raiSing The Tone
Regarding the relic debate:
1. Some people prefer the look of a relic’d or roadworn guitar, others don’t. This is called personal taste. We should respect other people’s tastes. Most normal people don’t spend hours and hours locked in heated debate with strangers on the merits of stone-washed versus pristine jeans.
2. The effect of ‘tonewood’ on the character of an electric guitar. Who cares? It may or may not affect your tone, but non cork-sniffing members of the audience aren’t bothered, they have come to listen to the band playing. Half of them will be drunk anyway.
3. Maple fretboards versus rosewood fretboards. See the two points above. Martin Parsons, via email Thanks Martin. Switched-on luthiers often have really interesting things to say about how tonewoods affect guitar design and performance – but all too often those insights get used as ammo for snobbery. Tone is important in so much as if you can get a sound that inspires you, it does encourage greater emotional engagement with the music you play, which the audience will notice. But that’s the sole and only purpose of striving to get great tone, not cork-sniffing, as you say. The overwhelming majority of Fender Custom Shop orders involve some degree of relic’ing, we’re told – so it’s certainly popular and if it floats your boat we can’t see a problem – though it’s always been impressive if genuine heavy wear comes from the sheer love of playing. In the end, it’s a matter of matching the right instrument to the right player – as Frank Zappa once said, “If you pick up a guitar and it says, ‘Take me, I’m yours!’ then that’s the one for you.” He’s right, of course; we’ve all had that moment where an instrument has virtually demanded that you adopt it and take it home and that’s nearly always down to a whole series of highly personalised likes and dislikes. It might be a pawn shop special from a long lost era, it could be something far more everyday – a Strat, a Tele or a Les Paul or 335. It’s a personal choice and if that special instrument just happens to be a relic or roadworn guitar then surely the choice is a valid one.