My d50 is almost orange on the top now.
:victorious:
Al, what is the fretboard extension?
The end of the fretboard that's glued to the top.
:friendly_wink:
It's a real sweet spot for best woody tone on any flattop, at least for work up to around the 7th fret, then you need to move the right hand closer to the soundhole.
I rest my pinky just beneath it on the top when fingerpicking and also strum pretty heavily right over it depending on the tune, so it got a lot of extra wear.
Not like Willie Nelson's Trigger, just a small area only about an inch long and 1/2" wide where the lacquer's worn out of the soft lines in the grain, not completely gone.
There's few things finer IMHO than the fine ambering of the top of a vintage acoustic.
Yep. The first time I saw an Amber Guild finish here, it was immediately my second favorite after Cherry and I secretly wished Hally'd been one of those.
Little did I know back then:
Good things come to he who waits.
When I visited the Santa Cruz factory about 5 years ago, I asked Richard at the end of the tour, in the buffing room (where "you only make mistakes once"
) "Would you ever consider doing an aged finish?" and all the eyes in the room turned to me as if I'd just committed heresy.
But to me, I can't stand the whiteness of a new top, it's not warm enough.
It's funny, that's one of the reasons I like the Dreadnoughts' A and double AA tops better than the F65ce's AAA.
The F65ce's too white and even too consistent, I've actually called it "white bread".
In the '70's context.
:glee:
I like the variegation in the 2 lower grade tops more, and I think the silking on the D40's (AA) top is better than the F65ce's for the same reason: it's coarser and stands out more in a couple of stripes right next to the heartwood, coming down from the ends of the bridge.
They're both definitely "whole wheat bread".
Neither of those has seen more than a couple of hours of true outdoor sun, but the D40 is ambered up more than the F65ce even though it's a couple of years younger.
A few weeks back I did realize that the F65ce's top at least serves as kind of a benchmark for how they look new, but it
is finally developing a tiny bit of shade.
AD, how about a "clickmeter", some sort of human strum powered Hobbs hour meter that sits nicely in the top, up by where they do the switch on an LP
)
Well, besides not wanting to mount anything (even if removable) on the top besides what God intended (like Richie's second 'guard), I think it'd only have value to somebody who's owned a guitar from new or knows its history.
Maybe if it was an app....:glee:
Initially it was kind of a reference point to track whether tone really does improve with age and once I was satisfied it does, actual "mileage" became less relevant to me.
I still believe it's primarily a function of actual playing time as opposed to simple chronological age, and for all 3 of my Guilds somewhere between 2-300 hours was the "tipping point"; it just took a lot longer to get there with the D40 and F65ce.
The D25 hit it inside of 15 months I think it was, shortly after the first refret, which was when I started "tracking hours", because I was so surprised it needed refret so soon..even thought it might be a warranty issue.
Nope, just high silver content fret alloy and I dig in pretty damn hard. (And frets themselves are specifically exempted from warranty anyway, for wear at least)
I could have gotten away with a fret dressing I suppose, but the thing that made me buy her in the first place was the playability including fret height so I wanted every bit of that new feeling back.
Anyway, I calculated how much time must have been on her at that point from all the weekends in the park and weeknight practice besides and figured she only had just over a couple of hundred hours at that point. (Even discounted downtime for breaks during all the total hours too, to get just the "actual" playing time. Figured it was really more like 40 minutes out of every hour so if I was at park for 6 hours, a typical day, there was really only about 4 hours of actual playing time)
A couple of weeks later during a Saturday morning warm-up in the park, experienced something I'd never felt before:
I was thinking to myself "Wow she's never sounded
this good", just a wonderful continuous sustain developed in the soundbox on a medium paced strumming tune and I realized I could even feel the neck vibrating in my hand and wondered if maybe there was some kind of acoustic feedback loop going on where soundbox vibrations were feeding into the neck and then back into the top somehow (via the fretboard extension, maybe?)
She was louder for the amount of strumming force I was using, too.
A couple of days later I thought "Wow maybe that's what they mean when they say a guitar opens up".
I didn't disbelieve the concept but I wouldn't have expected it to happen in a single "moment" like that unless it'd happened to me.
A few years later after I'd joined up here and saw debates about whether the neckjoin and even headstock shape could influence tone, I already had my answer: I'm a firm believer, from feeling that neck vibrate in my hand.
Even wonder if that was at least part of Gruhn's intent when he introduced the "snakehead" headstock.
In fact the F65ce's still little shy of hitting its plateau, I think, but the D40 seems to keep on improving on a gradual incline.
I literally used to call her the "sonic runt of the litter" when she was new, and was kinda surprised.
Given its rep and the Richie Havens connection I expected it to be louder than the D25, but no.
Even created a quasi scientific comparison test to measure how long it took to fade to complete silence after hitting a 6-string "full harmonic" at the 12th fret.
Both archies easily outdistanced the flatback for many years, but the '40 just kept getting a bit longer (and subjectively louder) every couple of years while the archies had kinda peaked out.
I forget the specifics (have notes at home though), but the numbers 19 (D25) 14(F65ce), and 9(!) for the D40 come to mind, in about 2005. (And both dreads basically always have same strings on 'em, factory-spec Guild L350 lights).
Also at that time the F65ce was definitely underplayed, probably had less than 100 hours on it, and strung with slightly heavier than factory spec "custom light .011's.
I hadn't
really learned how to play it yet. But it's still in that 15-17 second bracket, and about a year ago rough-calculated it's probably close to 300 hundred now that it's my "go to".
My ear was beginning to get more sophisticated though, and I did start to realize the D40 had a much more "focused" sound than the '25 and had a "cleaner" sound as a result.
So it wasn't so much about volume as "flavor".
And it keeps improving in that regard too, and is up to 15 seconds of total "decay to silence" time itself, now, on dead strings, when I checked a few weeks back.
It's probably up around 500 now since it became the "go-to" after the D25 came back from its second refret.
At that time I realized that the guy I took it to that time had corrected something that was slightly off about the first job but that I'd never realized was the work and not me.
But all of a sudden a couple of little tricks that were crisp and clear when brand new were crisp and clear again just like new, and then I decided it was time to conserve that for as long as possible and let her rest, saving her for those times I just "gotta had ta have" that D25 jones fixed.
She
still fixes me up when I'm goin' into withdrawals.
:glee:
