Guitar is Loud, Very loud Booms, Help
 

I have a classical guitar that I put new strings on May of this year. I put on D'Addario Classic Nylon, Silverplated wound, clear nylon, EJ27N. String sizes are .0280 .0319 .0402 .029 .035 .043. I do not know, have forgotten what was on there before. Now the guitar has almost to much sustain and is very loud. My wife wants to play it at church meetings and wants something more mellow, warm, and not so noisy. The guitar has a 25.5 inch scale. The Almanza Gutar listed on my signature. Please give me your recommendations. What strings should I put on the guitar.

At the same time I put these strings on the classic guitar I put the same kind of strings on my baritone ukulele using the A D G B strings and tuning D G B E. Then I lowered the tuning on the ukulele to C F A D and got more sustain and a warmer sound. Ukulele sounds great. But wife does not like the sound of the guitar as is at all.

Take a small hand towel and place it inside the guitar. The quality of the sound from the strings shouldn't be impaired, just the projection. When I played a Guild F412 in a mix I did that to prevent it from dominating.

Classical strings are much harder to pin down than steel string for me.

Try some La'Bella "Folk" strings. #830 Those are pretty mellow sounding.

I’ve found that real flamenco-type strings, either hard or extra hard, seems to keep the boom down. The bass strings are stiffer. They require a different attack and maybe a setup. I use the Luthier extra high tension.

What strings were you using on the guitar before? Why not just go back to that brand? There shouldn't be any need to stuff a towel into the guitar.

You should also think about what it is about your wife's right hand attack that's making the guitar sound brash and harsh. If she's using a pick, experiment with different pick materials. Dunlop makes nylon picks that have a fairly mellow sound:


https://www.jimdunlop.com/category/p...picks/nylon.do

They also make picks out of felt, which are even mellower yet:


https://www.jimdunlop.com/search.do?query=felt+picks

https://www.sweetwater.com/store/det...lt-picks-12-pk

The felt picks are mainly used by ukulele players, it seems, but would work just as well on nylon string guitars. They eliminate the clacking sound that plastic picks make on nylon strings.

In short, before you go changing too much about your guitar, check whether it's really the guitar that's the problem rather than the way it's being played.

If she doesn't use a pick, then we're back to where we were. But if she does play with a pick, using felt picks might help a lot.

Hope this helps.


Wade Hampton Miller

This sounds like a simple solution to a difficult problem. Try more or less amounts of cloth if one small hand towel doesn't quite do the job. That should do it!

A boomy guitar is normally referring to a bass heavy response. Some guitars have a sound that has more bass than treble.

To solve this you can put lighter tension bass strings on compared to the trebles.

So you could try ordering EJ43 bass strings and EJ45 treble strings.

Or if you wanted, you could just try the whole EJ43 set and see what you think.

Sirwhale, I purchased a small Yamaha Classical Guitar CS40. It has bass strings that buzz a lot. I have EJ45 strings on it now. Do you think the EJ43 strings will reduce the buzzng on the bass strings?

I just put capo on fret 5 and no more buzzing, so problem must be between frets 1and 5. Maybe frets not level.

It's entirely possible that you frets that are not level. If you put a credit card over three frets there shouldn't be any wobble (i.e. the card should be flat across all three). A low fret might be in the middle of the three which would go undetected, so you can keep moving the card around to check all the first 5 frets.

Do all the bass strings buzz? and is it a particular fret, or all the first 5 frets?

Higher tension strings will reduce the incidence of a buzz. I see now that this is a problem as you want to reduce the boominess, but also want to avoid buzzing.

Maybe you could try a different material string for the basses. You could buy the Aquila Alabastro medium tension basses, as they are not nylon like most strings, but nylgut.

I've played many nylon gigs over the past 33 years. I used to let the strings settle in, but several years ago I just started stringing them up and stretching them very well, and now I'll usually change strings a day or two before a big, with no anxiety over tuning issues. I love the bright, fresh tone and response of brand new strings. I change my strings before every gig these days... regardless of whether I'm playing steel string electrics or acoustics for rock/country gigs, or nylons for flamemco-inspired or classical gigs (though it's been a few years since i've performed classical in public).

Anyways... your post just inspired me to mention that for people who find themselves needing to change nylon strings before a gig. You can just pull up on the strings a bunch of times to pre-stretch them. I would caution those doing so to make sure their tie block technique is secure though. Many years ago I snapped a hole in the finish behind a tie block on a cheap Yamaha classical because I hadn't tied the unwound string very well.

I have never tried this on a full size classical, but you might try the Aquila Nylgut strings - I have them on a little romantic era replica guitar and it is a nice mellow sound....