Tone controls on Acoustics ??
 

Just thinking today about the various things we discuss here - Sitka Vs Adirondack, Hog Vs Rose,. Will ivory bridge pins make my Martin sound better? Should I have a popsicle brace? What strings are best? Blue Chip picks or not? Will binding affect the sound? Which capo sounds best? etc etc.

It suddenly occurred to me that whilst so many of us are searching for a "Holy Grail" acoustic sound even when we already have it, and that maybe we are searching for tone controls like electric guitarists do - fiddling with knobs and kicking pedals and chaning amps and speakers and all that stuff.

Can you imagine the guys back 'tween the wars worrying about such things ?

For them I guess it was just a matter of an arch-top or a flat-top, and if the former a Gibson or an Epiphone or a playable Martin or Gibson flat-top.

I doubt that they thought about temperatures and humidity, bronze or nickel strings - celluloid or Tortoise picks etc., and they tuned to the nearest piano - or by ear judging by some old records.

I wonder if Jimmie Rodgers, The Carter Family, The Stanley Brothers, or Hank Williams traveled with guitar technicians and a selection of different instruments, microphones . cables, and p.a. systems ....I suspect not.

I remember reading or hearing about one of the famous old itinerant bluesmen being asked about their choice of guitars - he replied - "Oh we didn't travel with a guitar - too much trouble - we traveled with a mouth-harp. Got t the next town - played and sang on the corner until we had enough for a meal and to buy a guitar from the local pawn shop, then we'd p[lay that guitar 'til we had to move on , then we;'d sell or pawn that guitar and repeat the provinces from town to town.

What guitar did Robert Johnson play ? - possibly whatever the local pawn shop had at the time?

We are almost cursed by choice nowadays.

Fair enough. I'll buy into the concept. But it would make guitar forums pretty quiet.

Somehow, I can't imagine Robert Johnson signing on to AGF to ask what the best bridge pin material is.

That's true.

But experimentation is awesome and it leads to sounds and ideas that nobody has ever thought of before, which enriches the human musical experience.

The quality of sound recordings and of live sound reproduction has also increased so much since those days - that now we can actually tell a difference in recorded tone from different picks or different strings or different saddles - whereas in the "war years" recording technology was in its infancy and didn't have the fidelity to do so.

-Mike

the thing is that for many people (myself included), experimenting and GASing takes a huge chunk of time that they could invest playing/practicing and improving musical experience that way. And when you have very limited time to begin with, it becomes a problem.

As far as eq-ing acoustics, I found that picks have much grater impact than on electrics (I was electrics-only until recently, so it's a revelation for me), so they can be used as a cheap and easy to swap eq device. I have few dozen different brands, models, thicknesses, shapes of picks on my desk, as I'm making a review for my website. It's interesting to hear how all the different properties of the pick influence the sound.

I watched a bio about Sister Rossetta Tharpe this past weekend. She started off as a church singer/musician in the footsteps of her mother. She was a multi-instrumentalist. They said she'd play guitar (ac or el) if available, piano, tambourine - basically, whatever was there that she could get her hands on.

The idea reminds me a lot of some of the first bottleneck slide player that had a single wire, attached to their house and played with a butter knife. While I am grateful that we have an abundance of choices I feel much creativity has been lost during those days of "making do with what you got."