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One has to admit one has a problem…….


onewilyfool

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I tried the 12 fret solution last time out. It's gone a long way towards helping me. If I can just make it through the holiday season I think I might be in the clear for awhile longer. There is a looming electric shock therapy I'm considering but so far I've been able to stave it off. God bless us everyone.

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My wife is so done with my GAS that even my recent mentioning of our upcoming 25th wedding anniversary weekend getaway ( driving south to Nashville) and how I would love to check out if they have any 50s J50s, got her bummed out. I swear this may be the last straw. She may have to go...

 

 

[lol]

 

 

 

=D>

 

 

[lol]

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My wife is so done with my GAS that even my recent mentioning of our upcoming 25th wedding anniversary weekend getaway ( driving south to Nashville) and how I would love to check out if they have any 50s J50s, got her bummed out. I swear this may be the last straw. She may have to go...

 

LOL that a boy can't let them slip out of line ya know...Where do you live?? Just curious since I am in Indiana

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Probably has to do with the "parlor" guitar craze that seems to have been sweeping the guitar playing world.

 

Maybe because for 50 some odd years I have had a soft spot in my heart for pre-War guitars, it is hard to recall a time I was without one. In fact just snagged another one last week.

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Well I have a significant obstacle to hurdle before that!

 

And she's a dooozy.

 

 

And don't forget the locks could get changed while you drive!

 

 

Maybe it is a good time to re-evaluate things before they get out of hand....

 

 

 

And get a FedEx delivery to your back door/garage?

 

 

 

BluesKing777.

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We (my wife and I) don't really have a problem. In the large bodied flat top division, we are close to the minimum -- remember there are two of us.

 

big12s.jpg

 

On left and right are the required vintage Martin and Gibsons -- late 60s for the Martins and mid 30s for the Gibsons. Up top are our new guitars -- 95 HD-28SO (Sing Out) and a Randy Wood adi over Cuban mahogany -- we have to support our modern builders! Down front is our 1895 Almcrantz. So we are only short one 19th century 12-fret dread to have a full set -- and you know how common those are.

 

As to small bodied 12-frets, we don't count them because they are too small and that would be too much work.

 

So we don't have a problem.

 

Let's pick,

 

-Tom

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We (my wife and I) don't really have a problem. In the large bodied flat top division, we are close to the minimum -- remember there are two of us.

 

So we don't have a problem.

 

Let's pick,

 

-Tom

 

 

Tom, I would love to wander through and look at your entire collection, but I think it would spoil me forever.

 

I've got a question for you. You seem to play a lot of your guitars on a regular basis, but I can imagine that string changing could be a monumental task.

 

How do you deal with it, and do you generally use one brand/type/gauge on most of your guitars?

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With the kind of guitars I tend to gravitate towards, the 14 fret sweeties like my Oscar Schmidt-made Galiano jumbo are the harder to come by. And if you have a thing for something like fancier Kay Krafts generally the 14 fret instruments are ladder braced while the 12 fret guitars are X braced so very different sounding beasts.

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Tom, I would love to wander through and look at your entire collection, but I think it would spoil me forever.

 

If you are ever in Atlanta while we are, let me know. I'd love to hear your 60s NY stories.

 

 

I've got a question for you. You seem to play a lot of your guitars on a regular basis, but I can imagine that string changing could be a monumental task.

 

How do you deal with it, and do you generally use one brand/type/gauge on most of your guitars?

 

Well, sort of divide and conquer. Remember I am a geek.

 

We do have a few guitar wall hangers and quite a few old banjos we use mostly for decoration. We are not into electrics anymore, and those only get played sometimes at Christmas. From our flea market-pawn shop days, we do have some sort of interesting electric stuff. All are kept playable, but they generally get restrung only very occasionally for special occasions.

 

We went through about a decade -- mostly the 1990s -- when we tried many strings. As an acoustic scientist I can tell you that you can train you-self to like or dislike just about any string sound. In the 1990s we played with a extraordinary guitar player who LOVED 80/20 bronze on mahogany guitars. By the end of the decade we did too. We never did like coated strings because of their power loss, although for several years we used them on some guitars for longevity. We determined very early on that the sound only had differences in nuance associated with string compounds -- the guitar itself was the main sound functional generator.

 

Eventually, we realized we were only fooling with small diferences and we would lose almost nothing from a single approach. We do still experiment occasionally -- hope springs eternal -- but we now use Martin bulk 80/20s on most everything. We keep them in Medium, Light, and x-light and we pay about $2.00 a set. They actually last quite well, but we change them a lot on instruments we are playing a lot. My personal feel is 80/20 on mahogany are indeed perfect -- maybe learned, but true nonetheless. I can go either way on RW and Maple. Mediums for BG, lights for fingerstyle with picks, ex lights for bare finger style.

 

We usually have examples of each of these types of guitars out -- ie,fresh strings, tuned up, and easily accessible: BG rhythm (me); BG lead (me); BG rhythm (wife); finger style (bare); finger style (picks); folk (wife). We cycle most all the appropriate guitars though these groups periodically -- they are restrung when they come out of storage and down-tuned when they go back in. I restring guiars while watching TV -- news mostly. They generally stay out for at least a month. Mostly the BG instruments are played out, but occasionally we do a different kind of jam or gig.

 

I feel like I know each of the instruments personally, but I don't try to use all instruments in all ways. I also try to have a lot of good musicians play our instruments -- often at jams but at home too sometimes. You can learn a lot that way.

 

Best,

 

-Tom

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Well, sort of divide and conquer. Remember I am a geek.

 

I feel like I know each of the instruments personally, but I don't try to use all instruments in all ways. I also try to have a lot of good musicians play our instruments -- often at jams but at home too sometimes. You can learn a lot that way.

 

Best,

 

-Tom

 

 

Thanks, Tom. Very useful input. I haven't tried 80/20 strings in a long time, but might give some a whirl.

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my last couple of string purchases have been 80 20s .

am currently liking elixir 80 20's a lot. took a few weeks though. and as tom says , dunno if I'm getting used to them , or the string changes.

 

 

A question ,

I was never a fan of martin strings , but wanted to be because of the price of the things. They died really fast on me. But I only ever used P'S. will 80 20's have a different span ???

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I tried the 80/20s last time we had a conversation with Tom on strings. They sounded surprisingly good on my 45. They sounded clearer than the BPs I usually use. I still prefer the fuzzier and warmer BPs. I also like the feel of the DRs. I would love to sit down and pick Tom's brain on what creates tonal qualities in sound.

 

chasAK

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I am not trying to talk anyone into 80/20s -- I am just reporting from our actual history and decisions.

 

I think I should put on my geek hat on here -- per chance I know a whole lot about human sound quality assessment. In fact in the late 1980s I wrote the first scientific book on the subject.

 

The reason I did that research and wrote that book was because we were reseaching how to make the best sounding speech coder (digital communications system -- think cell phone) at a constrained bit rate. We were competing for an international standard for US and NATO, and ultimately the winner was to be determined by subjective speech quality tests using numerous different languages and cultures. We studied this more than the competition and we won -- maybe because of what we know about sound quality perception.

 

The primary non-obvious point we learned is that individuals do not scale -- I.e. a single subject in a constrained population (same language and culture) is not a good estimator of the whole. Stated simply, a lot of different opinions is normal for humans.

 

On the other hand, there are systematic difference for language and location. This is because (we now know because of more recent research) much of what we hearing is a learned phenomenon. We all have different hear acuity for sure -- but that is not what the driving force is here. Rather the human auditory cortex is actually reconfigured by the sounds it experiences. This happens at a phenomenal rate in an infant, but it continues to happen during our whole lives. For music, the more you listen the more you learn. If you limit yourselves to particular genres, you (subconsciously) know much more about them than those you have not experienced. So because of our varied sound experiences, we actually don't hear the same things in music. Your hearing will be more similar to people with somewhat similar sound experience, but even then it is a safe bet you what you hear will be different.

 

Since we learn to like from what we hear, the commercial music business can restrict access and more-or-less control what we buy. Sad, but I digress. This all boils down to why I will never tell you what sounds best in an absolute sense -- only what I found to sound best. Ultimately, your personal quality scale will be predictably different -- maybe a little and maybe a lot -- so you must try it for yourself.

 

Best,

 

-Tom

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