Does a guitar´s tone and sound improve with age?

[Monty Christo]

Does the EC you had in 2014 sound any better now? How about the Shenandoah?

Does your D-42 sound better now than when you posted this?

How about the guitar you purchased in 2014?

[Rpt50]

Being constructed from organic material, I think there is little doubt that the sound of a guitar will change with age. What I find ridiculous is the assumption that the change will always be for the better.

The best practice here is to buy a guitar for the sound that it makes now. If you are unable to play a particular instrument beforehand, make sure you buy it from a place that has a rock-solid return policy.

[tinnitus]

Do guitars sound better over time? Mine do.

Even in this short (so far) thread, you will see plausible arguments for yes and no. There's another tangible angle that I never see come up in these frequently recurring discussions.

Playing all kinds of electric and acoustic guitars for over half a century, I've assimilated techniques that optimize whatever a particular instrument has to offer. Often subconsciously (and depending on the strings, action, fretboard, tonal "personality"), I avoid doing things that might make it buzz, boom, quack, etc. True also with keyboards (even soul-less electric planks) horns, tools, cars/motorcycles, weapons, etc. Once a player internalizes various (even subtle) nuances, they all perform better.

Thus, whether several years of gentle aging will do something physical to improve a wooden guitar's sound (or not), I would submit that playing to its strengths and avoiding inherent weaknesses will certainly add greater dimension to the "sounds better" continuum. Though I've not necessarily advanced my competent bar-band skills to another level in the past decade, two of my guitars are only a few years old now and already sound much better in my hands.

The point? Don't forget that player technique on any particular instrument is a significant part of the equation.

[jspe]

Definitely agree with Tinnitus and have many of the same experiences over the many decades of being a total guitar nut case.
Bottom line for me? You can't beat the sound of old wood. And really old wood is typically really special.
I'm the guy who'll take a fifty year old guitar off your hands anytime, and you can have 1/2 a dozen of my newer ones!

[rounder]

I dunno. I have had both a D-28 and HD-28 that I owned for over 20 years each. Still have the HD-28. Both of them sounded good when I got them and while I had them. But, any change in sound is gradual. I have no idea whether either one sounded better when I got it or when they got older. That is me. I know that a lot of the guitar writers tend to believe that the guitars loosen up and sound better as they age.

[Andy Mitchell]

I'm not an expert at guitars, and have no idea if blanket statements about them getting better with age are true or not. But I am an engineer who knows something about materials and have worked with a lot of 100 - 150 year old lumber while renovating old houses. And old lumber definitely has different material properties than the less old stuff. Genuinely old lumber seems very hard and brittle in comparison to the newer stuff. You drill hole to put nails through to prevent splitting instead of just trying to pound them in. And assuming something like that happens to guitar wood as it ages as well I could definitely see an instruments tone changing with the passage of time. Better or worse, I don't know.

(and PS - after building a couple of kit guitars with torrefied tops, I'm not sure that the same 'old house hardness' is there in a modern torrefied top. They seemed to generate a lot of fuzz when you sand them and they smell different than a 'normal' top, but the material itself didn't seem harder to me. But I'm not really an expert, so take this observation with a grain of salt, lol.)

[RLetson]

When I bought a 1965 Guild D-40 off the wall in 1967, I thought it sounded pretty good. 57 years later, it seems to me to sound even better, though who knows what that means to ears that have also aged 57 years. But to be specific, my recollection is that early on, that guitar had just a bit of nasality in its voice--a common Guild characteristic. It's quite a bit sweeter now, to the point that the D-40 is probably my favorite guitar for slack key. But again, that might have to do with having the top 8KHz of my hearing range rolled off.

I have no way of knowing, but I wonder what my 104-year-old 0-18 sounded like in its youth. Right now it has a sweet, very well-balanced voice with a solid bass range. Was it angelic in 1920? And my 1975 Marin Montero classical is on loan to a pretty experienced player who has fallen in love with its voice. (I'm inclined to agree with him.)

Guitars' voices do change with time, though I can't say how much or over what span. But I have had the experience of playing a newly-retopped guitar and hearing it become more responsive and less tight-sounding in less than an hour of passing it back and forth with the restorer--we both thought we were hearing the same changes. Something was going on there.

[Phantoj]

Originally Posted by Alan Carruth

Glennwillow wrote:
Since hemicellulose is the part of the wood that absorbs moisture from the air it is less able to do so as it ages. It shrinks and swells less with changes in humidity.

Does this mean that an older guitar is less likely to be sensitive to humidity?

I used to use a humidifier with my D-16GT, but now I no longer bother. It's 23 years old and crack-free.

[CharlieBman]

Well, I don't know the answer...but I do know it's not an idea upon which I personally would base a buying decision. I've always bought new...and never felt like I could have found something better because it was older. Then again, I just like new.

[000Guy]

My experience is that if a guitar sounds good at the beginning, it will sound better as it ages. If the guitar sounds unexceptional, it will always sound unexceptional. Age will not, cannot make a mediocre guitar something special.

[The Bard Rocks]

Any change I have witnessed has been so gradual, that I cannot trust my aural memory to make any kind of blanket statement, other than I don't think I have observed any changes..

[Russ C]

It’s difficult, if not even harder than that, for a human to be objective about sound as time passes but I ask anyone who doubts that guitars sound different with age - how could they not?
Really, if the changes in the structure and weight/density of wood are factual (I'm willing to take science’s word for that) how could it possibly vibrate exactly the same after decades?
How much it changes, would everyone notice, or is it better? Sure, that’s much harder to answer but there’s no way it stays the same.

[Leocino_2804]

If it's all solid. Laminated ones will go worse over time.

I.M.H.O if a guitar was well-made, it would become better down the line. A bad guitar is a bad guitar no matter what.

[Don Lampson]

Originally Posted by rov

Is this true?. I am planning to buy a Martin 00028 EC so an old one will sound better than a new one?

The answer is a definite "maybe"? It is viewed as evidence to lots of "play before you buy", believers.... Finding the best box, requires a lot of effort, especially, if one is hunting for "Mojo"?

If you can't spend $, & hrs, auditioning individual guitars, buying new is a far more sensible choice, I think? We are now in the "golden age" of guitar manufacturing... I suspect you'll get a 1st class instrument, buying new?

Don

[phavriluk]

I think (no offense meant to the original poster) that there's no telling. And for sure the owner's opinions are meaningless, as folks age their ears do too, and I can guarantee that the passage of twenty years will show an erosion of audio processing.

We can opine till the tavern closes as to whether laminate guitars improve as they age as compared to solid-wood guitars but whose empirical testing (Testing? We don't need no stinking testing) can be produced to support a conclusion, and by the way testing equipment ages, too....