Feeling dumb with my average ears

[MBE]

Originally Posted by kydave

You're hearing the important stuff.

But, depending on your age and relative exposure to loud sounds over your life (music, guns, airplanes, jackhammers, etc.) you might have lost some high frequency hearing, which will affect some of those finer distinctions.

In fact, that is my theory on the growing popularity of mahogany relative to rosewood. Old guitar players naturally tend to lose some of that frequency hearing due to age; many older guitar players who've played all their lives have also played or listened to a lot of loud music (either as gigging musicians or at concerts or both) over the decades; many younger guitar players spend their days plugged into their iphones with earbuds blaring...

Good for the mahogany market!



P.S. Hearing loss is SO gradual (usually) that you have no idea how much you're missing without a test.

Sounds eerily familiar to the rosewood guitar discussion you just posted in .

I agree though. Some of the things you aren't hearing (bridge pins,cutaways) are things that I genuinely don't think make a noticeable difference.

Part of it comes down to hearing, and honestly I feel that part of it comes down to believing there's a difference. There area some things that are debated over and over on the forum that are probably just a waste of time. "Is it a difference that makes a difference?" is a question we should all be asking ourselves more often.

[djg]

I wouldn't worry about it.

Some of the differences other folks claim to hear may be real differences (and may be cases of people really hearing those differences), and some may not. Suppose it's possible (but not obvious) that you could learn to reliably distinguish what you cannot now distinguish: the difference it makes, in a given guitar of yours, when you switch back and forth between bone, ebony, and plastic bridge pins. I gather that the difference is, at best, a small one of tertiary musical importance. So it's not about the fundamentals or the intervals -- not about what's written on the sheet music -- not about whether you can tune the guitar or whether the intonation is good; and it's not much about basic features of balance or voicing, of overtones, etc., that you hear now, that might make a D28 sound very different from a maple bodied 00 (and might make both sound like guitars instead of other instruments capable of hitting the same dominant frequencies). How much study and training would you like to invest in learning to distinguish, blindfolded, say with 90% reliability, the ebony pins from the bone pins? An hour? An hour a day for six months? Nothing? It's your call, but I might give it something along the zero to one hour continuum and an hour seems like a lot to me. Likewise, how much effort would you like to invest in discovering whether somebody else can reliably make that type of distinction, even if you cannot? Maybe it's an interesting fringe problem for perception science, but maybe not.

Maybe learn another piece of music and maybe, as a matter of course, more things will become salient to you or not?

[devellis]

A lot of it is learning and I think we learn to hear those differences that are important to us. Any self-respecting bluegrass player could likely distinguish a rosewood from a mahogany Martin dread. But a petite bouche versus a grand bouche Gypsy jazz guitar? I'm pretty sure far fewer would recognize or care about that particular difference. Do the same test with Gypsy jazz guitarists and it would be a whole different story.

There's also the issue of some people perhaps believing that they hear differences that they might not actually reliably differentiate. The key word there is reliably.

If I can't hear a difference then, by definition, that difference isn't one that's important to me. That has changed over time, in both directions as I've gotten more discriminating about certain preferences, on the one hand, and as my ears have gotten older, on the other.

[DesertTwang]

You're not alone. I think it takes practice, training and focus to consciously listen to develop a discerning sense for tone over time. Recently I took a friend to what probably was his first live bluegrass performance, and he told me that he had trouble distinguishing the sound coming from the "small guitar" compared to the sound coming from the regular guitar. He was referring to the mandolin...

[MBE]

Originally Posted by DesertTwang

You're not alone. I think it takes practice, training and focus to consciously listen to develop a discerning sense for tone over time. Recently I took a friend to what probably was his first live bluegrass performance, and he told me that he had trouble distinguishing the sound coming from the "small guitar" compared to the sound coming from the regular guitar. He was referring to the mandolin...

Now that's pretty funny!

[Chordpounder]

Originally Posted by kydave

P.S. Hearing loss is SO gradual (usually) that you have no idea how much you're missing without a test.

Dave, when I was teaching high school physics and chem, hearing loss was a boon. I used to use a frequency generator and a speaker, run it at about 15,000 Hz when the kids wouldn't shut up. I couldn't hear it, but they'd all start going "ow, stop it, Doc," then they'd quiet right down when I needed t!

The Lord works in mysterious ways, as they say!

[brucefulton]

Originally Posted by Chordpounder

I've noticed that a lot of things that people really hear I just don't, and at times it makes me feel I'm missing out on a party somehow.
Richard

You'll want to get to the point where you can distinguish guitars from each other under ideal listening conditions, and the vast majority of people can do that with a little practice, even as ears age and lose some of the high frequency response. You can do this with practice and access to guitars so that you can listen to one and then the other, live and in person. Best is to have someone else play them so you can concentrate on the sound.

You can't do this using recordings, especially on sources like youtube. There is too much going on with color and frequency filtering with recorded sources to be able to tell much of anything. Only very obvious differences can be heard from recorded sources, even high quality ones.

A couple of things to note: There isn't really a standard terminology that everyone agrees upon when it comes to describing sound. One person's brittle might be another person's sparkly and another person's tinny.

The other thing to keep in mind is that while it is not too difficult to recognize the difference between two guitars when played live right next to each other, attributing the difference to a particular cause is a very different thing. Not everyone agrees when it is claimed that a difference in sound is caused by a certain thing. So some people are more skeptical than others when a claim is made about the cause of a difference in sound. Not that there is a difference, but what is the cause of the difference other than individual differences between guitars and guitar makers. As you'll find out if you read a lot of other threads.

[justonwo]

I'm pretty much with the OP for the most part. I don't think your ears are dumb.

[Methos1979]

Consider yourself lucky! 'Trained' or sensitive ears is a double edged sword! I can lead to a never-ending search for perfect tone that will land you in debtors prison!

Seriously though, I'm with you on most of the little things like the materials used for bridge pins, saddles, etc.

The one thing that drives me crazy now that my ear is getting better is TUNING! I have to tune way more than I used to. I can hear even the slightest string being out of tune. And since we play very mellow songs in our acoustic duo, it's even more pronounced to me. No one else can hear it, including my wife who is the singer. But it drives me crazy.

[cke]

OP you are fine.

I do hear the differences in all those things. The difference is, I acknowledge they are small, and generally unimportant especially from the perspective of an audience.

But watch out! Not believing each make for metaphysical alterations violates the received sensibility of the rank and file of the AGF!

[bhbayless]

Originally Posted by fishstick_kitty

I read your post with Andy Rooney's voice in my head and it was pretty funny .

Bwaaahaha .....I love it.