#16
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#17
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If everything else is exactly equal, I'd choose the lighter guitar. It may be more responsive.
But, everything else is never exactly equal. If I were buying online with no opportunity to listen or play, I'd choose the prettier, heavier guitar over the less pretty, lighter guitar, every time. |
#18
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Hi Matt
No, the weight (in pounds/ounces) is not the deciding fiber. You need to play every one of them to see how responsive they are - especially manufactured guitars where every part is milled to identical size. That is a large factor in hand-built guitars are improved. They are milled individually and the tops/backs/sides thinned appropriately and INDIVIDUALLY for maximum resonance, projection etc. If you make 100 guitars identically to spec, 10% will be below average, 10% above average and the rest varying degrees of average sounding. You might get lucky and choose a guitar which was built right according to spec and it could weigh exactly the same amount as the worst sounding guitar in the lot. |
#19
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Over a dozen times I've taken students/friends to a Taylor dealer with massive depth of stock (as many as a dozen of identical models), and there was no correlation between the weight of the guitars and the responsiveness of them. So my experience doesn't match with your response. I've twice seen some under built guitars by luthiers which started having serious…not a frequent issue at all. |
#20
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There is considerable confusion between "lightweight" and "lightly built". A lightly built guitar will be more responsive than something heavily braced, like a house in earthquake country. I could not tell you which of my guitars is heaver or lighter, but I can surely tell you which ones have "all that" for sound quality.
And I agree that there is no discernible correlation between overall weight and tone. In my opinion (worth both pennies that you paid for it).... |
#21
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If you take two boards of the same wood, milled to the same dimensions, the lighter one will no doubt be the older one, probably having a lower moisture content. It's just like firewood: a log will weigh more when freshly split than after drying a year or two.
To the OP question, I'd prefer to purchase a guitar built of wood that's been drying for a while rather than freshly milled. So I would gravitate to the lightest weight, if ordering a guitar blind. That said, I tend to want to play a guitar prior to purchase, and A/B it with its conspecifics. Despite my strong preference for light guitars, tone trumps weight any day.
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1 dreadnought, 1 auditorium, 1 concert, and 2 travel guitars. |
#22
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"Generally" I will stick by the statement that weight is correlated with responsiveness...generally. Similarly there are some boutique builders who heavily heavily scallop their bracing and use very small bridge plates. There is even a builder who heavily scallops the bracing where the bridge plate meets the bracing (under the theory that the design gives a better hinge effect). I have seen some issues with those builder's guitars. I am not smart enough to know if they are one off or consistent probs. But given the build design, I wonder. Last edited by Scotso; 10-30-2020 at 11:41 AM. |
#23
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In theory, it depends where the guitar is lightly built. For example, in theory, you can have heavy double sides because the sides aren't acoustically active. In practice, all of my very favorite guitars have had an overall light weight. I can't tell you why that is. Perhaps the theories are incorrect . . .
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Circa OM-30/34 (Adi/Mad) | 000-12 (Ger/Maple) | OM-28 (Adi/Brz) | OM-18/21 (Adi/Hog) | OM-42 (Adi/Braz) Fairbanks SJ (Adi/Hog) | Schoenberg/Klepper 000-12c (Adi/Hog) | LeGeyt CLM (Swiss/Amzn) | LeGeyt CLM (Carp/Koa) Brondel A-2 (Carp/Mad) |
#24
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Does the notion of active vs reflective backs enter into a discussion of overall weight? I don't know enough about this to stake out a position -- except to suggest that active backs tend to be lighter (?)
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#25
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Now you made me curious and I checked my guitars:
Martin D-18MD: 1820g loud Gibson Dove: 2230g, loud Gibson Hummingbird: 2105g, medium Gibson SJ-200: 2250g (!!!), soft but deeeeeeep Gibson J-45: 2030g, soft Martin CEO-7: 1630g, quite loud So, of the 2 loudest guitar one is light, one is heavy. Second loudest is the small and light CEO-7. No idea how they made this thing. The heaviest guitar is not loud but has the lowest bass by far. Honestly, that tells me ......... nothing.
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Martin D-18MD, Martin OM-21, Martin CEO-7, Martin J-40, Martin 000-1, Guild D-55, Guild D-140, Gibson SJ-200, Gibson Hummingbird, Gibson Frank Hannon Love Dove, Gibson Southern Jumbo, Furch Gc-SR Red Deluxe, Furch Yellow Masters Choice, Larrivee P-03ww, Kawaii piano, mandolines, drumsets, doublebass, Fender Jazzbass, ... |
#26
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#27
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Given a choice between several on-line guitars that I couldn't play before buying, I would buy the lightest.
Sweetwater comes to mind for their weight and pictures of individual guitars. On my Martin D Jr weight was the deciding factor, I liked the grain pattern as well. It turned out to be a great D Jr. |
#28
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Is light weight desirable with guitars? Yes. I'm an old guy. I don't like heavy stuff anymore. If I was richer, I'd also replace all my conventional wood guitar cases with light-weight alternatives too. I'm not to the point where I'm switching to ukulele yet, but if I like the sound of two different guitars and one is a few pounds lighter, that's the one I'd pick, because I'm going to play it more often. An ounce or two lighter? I don't think I'd notice.
Does it indicate something about superior sound? This is the one that most are answering in the thread, and I agree with the consensus: it might indicate something sound-wise in a weak and non-repeatable way with similar designs. On electrics I'm not sure of the effect on sound, but the comfort thing is a factor there too.
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----------------------------------- Creator of The Parlando Project Guitars: 20th Century Seagull S6-12, S6 Folk, Seagull M6; '00 Guild JF30-12, '01 Martin 00-15, '16 Martin 000-17, '07 Parkwood PW510, Epiphone Biscuit resonator, Merlin Dulcimer, and various electric guitars, basses.... |
#29
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bufflehead wrote:
"If you take two boards of the same wood, milled to the same dimensions, the lighter one will no doubt be the older one, probably having a lower moisture content. It's just like firewood: a log will weigh more when freshly split than after drying a year or two." Although any piece of wood tends to lose some weight as it ages and seasons, that loss is small compared with the variation in density between pieces of wood of the same species. I've been measuring the properties, including the density, of the wood my students and I use for quite a while now; it varies a lot more than you might think. It's not hard to find a Sitka spruce top, say, that is 10% denser than average (specific gravity ~.46), and not too unusual to find one that is 15% denser, and you'll see the same range of variation on the low side. The densest piece of softwood I've found (so far) is a piece of European spruce that was cut somewhere between 200-400 years ago, with a sp. g. of .541. If that normal ~10% range of density I see in softwoods holds for hardwoods (and I suspect it does, although I don't have as many samples) then any guitar off the line could be as much as 6-7 ounces lighter or heavier than average, just by the luck of the draw. That would require that all of the wood used to make it was toward one end or the other of the 'normal' range of variation, of course, but it says that a 4 ounce difference is probably not unlikely in a sample of, say, ten production instruments. I'll note that another thing I keep track of while I building is the overall weight of the top and back plates. I start out with the 'rough', over sized, bracing in place, and trim it down, using the 'Chladni' method, to get the bracing and the top (in particular) to work the way I want. It's a sort of 'tech' version of 'tap tuning'. At any rate, it would be unusual in this process to reduce the weight of the top by more than ten grams or so, and one can often see significant changes from the removal of a fraction of a gram. It's not so much what it weighs, but where the weight is that counts. |
#30
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All things being equal I much prefer a lighter guitar. But all things are never equal and it's not something I base decisions on. It's a factor. But tone and playability and appearance are all more important to me. |