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#1
12-03-2019, 11:03 PM
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Opening up a guitar using the "Loud music" method
Hey guys, i've just started trying the method of opening up my acoustic guitar quicker by having it in front of a sub while i have a maximum bass album playing for the intense vibrations.
Have any of you ever used this method before with loud music and do you think it actually works on an acoustic guitar? 
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#2
12-03-2019, 11:27 PM
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#3
12-03-2019, 11:38 PM
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#4
12-03-2019, 11:43 PM
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There's a spot in my room where I put the acoustic on a stand and play the electric guitar through an amplifier. The acoustic absolutely howls when it's in the right spot. It definitely has changed my "lives on the guitar stand" acoustic. It feels like that acoustic is more sensitive than it used to be.
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#5
12-04-2019, 12:26 AM
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I just use my $10 ToneRite; in fact I'm using it right now. I live in an apartment with no soundproofing so my next-door neighbor can probably hear me think.
__________________
Martin X1-DE Epiphone AJ500MNS Alvarez AD30 Alvarez AD710 Alvarez RD20S Esteban American Legacy Rogue mandolin
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#6
12-04-2019, 11:32 AM
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With now way of proving it, I would think that putting a guitar in front of an active speaker would help open up the guitar.
So does playing the guitar. LOL
__________________
Happiness Is A New Set Of Strings L-20A
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#7
12-04-2019, 11:39 AM
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Old school but it can’t hurt.
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#8
12-04-2019, 11:45 AM
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__________________
1 dreadnought, 1 auditorium, 1 concert, and 2 travel guitars.
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#9
12-04-2019, 12:27 PM
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If it works at all it's wildly inefficient. Most of the sound in the air just bounces off the guitar. The better way is to rig up a 'stinger'. Get a small loudspeaker, say around 2-4 W, and cut out most of the cone, leaving three or four 'ribbons' along the radius, to tie the coil to the edge. Get a cork or piece of balsa wood and shape it into a cone that can be glued over the dust cap and will project out past the rim of the speaker. Fix this up to a support so that you can have the guitar sitting on a stand with the point of the cone pressing lightly against the saddle of the bridge, and perpendicular to the top. Plug it in to something that can play music and let it rip. If the stinger buzzes on the saddle either increase the pressure a little or back off on the volume.
What you're doing here converting the guitar into a speaker. The stinger doesn't add much of a load to the top, so it doesn't alter the resonances much,, and it's a lot more effective at pumping sound in that a speaker in the air. You'll be surprised at how loud this can get with only a couple of watts input. Any level of input with this sort of rig will make changes in the way it responds over time. The more power you can put in, the quicker the changes; at two watts I've made measurable changes in a weekend, using a radio as the driver. One interesting thing that I've seen is that at a low power level I could measure changes after a fairly short time, but could not hear any difference. There seems to be a threshold for perception: the changes progress slowly over time, but you don't hear much difference until they reach a certain level. In at least one case, people talking sounded like they were 'under water' at first, and there was no perceived change in the sound of the guitar until that cleared up. I've done this sort of thing a number of times, but always using slightly different setups for driving and measuring the output, so it's hard to give a really exact reading on what's going on.Do get actual data you need to control a bunch of things you might not think of offhand, and I have only recently been in a position to do that. Now to try to make the time....
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#11
12-04-2019, 01:01 PM
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#12
12-04-2019, 01:19 PM
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Regular music helps. I've put my acoustic in front of stereo speakers before, and play my acoustic alot. I found that the string frequency of violins and cellos work better toning the wood up. So some Bach or Beethoven does a good job of it.
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#13
12-04-2019, 01:20 PM
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Forgive me for being ignorant, but do y'all mind explaining what you mean by opening up the guitar?
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#14
12-04-2019, 01:26 PM
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I wanted to point out a couple of things. One is that all of this is controversial; due to the difficulties in measuring all the possible changes and excluding noise we still have no 'proof' that playing a guitar does anything at all. There are folks who maintain that guitars simply don't change: if it sounds better it's because you got better a playing it, or something like that. I have, as I said, measured changes, but need to do more careful experiments to be sure those weren't from things like humidity changes or other stuff.
The second thing is that the only reasonably well-controlled study I know of on the ToneRite (in the on-line Savart Journal) found that it made no difference. Again, this is a hard thing to nail down definitively, but they did at least try to cover all the bases. It's plausible that, since the ToneRite works basically at 60 Hz, which is well below the pitch of any normal guitar resonance, it may not have much of an effect, and that the 'results' people report are placebo effects.
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#15
12-04-2019, 01:34 PM
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When I bought my first solid topped acoustic back when I was 16, the shopkeeper said when I wasn't playing it, to lean it against a speaker and play symphonic music, because they had the full range of frequencies to "wake the guitar up."
I asked him "does it work?" He said "No clue, but at least you'll be listening to good music."
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