BoSoxBiker

Thanks Twang Gang and uncle fester. No sideline for me. I can't imagine having to deal with mastering the people aspect of this. Gives me chills just thinking about it. LOL

LOL - Sorry about that. That'd be one way to keep me forever busy. 🙂 This was Dan Erlewine talking specifically about Gibson acoustics on page 33 of his book, "Guitar Player Repair Guide". He is quick to note to not set up a Martin in the same manner, or you will lose customers. (paraphrasing) I think that is mostly down on the bridge end. Much bigger break angles down there, IIRC. I don't remember what he said about scale length and string height. He did talk about tension a bit, IIRC. I'll re-read that section before proceeding next week. Electrics are a whole next level lower. I got my 2014 Epi 335 that was not made on someone's best day down to 3/64 low-E and a little under that on the high-E. I did some hardware changes, too. a whole other topic. It was my first fret leveling, so not too bad, I guess. It doesn't play as nice, as tight nor as quietly as a nice Gibson 335. It does play on par with a couple poor US made examples I've seen. It definitely does the 335 thing very well, at least as far as I can tell. I'm no Larry Carlton. I am measuring string height at the 12th fret and bridge/saddle with a 6" machinist's ruler. Neck relief with feeler gauges and a straight edge. The string height at 1st fret (for nut slot depth) using this kind of pricey string height gauge. Stewmac String Height Gauge I think it's over-priced, but running feeler gauges under strings by sight, feel and ear is too wide open for interpretations - at least I thought so at the time. It took a lot of uneasiness out of the equation. I agree with your thought on electric players converting to acoustics. I was skeptical about this for a long time. Still kind of am. I did what I did and still left a little room to go down further.

Thanks, guys! It was indeed a satisfying accomplishment. I'm having some flareup this afternoon, but I can still play guitar. Gotta watch it with songs with lots of barre chords. @fortyearspickn - I'd starve to death as long as it takes me to do this. LOL @michaelsegui - I should have taken some pics. I will take some when the SJ is in the counter and taped up. @BluesKing777 - That is fortunate. I do have a good electric guitar and amp guy here, at least. Actually, a couple of them. @duluthdan - It plays VERY nice. I left it about 1/128 high, mostly because I can get heavy handed at times. 🙄 I will finish the job, so to speak, if I don't have to do any adjustments over the Summer. Of course I'll try it with an old or cheap saddle... 🙂 @MissouriPicker - It's my Wife's favorite to look at and hear, and now a clear favorite to play. It is a true luxury to be able to play something like this. I do not take it for granted.

(Sorry for the length. Writing and surgical head injury do not go well together.) And this is what happens when no local luthiers within an hours' drive and actually wanting to do luthier work exist. I would have preferred to pay for this a year ago. Now I am glad I could not. I went to great lengths to practice before doing anything to my nice guitars. My Hummingbird has had moments of brilliance since I got it 23 months ago. The initial main set-up specs were decent enough, but I had to have this guitar right on it's lowest action point or deal with some impressive Arthritis pain. My preference for playing with minimal flareup has been a string height right at 5/64ths and 3.5/64ths, and neck relief somewhere around .006" and .004". Anything lower that and fret interference became an issue. If both measurements were on the low end, I had fret buzz - period. Anything above it, pain became a quick issue. I had the spare time, so I kept up with it. I tried .011s on a different guitar and did not care for it. Every man chooses his poison, yah? So, last year, I bought a Stewmac Fret Rocker and the Dan Erlewine (Stewmac) guitar repair book to see what I could do. I know I could have done similar with things around the house and internet sources, but this seemed so easy. As it turned out, this guitar was in decent overall shape and well within Gibson's range of specs. One notion grabbed attention. The suggestion in the Erlewine book that a Luthier could make a guitar even more playable and less noisy (sans fret buzz) by going to some more exacting standards and measurements. On a high level, basic view, he mentioned string height at 4/64 thick E @ 12th and just a hair over 2/64 on the thin E, and then neck relief down to .004". As lofty as it seemed, and I was suspicious, the individual items he wrote about made sense. I decided to try these things, but to take my own sweet time in doing so. I practiced on an Epiphone ES-335 and a ESP LTD acoustic guitar (a $350 laminated B&S solid top pile of junk I got from MF for $99 on a SDOTD. about 8 years ago. Good thing, as I ruined 3 nuts. He goes into decent detail by describing what he looks for both the topic at hand and it's relationship to the big picture. I got a better sense of the big picture and geometry involved. I carefully inspected, measured and learned what I needed to do. I'm fairly uncoordinated with such things, so buying idiot-proof tools where it made sense was in order. That said, I also knew that I needed to figure out a way to do all of this over a longer period of time so that I might get better at each component than if I rushed into one big long weekend task. This took me a year, including the practicing on the more affordable guitars. I know my own demons. Coordination challenged is just the beginning for me. hah! 🙂 My hummingbird was somewhere along this point a year ago. I wanted to make that totally clear. This is in no way, shape or form, a Gibson bashing. More to the point, it is a compliment. I can compare this whole plan of attack to my SJ along with a Taylor 614 and a Martin D41. It is, indeed, possible to set up a Gibson Acoustic to such playable standards without getting a bunch of racket and noise. So my starting point a year ago: Neck relief (6th to 8th fret) - .006" Saddle Height (measure from top of bridge to bottom of string) - 10/64th lowest and 14/64th highest. String height from body to bottom of string right before the bridge - 12.5mm highest points Normal (non-excessive based on pro demos online) resonance in the B-E strings Bridge Pins all wiggled WITH loose string in place. 16" radius fairly consistent throughout, including all of the frets and strings at both ends. Just the high spots discovered with fret rocker. String height at nut (measured at 1st fret thin through thick, and following a radius) - .021" - .026" Hi-spots in frets using fret rocker - 8 varying from being really anal to quite obvious. The 3rd and 15th were end to end. I replaced the saddle first, as part of removing the UST earlier, and got it to match the original overall height. I did like these two changes tonally speaking, but of course, it did little to nothing for the overall playing ease. I was still somewhat high on the overall saddle height using both the body and the bridge based measurements. String height at the nut was next. I got the files over the holidays. I practiced on a couple other less expensive guitars, too, before attacking the hummingbird. Initially, this took quite some time as I was very timid after ruining a nut on the ESP LTD Acoustic beater guitar. I got them knocked down part of the way to the Erlewine spec. The method of using feeler gauges left my confidence quite low. I ended up getting that high-priced nut-slotting gauge from Stewmac, which was one of my better tool purchases to date. I ended up between .014" and .016" high-E thru low-E. The low-E was supposed to be closer to .020". I got over-confident and quick. I adjusted the others to maintain radius as closely as possible. This was my big error of the whole long-term project, but it worked out well. Next up in the plan was the fret leveling. I did one practice guitar doing an entire fret leveling, and another guitar doing spot leveling. One of the many things I learned was that even the little tiny high spots mattered as string height was reduced. All of the wires with in radius sans the high spots, and only two wires needed end to end attention. I did the somewhat risky thing and did the individual thing. I spent much money again on a tool - the Stewmac Fret Kisser - which allowed me the freedom to file without going to low. it worked. As this was my third guitar to do fret leveling on, the resulting crowning and polishing went very well. More expensive files and some darned nifty sanding cloth and a butt-load of tape. The last item was also the first item. A new saddle. I could have sanded the other one, but I had bought one as part of a (somewhat)matched set with dyed Colosi pins I got earlier this year. Might as well actually use it. I installed it, but did not go down to or below the height of the old one. I left the guitar otherwise setup overnight to settle in before deciding on how much more to take off. My plan was to leave the neck relief around the .006" mark for room to handle weather variations. I took the saddle down enough to leave my string height at 4.5/64ths and the 2.5/64s. If Erlewine's specs worked for me, this would leave me with with a minimum of .5/64 up or down before getting fret buzz or getting above that Arthritis pain trigger height. The amount I needed to come off the saddle would also reduce the actual saddle height numbers to 12/64(from bridge) and 11.5mm (from body). The sanding went decent enough, and the strings went back on just in case I needed to take more off or put my old saddle back in. Turns out it was just right. It took some playing and a few hours for the 2-day old strings to settle down from being both new and de-tensioned twice, but it worked and is still working after a few weather changes. The end result is best of both worlds. Plays like a dream with any sort of buzz resonance at extreme lows. The guitar is louder, too, which took me a few sittings to get used to. That Hummingbird motor is more evident. There is this sort of warmth that developed over the course of a 2-1/2 playing session last night that's hard to describe. My ending measurements. I can go lower, but why? I wouldn't do it with this saddle right now. If I do anything other than the, it would have to be 100% reversible. Nut - .014" to .016" String height 12th fret 4.5/64 and 2.5/64 Neck Relief - .006" (in playing position. Closer to .008" on bench with neck rest below 3rd fret) Saddle height from bridge (8.5/64 - 12/64) Saddle Height from Body highest point 11.5mm Remaining issues: Defect #1: (Minor ) Went too low on the bass strings at the nut according to the Erlewine spec. Defect #2: (Minor) High-E string is in danger of messing up the radius at the nut. (I was too much of a pansy to knock it down another .001". It's borderline, but I'm not convinced the contact point and break angle are perfect on this one and I can't see clearly even with my magnifying glass.) Defect #3: (Minor) There is not a single bit of doubt when testing the radius at the bridge. All strings are clearly vibrating on the radius gauge. The radius at the nut is not so obvious. The B string barely hits the gauge at all because of the slightly raised high E string. Summary - I was 90% of the way to this level out of the box. I took tons of effort to get that final 10%. Would it have been worth it if not for arthritis flaring up? Who's to say. Worth every bit of effort to me right now, though. 🙂

In their defense, they did state right up front that they did just get that Taylor in. The other video posted later was more favorable. I almost didn't buy my D-41 because of an online store demo of a brand spanking new one having no low-mids. Then I read about them needing a few days. Not sure if Sgt Pepper had the same experience or not. To back your point, though, my 614 was a wall job, though it was a very clean one. It was ready to sing, that's for sure. This was right after Taylor did that redesigned 614 (or maybe the whole 600 series?) Baked top. Nice!

I never get deals handed to me. I have to research and wait and be ready to pounce. Sometimes just asking works, but seemed to be increasingly difficult. I got my last two as price matches. My SJ-200 was brand spanking new for $3895, and my D41 was $3599. That one took national sales manager approval. A little un-empowering, I thought, but whatever. It was close enough to what I had budgeted for the then unavailable HD-35, so big score all around. My 614 was some memorial day sale thing. I do like that the wide range of guitars within a few hundred dollars of each other instead of a grand or more. I mean standard models, not the builder's editions and other odd special runs. Seams like a managable product line sans re-using old names to push new product. (cough cough) That's not what this thread is about. Nor is anything we talked about for two days. I digress. LOL One thing I did want to say, on the OP, was the first thought that went through my mind when he started strumming the Taylor. I imagined a Taylor product manager yelling at his video screen for using a guitar that had just been in the steam room 3 hours prior. I would have been crying foul. They didn't do the SJ any favors, either, so that's that.

I didn't intend to buy one. I did, though. Uneducated consumer on the intricacies of guitar tone combined with a sales manager with a limited post-holiday inventory - and post-holiday budget. It was made to cut through the live band mix, though. I will give him that much. He's also the one who told me there is never a reason to not use a humidifier. The guy that replaced him is a great dude. Yeah, getting too long in the tooth to handle difficult guitars.

Of COURSE you would't.

BK, I remember now that you got one last year. Nice score! (again!) They were on my very short list of options before deciding upon the D28/D35/D41 arena. It's becoming a cliche with that v-bracing now, but the Grand Pacifics struck me as trying to sound a 70's acoustic song. (meant as a compliment) KB, Taylor built these "Wall of Taylors" displays in some Sam Ash stores, if you have one within driving distance. There's a somewhat obscure way to get to their stores' inventory listings on a Google store site via the main SA site's store locator results. Used, too, though a different web app is used. If your closest store is like mine, there are many to choose from. Yeah, these new breeds of Taylors are not the blatty/screechy 314s anymore. (dumped mine to get my 'bird) They even came out with a line of plectrums designed to tame that classic driven mid-range overtone that many found to be too aggressive. I think they listened to guitar players, though I wish they had left the 614 alone. That said, my local store has a Builder's Edition 614 that I do want to take for a test ride. 🙂 fwiw - after Jinder's thread on the comments from his future mrs Jinder, I chatted with my wife about my small stable and what she hears. She likes them all, but the 614 doesn't get to the same pretty sounding plateau that my Gibsons and the Martin do. That didn't surprise me. The 614's strength is elsewhere. It's a Rocker that LOVES to get dug into. Imagine Keef doing some big acoustic riff.

The redesigned era of the 614ce (2015-2018) is a beast of guitar. I thought switching it to the V-bracing took the character out of it. I bet it's easier to track with, though. I've only played my own, though, which is a 2015. I have played(test-driven) several 614ce v-bracing and was unimpressed. I've test driven the 814 DLX and the 914 and have been very impressed. They project very well. I still had to go with a D-41 last October, though. For the record, I have enjoyed test driving the Pacific Coast 517 and 717. the local Sam Ash has both AND both in builder's editions. It hurts to know this. No 618s, though. I am curious to try one, now. I agree with EuroAussie that they both sounded weak. (Tight was the word he used)

Nice! I agree with others and like your playing style. Very smooth and relaxing without losing any of the tune. Again, nice! That's a great one to play on a Sunday morning, such as this. I've heard the radio edit for so long, which is Breathe - Time - Breath Reprise blended back to back to back. I put together a chord chart to match and played that one as one of my few early start to finish songs when I began this journey. Anyhow, your next song (REM Losing My Religion) started playing after Breathe was done. That was nice, too, and your style very much works for it as well. I never thought to to that one in a picking style. Kudos!

Check early and check often with those humidi-paks.

Well, it took far too long, but I finally got a handle on the needed adjustments needed to further treat my studio space. It took several weeks to mix a 5-track song. The root cause ended up being gaps in my front wall treatment causing echo-chambers that reverberated and reflected back into my audio. In the pictures earlier in the thread, these were the space between my two front gobos, and the spaces between the corner bass traps and the top center wall bass trap. As a quick proof of concept, I taped together a bunch of my old studio foam, cut to size, and made 8-inch thick panels wrapped in plastic and filled the spaces. As part of my ongoing pegboard and plastic experiments. Added plastic to 6 of the ceiling to wall triangle traps. Fastened the three 2' x 4' pegboard pieces to partially cover the foamed areas previously mentioned, as well as equalize the placement to be more uniformed. Moved pegboard from the 1st reflection gobos to the middle gobos. * Added full length plastic to the first reflection gobos and the one rear gobo. * Added one 12" x 12" square piece of foam to the top center of my front wall pegboard to control a specific reflection. * = Technically speaking, having reflective material is in the first reflection zones is voodoo, and by helping, would indicate that it is making up for additional defects. This helped me with three big, remaining fundamental defects that I had as a result of the new acoustic build last Winter. A more balanced room in a tonal sense. It was tilted towards the low frequencies far too much. It is more even now. As it turned out, I was still getting lots of mid-range phase cancellation. I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. Most surprisingly, the major canyon between 60Hz and 110Hz filled up some more. No measurement numbers yet. Now to how it helped me. The biggest thing was depth. As I said in another thread about my recent song, I have been able to hear the defects all along during the whole mix process. I just could not fix them. I wrote it all off to poor tracking, which is still at least partially true. After I did these changes, I was able to hunt down and identify the defects as if they were giant zits on the end of my nose. I re-mixed that song in about 4-5 hours and had the best mix of my life despite not doing any volume automation or anything. And that is all on what was still a poorly tracked performance. Speaking of poorly tracked, I did some test tracking with my SJ-200 before and after. What I can hear now from the "before" is a separation of about 25-50ms between the original sound coming from my guitar to the ugly reflections being picked up by the microphone. I think this is more comb filtering? Regardless, the newer test recordings did not have this. There was a distortion happening right around the 1kHz area, too, that has been greatly reduced. This combination definitely led to a much more pleasing sound. I did do the gap filling in one afternoon and then the pegboard and plastic positioning the next afternoon. I did not do any test recordings in between. I did do, however, a shorter rough mix in between. The bulk of the improvements of the sound I got from my monitors as evident after filling the gaps with foam. The positioning of plastic and pegboard helped, though, and it too was obvious right away. I would say the low mids benefited from this more than anything. In closing, finally, this link is the forum post to my most recent song and has the 3-week mixing effort and the subsequent remix for comparison. This is the same source material. It is all a result of being able to hear the detail much better due to room improvements. I think you'll find the differences to be substantial. The Song Thread with samples

OK, so I took the next step in my studio room acoustic treatments over the past few days. As I said in the previous post, every defect I could hear on the recording, I could hear in the room. It took far too long, IMO, but I finally was able to hear the fundamental reasons behind all of this last week and have since made subsequent modifications. I'll post the specifics in my studio thread. Studio thread and specific post Below are the before and after studio room modifications mixes. They are definitive in the very least. Same source recordings. Only mix changes. Original and the adjusted mix fwiw, some small test tracking before and after indicated a lot of defect in the mid range will be solved. On to the next song..... I will have to track this one sometime, though.

As would I.

Hokey Dokey, then!

I could not imagine any reason at all. Perhaps I over-illustrated my point. Then again, people do so love to take something out of context and blow it to smithereens. This is an internet forum with all of it's Inherent natures, etc.

No, not because of the stuffed pillow thing. I was just illustrating that my ears needing to adjust going from a brighter guitar in an untreated living room to a somewhat calmer guitar in a room that has been quite heavily acoustically treated. I do like the reduced sustained overtones of the SJ for the purpose. In addition to that usage, I do enjoy it in the living room for just casual playing and singing. Like you said, it's easier to sing around. At least for me, anyhow. I like the EQ of the Maple SJ better, too, but I have wondered if I would feel the same if limited to one guitar. Having options is nice. 🙂 I've not figured a way to quantize this thought, but I suspect the Maples of having a bit more compression to them. The topic of EQ characteristics does very much relate to your original post. For example, If the mid-range of one guitar is brighter than another guitar, it will be easily perceived as louder in an immediate sense. Add the room to the equation. The frequency range centered on 2.1kHz (the pain range) can sound very loud on it's own. Factor in a room's acoustics with their reflections and the brightness can start to compound (like comb filtering), which makes it all seem even more loud. The concept of "loudness" has a sustain element to it. I've seen an easy, quick definition of Loudness being a measurement of volume over time. All that said, though, does not mean that you are not making a valid observation. It just illustrates differences to be considered when comparing guitars of different makes. One thing I have found on my two maples is that humidity robs them of energy long before my RW and Hog guitars. Up and down the whole frequency range. I used the pillow analogy earlier. I think it's more like a blanket. I use silica gel packs in my cases when they have been out on the rack for humid stretches and/or rainy days. I'm sure others have their own methods that work just as well for them, or even better. Silica Gel Packs on Amazon I'm sure you know all the other factors, such as combinations of guitars, strings, pic, etc, etc. What works well for one may not for the other.

This all seems spot on to me. The only thing I would wish I could see if I was making a judgement was the neck angle. @mccartymind - I would do some serious measuring if you have the simple tools. If not, perhaps a friend might. $25 will get you feeler gauges and a 64th inch machinist's type ruler. There are ways to measure everything you need to measure. Have those numbers with you when you speak to the tech. "Within Gibson Specification" and set up well for personal preference are two entirely different things. The first is designed to be big enough to suit a wide variety of playing styles and setup preferences. Secondly, it greatly reduces the whole warranty return thing. It gives the retailers something plausible to get out of having to accept a return, or at least more ammo to talk you out of it. With measurements in hand, you can have an entirely different conversation. That conversation changes from a possible return or a "please have mercy and help me!" type of thing to a "how can we get these measurements from point A to point B?". Guess which one will solve your problem. BUT, it is something you will likely have to pay for if it's anything more than a twist of the truss rod nut. Free setups are negotiated pre-purchase. In the very least, you are protecting yourself. There really is no reason to not take measurements and do some research on what they mean to you.All that can be done without twisting the first screw. Lastly, as many have suggested, having a higher set up guitar from the factory is the norm. It's very easy to assume that there may be an inherent nature of the guitar that causes issues - eg neck shape - when it might be nothing more than setup. You could even be losing out on a guitar shape that is perfect for you without even knowing it.

The SJ-200 is my first choice and almost an exclusive choice of guitars to use in my very small home project hobby studio due to it's reduced overtones. If I am downstairs playing my D-41 or Hummingbird and go upstairs to play my SJ in the deadened space, it sounds like I stuffed a pillow in there. Takes a minute to get used to. These two videos are two years apart. Not apples to apples as far as the room and processing go. They are close enough for some generalizations, though. Same concepts with post production gating and the very active mic. Close enough to give one a general idea of possible differences from the standard SJ to a Rosewood SJ.

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My wife notices quite a bit. Even on test drives at the guitar stores. Even when not being so honest would save us money when decision time is near. As much as $2k-ish options to the $3895 Hummingbird. (we took that bird home) She was as nervous as I was about the D-41 not sounding all that deep on day-1 last October,but was relieved when it opened up within days/weeks to follow. She's also in the same room or in a room across the bottom of our house within straight eye and ear shot for the vast majority of my playing.

Thanks guys. I appreciate you giving it a listen. I'm going to select one of the mics and go through a bit of a different exercise and see what I can pull from it as opposed to enhancing into a one-man jam session. I am digging it. I am not done. That was the deaden the space round. I've got much plastic and pegboard hung to test the next round's placement of more permanent installation. It's doing well. I can hear everything. I just don't know what to do with it. Every defect you hear in the recording, I can hear in the room. Even low end. It's fantastic. BUT, I have to re-learn everything. I spent 9 years cutting out defects via EQ. Now I have to learn what to do with all this pesky audio. The bad moves I made are evident on this track. Especially now that the "volume wars" are over. It sounds way over-compressed, and it is due to a ton of "natural compression". No space. Dynamic range is in the tank. I know my tracking mistakes and I know the bulk of the mixing mistakes. I needed to snip this version off, though. 3 weeks of this - bah!

Me and my SJ-200. (and three accent guitars through a Kemper as listed in the song description.) No drums this time, but one tambourine VI just to have something. ) Time for some 90's style Outlaw Country? Sort of a cliche by now, but is still such fun. This is actually my first front to back one-take recording doing vocals and guitar sans overdubs, though I did do one of the verses twice and cut out the bad. Some un-matched dual-microphone phase challenges and heavy-handed digital tape emulation not withstanding, it's one of my better vocal efforts to date. I really stink at vocals. Lyrics below. (just pasted my chord sheet, if that's OK.) Oh - The song is longer than it should be. To save you torture inherent to long songs without much change, intro for 30 seconds, instrumental at 3:05 for a minute or so and excessive outro at 5:15. I was hoping to play something more interesting. Perhaps someday. 🙂 Lyrics & Chord Sheet [INTRO] [Dm][F][Gm][F][C] - x2 [VERSE 1] [Dm]A few empty bottles, and a [F]half pack of smokes. [Gm]One night's all she left me, and [F]all I had when [C]I awoke. [Dm]Rotten liquor and poison pills, the [F]two things I don't hate. [Gm]Uptown girls with uptown names, [F]they use me for down-town [C]dates. [CHORUS 1] [Dm]In and out of my life [F]that's how it always ends. [C]You keep what you're born with, [C]_______ when you're the [A]Devil's only [Dm]friend [F][C] [C]_______ [A][Dm] [VERSE 2] [Dm]No living for the week-end, and [F]no virtues to defend [Gm]No sheet cake on your birth-day, and no [F]parties to at-[C]tend. [Dm]Song birds, they go quiet, ain't no [F]laughter in the air. [Gm]Moms and Nuns blush when I walk by, as their [F]kids just stop and [C]stare. [CHORUS 2] (Repeat chorus 1) [INSTRUMENTAL] (Verse and Chorus chords - one whole iteration) [VERSE 3] [Dm]Hang-man won't hang me, [F]Preacher won't say my name, [Gm]Uprising in the jail-yard [F]when the warden, she [C]said the same. [Dm]Ain't much on pretty things, but I [F]got an eye for sin. [Gm]Sunny days make me meaner, [F]holy [C]water burn my skin. [CHORUS 3] (Repeat chorus 1) [OUTRO] (eventually?) [C][A][Dm]

I like this one, Lars! Job well done. Very raw emotions and thoughts. Kind of a slow Bruce Springsteen vibe going on a topic many of us have faced. Real life predicament instead of vanilla, generic love songs. I think most people have their one flame that just could not work out from years ago that they think about from time to time, and wonder how that one ever ended up, etc. You did a good job connecting of connecting the listener to that memory, IMO. I also like that guitar playing, tone and placement. I liked the strings pad, too. Sounds like a teensy touch of bagpipes and harmonica mixed in. It fit nicely. Well, good job again, and a nod to the continued improvement from one song to the next.