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Old 10-16-2020, 06:23 PM
ctvolfan ctvolfan is offline
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Default Current or Previous Owners of Black Guitars

I know this subject has been covered before but I was wanting to get opinions on black guitars from people that own them or have owned them. I don't think they all look good but I think the Yamaha LL16D in black looks really good because of the abalone binding around the binding and soundhole. It just pops in my opinion. I'll probably never buy one and I am interested in that model but I'm sure I'll end up with natural finish. It just seems a shame to cover up the wood grain. What are the downsides of owning a black guitar? It seems like fingerprints would be an issue. Scratches seem like they would be magnified. I'm sure any nicks in the finish would stick out like a sore thumb since the light wood color beneath. I'd say resale would be difficult too since its such a niche market.
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Old 10-16-2020, 07:33 PM
Wade Hampton Wade Hampton is offline
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ctv, you're correct about fingerprints being a problem with instruments that have a black shiny finish. But increasingly guitar manufacturers are making guitars with matte black finishes. They have no fingerprint problems at all:



Fender Tim Armstrong Hellcat



Martin 000-17S Black Smoke



Martin DX Johnny Cash

This is the merest sampling of what's out there on the market these days. If you want a black guitar, there are plenty to choose from.

Hope this helps.


Wade Hampton Miller
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Old 10-16-2020, 07:48 PM
The Growler The Growler is offline
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I have a black guitar with a gloss finish. Looks great, but as Wade described it, it is a fingerprint magnet. A wipe down with a soft white flannel cloth is needed after every play, but I do that with every guitar so it's not a big deal.
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Old 10-16-2020, 08:16 PM
anjoga anjoga is offline
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I love my Taylor AD17e blacktop. I know it's not entirely black.


Last edited by anjoga; 10-16-2020 at 10:48 PM.
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Old 10-16-2020, 09:51 PM
Willie_D Willie_D is offline
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Back in '95 I had a black Ovation Celebrity. It looked cool until it got some nasty winter cracks in the finish. I don't miss it, though the black top did look cool with the black bowl and white accoutrements.

Sold it cheap and bought the Taylor 510 that's been my baby ever since.
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Old 10-16-2020, 10:19 PM
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TBman TBman is offline
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I had a black Ovation Legend years ago, given to me by my first wife. Really nice looking. I never really bonded with the bowl (I should have just used a strap in hindsight). It had a nice tone to it. I think it had a 1.75 nut because I remember having a harder time with it when I first got it. I traded it in when I bought my Masterbuilt DR-500R
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Old 10-16-2020, 10:20 PM
Willie_D Willie_D is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by anjoga View Post
I love my Taylor AD17e blacktop. I know it's not entirely black.
I imagine that's a wonderful geet. Excellent!
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Old 10-16-2020, 11:47 PM
Wade Hampton Wade Hampton is offline
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The only black musical instrument I’ve ever owned was a black Kentucky mandolin that I bought in 1981 or 82. That’s where I first discovered the truism about what fingerprint magnets shiny black musical instruments are.

I’m not hyper-fastidious about the appearance of my instruments, but whenever I played that mandolin the smudges that would magically appear when I just THOUGHT about fingerprints. It made me feel like a total slob: as though I was an adult, mandolin-playing, grownup version of Pigpen, the filthy little character in the Peanuts comic strip who has flies and a cloud of dirt around him wherever he goes....

At that time I wasn’t playing mandolin onstage anymore, because the Irish band I had belonged to had broken up and I was playing solo gigs instead (fewer arguments onstage that way...) Mandolin is the one instrument that I play that really needs to be in an ensemble setting - unless you’re a virtuoso on it, solo mandolin is not much fun to listen to. By itself, the mandolin is the thumbtack of musical instruments....

Anyway, I still had the Larson Brothers mandolin my godmother had given me, and strictly speaking didn’t actually need the Kentucky mandolin any longer.

So I polished it very carefully and thoroughly, put a classified ad in the paper (remember those?) and sold it to a guy who didn’t play very well but sure did like that shiny black finish.

Mission accomplished.

Just a few years ago now I bought a new Subaru from a dealer in the Midwest and drove it back to Alaska. Virtually all of the vehicles that I was shown were black. There was one in charcoal grey, which is kind of like a black car that didn’t have the high school credits to graduate...

I kept telling the very nice woman who was showing me the car:

“I live in Alaska!! A black car is the most impractical color you could possibly sell me! I won’t buy one!”

The Subaru dealership in Anchorage doesn’t carry many black vehicles at all. They know better....

She finally showed me a red one, and that’s what I bought. It was a slightly less expensive model than the others she’d been showing me, and I think that was the real problem: she wanted to sell me a more expensive vehicle, naturally enough.

Hey, that’s how she makes her living, so I couldn’t begrudge her that. Still, I got a bit irked at the way she kept waltzing me around until she realized that I wasn’t going to budge, and she finally showed me the red one.

I really had to be a pill about it before she “remembered” that there was a red one on the lot. (Gripe, gripe, gripe.) But enough about that.

The moral of the story is that shiny black guitars and shiny black cars are fine so long as you have someone on staff who will clean and polish them for you daily.

If not, then you’ve just bought yourself a lot more work.

Hope that makes sense.


Wade Hampton Miller
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Old 10-17-2020, 01:12 AM
BluesKing777 BluesKing777 is offline
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Thanks Wade!

I have my black guitar collection, only one gloss black and a shiny black car......the gloss black guitar isn’t much trouble - I wipe it over after playing with a cotton T. But yes, the shiny black car can be a PITA, especially as it is a convertible! So handwashed, garaged and try not to drive it on wet days, or dusty days, or....avoid birds. Lucky I have the silver coupe shopping trolley as well!

Keef said black guitars sound better! It is true.


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Old 10-17-2020, 01:43 AM
Wade Hampton Wade Hampton is offline
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It sounds as though you’ve got it figured out, BluesKing. As for up here, the driving conditions and the roads in Alaska are much rougher and more challenging than anywhere in the Lower 48 that I’ve ever been.

Most folks from Outside kind of expect that, but what’s especially strange is that the more expensive the neighborhood, the worse the roads are. Anchorage’s equivalent of Mission Hills in Kansas City or Atherton in the Bay Area is the Hillside district, which climbs right up the Chugach Mountains. You’ll see these multi-million dollar homes on streets that are little more than goat paths, with potholes galore and loose gravel getting spit out from underneath the tires of the car in front of you, hitting your windshield and dinging it with star-shaped impact cracks.

My wife and I live in another neighborhood that climbs up the mountainside north of Anchorage, but it’s not as expensive an area so our roads are easier to navigate.

Yes, it’s crazy but true. Ask former Alaskan and Anchorite “Earl 49” if you doubt me on this.

It’s actually more of a matter of altitude than some bizarro city code: my neighborhood isn’t as high up as Hillside, and usually doesn’t get the more extreme weather that Hillside gets lashed with.

Anyway, the state of Alaska is not a great place to drive a black car, unless constantly cleaning and waxing your car is your idea of fun. So if that’s what you enjoy, Alaska is like a subarctic Garden of Eden, ever ready to bestow its bountiful harsh weather and endless supply of sloppy road muck upon you....


whm
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Old 10-17-2020, 02:22 AM
BluesKing777 BluesKing777 is offline
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A couple of years back now, but I was researching updating my old silver coupe and went to a lot to look at a ....gasp...charcoal coupe with a rocket engine twin turbo blah blah. As I looked over the stock from the uninterested salesguy, I could see there were about 40 cars to move to try the coupe. May just have saved my skin, let alone insurance. Conveniently, the (used) smaller motor black convertible was available to drive straight out.....

I do like the black but the ragtop means no carwash and lots of strange hand wash manouvres......my eyes nearly popped out of my head when I saw the same make with a metal convertible roof. Really? I assume they will go through the car wash....

Yes, gloss black guitars need a car wash too! But my matt finish black ones show arm marks....which may be harder to clean off.

BluesKing777.
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Old 10-17-2020, 02:42 AM
Wade Hampton Wade Hampton is offline
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Ideally, black cars should come with a pop up car wash as an accessory, kind of like cruise control: you’re driving down the highway, and decide that the car is too dirty to tolerate. So you push a button, and these soap sprayer arms unfold from the front fenders, move down the length of the car and back again, and proceed to soak, wash and wax your car.

You wouldn’t need a built-in dryer cycle because the wind created by your driving does that for you.

My understanding is that Taylor is working on a similar built-in car wash system for their black guitars, but the technology isn’t quite there yet: they’ve had some problems trying to miniaturize the components.

So it probably won’t be ready to market until the winter NAMM show in 2022...


Wade Hampton “Andy Powers Is Designing The Spray Nozzles” Miller
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Old 10-17-2020, 04:25 AM
EZYPIKINS EZYPIKINS is offline
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Only one I own is a Black Beauty Les Paul Custom. Tone not the best Les Paul I've got. So it never gets out of the case. So fingerprints not a problem. But I tend to stay away form black ones, because of the fingerprints. Same reason I don't buy Black cars.
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Old 10-17-2020, 05:50 AM
rokdog49 rokdog49 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Wade Hampton View Post
It sounds as though you’ve got it figured out, BluesKing. As for up here, the driving conditions and the roads in Alaska are much rougher and more challenging than anywhere in the Lower 48 that I’ve ever been.

Most folks from Outside kind of expect that, but what’s especially strange is that the more expensive the neighborhood, the worse the roads are. Anchorage’s equivalent of Mission Hills in Kansas City or Atherton in the Bay Area is the Hillside district, which climbs right up the Chugach Mountains. You’ll see these multi-million dollar homes on streets that are little more than goat paths, with potholes galore and loose gravel getting spit out from underneath the tires of the car in front of you, hitting your windshield and dinging it with star-shaped impact cracks.

My wife and I live in another neighborhood that climbs up the mountainside north of Anchorage, but it’s not as expensive an area so our roads are easier to navigate.

Yes, it’s crazy but true. Ask former Alaskan and Anchorite “Earl 49” if you doubt me on this.

It’s actually more of a matter of altitude than some bizarro city code: my neighborhood isn’t as high up as Hillside, and usually doesn’t get the more extreme weather that Hillside gets lashed with.

Anyway, the state of Alaska is not a great place to drive a black car, unless constantly cleaning and waxing your car is your idea of fun. So if that’s what you enjoy, Alaska is like a subarctic Garden of Eden, ever ready to bestow its bountiful harsh weather and endless supply of sloppy road muck upon you....


whm
It’s hard enough to put up with that nonsense in North Central Ohio for about three months. You can have it, especially the road muck.
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Old 10-17-2020, 06:04 AM
Skarsaune Skarsaune is offline
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I have a black Ford Escape, which was a deal when I bought it.
A black car in the south is a problem for its own set of reasons - sun, mostly.
You see a whole lot of white cars in GA/KY/TN.
When we recently purchased the Escape’s replacement (252,000 miles on it, passing it down to my daughter), “not black” was an important part of our shopping list. We got a blue one this time.

I had a black Takamine for a long time. It was a fingerprint magnet but sounded good plugged in and looked good, too.
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