falls and dings when i was moving into college my sophomore year i let my dad carry the guitar case hard shell case and apparently one of the latches was uh not closed and so you know we're holding the guitar right carrying the case sideways and then the case just flops open and the guitar falls boom face down four feet right under the ground i ran over there i was a little worried i picked it up literally not a scratch on the thing so polyurethane finish so you can see the screws are kind of old metal right they look aged not you know 100 years old but not quite as shiny and new as when the guitar was fresh same deal with the bridge just a little bit of aging there okay i don't know how well you can see that but that is literally the only blemish anywhere on this guitar and surprise surprise it's in the neck pocket this happens on almost every bolt on fender style guitar you're ever going to see after enough time let's talk about the neck now as we said this guitar is 15 years old and something that keeps me up at night as a maker of parts casters is the frets i'm going to shell out all this money i'm going to buy a nice neck a bunch of nice parts put them together play the guitar a lot and then a few years from now the frets are going to be toast and i'm going to be faced with a serious problem do i attempt to refresh do i pay for a refret or do i buy a new neck and you know that that's something that kind of bugs me and that i think about when i'm building parts casters and it's led me to shell out for some stainless steel frets but i think this guitar is a perfect example of why that's kind of kind of more hype and fear than fact so this guitar is from 2006 and i played this guitar exclusively for like almost 10 years and the frets are fine there's a little bit of a different feel over the edge of the fingerboard i think that's as much rounding off of the wood as it is the actual metal but as far as the frets go they don't pose any problems are they a little bit lower than perhaps when i bought the guitar yeah i bet they are is there any spot on the neck where you have dead notes or you know where you can't bend because you can't dig in no there's in fact zero problems with the playability of this guitar you know the frets could get quite a bit lower before they actually cause any playing difficulties whatsoever and you know i play all over the neck on this guitar i am position agnostic here um playing you know your cowboy chords i'm playing at the 12th fret 15th fret you name it right um and if you do that if you play all over the neck you're not really going to wear out any particular frets if all you do is play cg and d yeah you might have some some wear on these first three frets more than the other ones but if you play all over i don't think that's something you really have to worry about um so you know maybe yes if you are playing for hours a day if you're sweating if you're gigging um you may have faster front wear than i do but i think this is kind of an overblown issue i kept worrying for years that this guitar the frets were going to get too low and i wouldn't play well and um well i still play this guitar a lot and that's never happened so i don't think this is something we need to be afraid of i will say this most frets are made of nickel alloys and not everybody uses the same nickel alloy if you've ever played a prs especially a higher end one you can kind of feel the difference in their frets you know so a lot of manufacturers do use slightly different compositions for their fret materials the hardness can vary and of course sweat sweat is the enemy here right i mean the friction of your fingers over the metal sure we'll do a little bit of damage but i think the main culprit here is the sweat especially people with more acidic sweat thankfully i'm not one of those i don't really have to worry about this but you know your mileage may vary a little bit let's talk about the rest of the neck as well so this is kind of your standard kind of semi-gloss kind of finish on here it's been worn down quite a bit over the years the point where it's not nearly as sticky as it first was and i can tolerate it there's a little ding actually right there on the fifth fret i've never really noticed while i was playing i just found it right now um but as far as this neck goes there's kind of an interesting story here so unfortunately at one point in time i tried to sell this guitar i had student loan payments with pretty high interest rate and i kind of wanted to pay those off more than i needed multiple guitars so i brought this to your big box stores and uh none of them wanted it they all said we don't want to buy this guitar the neck is warped and i was like whoa wait a minute wait you're telling me that this premium american-made stratocaster has a warped neck they said yeah the neck is warped we looked at it we don't want it i said how could that be this guitar is 10 years old how could the neck be warped why would it just start happening now so i was pretty upset about that um and you know it didn't cause a ton of playability issues but at the time there was a little bit more buzzing especially on the higher three strings especially from about i don't know 712 area or seven on up really um and i didn't really know what to do at the time i didn't know how to work on guitars at all so i did the only thing that i really thought i could do which is instead of storing it just like this flat in its hard shell case on the floor i decided i was going to stand it up in a gig bag and you know i just did that and then i played other guitars because i was kind of unhappy with this one at the time and i came back a few months later um and basically it was fine uh all of the issues that i had previously had just disappeared so you know that's that's the thing older guitars they sometimes they do things and it's hard to tell why they do them there's a lot of variables in this system of a guitar and it's kind of difficult to pin them all down so who knows what caused that neck warp who knows if storing it upright was even the thing that fixed it but um it's kind of amazing that at one point this guitar started to kind of fall out and then it got right back and ever since uh i've started storing it standing up zero issues i don't even think i've done a truss rod adjustment on this guitar honestly since that happened six years ago it's incredibly stable for whatever reason now so those are just some things that happen with guitars over time and usually there's going to be a fix to that problem unless you really let it snowball and get out of control

Channel: Guitar Science

Views: 13,407

Keywords: guitar, guitar maintenance, stratocaster

Id: -QpzWS3kHwc

Length: 10min 17sec (617 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 05 2021