Hi,

I've never seen this topic being discussed here so I thought I should post and ask for people's opinions and experiences. The thing is that I have noticed that my three Sticks all tend to sound better the longer time I have been using them. Especially my bamboo SG-12 that I have been playing outdoors about five hours every a day, four months a year. Even my new wenge SG-12 starts to sound a little better now the more I play it but it still doesn't sing as the bamboo (sympathetic resonance) does today. The slowest instrument to improve is my grand; maybe because it has "more wood to settle" or maybe because I play it less than the short scaled... or maybe due to the looser string tension on the full scale instrument? Anyway, I have no doubts that the more you play a Stick the better tone it develops.

A related topic is how this does relate to the Railboard? I'd guess they are "set in stone" from day one, mening "timeless perfection" and should be expected to stay the same over time.

I don't think instruments evolve with years, and i didn't notice any sound changes with any of my instruments (my oldest one is 10 years old) due to wood age. But what I experienced is that a very minor setting change can really affect the sound and the playing feel as well.

I'm talking about how the sympathetic resonance in the instrument changes over time. A luthier would be able to answer accurately why this happens. I have no idea, I'm just curious about what I'm experiencing. I don't know if it is just the constant vibrations as you are playing, if it has to do with environment issues like temperature and humidity that or if it simply is how good tone wood ages.

I've had an acoustic guitar since 1989 and have noticed the same sonic tone maturing process in the wood box.

This kind of tone aging is common and expected in acoustic instruments. The research I've seen seems to indicate that it's the vibrations of playing that changes the way the wood resonates. I had a physics professor who made violins and aged his instruments with transducers and loud tones. I have not seen any research on this effect in solid electric instruments. Bamboo is such a different material than wood, it's really a grass. I would not be surprised if you are noticing a real process in action. An instrument needs to be played a lot for a long time for this to be noticed and you seem to be doing just that.

Interesting.

--Eric

Interesting! This means you can breed dope Sticks simply by leaving them out on the sofa and blasting the music player while out walking (or out somewhere playing another Stick). Not very nice method to neighbours I guess...

I always found that more you play one of your instruments more it sounds great. If you forget about one of them you can hear the difference.

I've heard of guitarists who do exactly that, they put their guitar in front of a PA system with loud music.
And then I know a technician/engineer/musician in Germany who went a step further. He offers this kind of optimization by vibration as a professional service for all kinds of instruments. He really went deep and brought the technique to perfection. For me that's too expensive, but I know several guitarists who swear by his method. (All of them play solid body guitars, by the way.) He even used his sound optimization on church bells.

There was also a company called TimbreTech that offered a service to vibrate instruments in order to break them in. They are no longer in business.

They were very honest and scientific about what they did. I remember reading how they measure an instrument before and after the process and sure enough its response to frequencies changed. The honest part comes in when the said that although there was a change, they couldn't say if it made the instrument sound better.

I have certainly seen instruments benefit from being played. The more acoustic they were, the more continuously they wanted to be played. I can certainly accept The Stick reacting like wise but maybe not the non wood ones since their internal structure is more uniform and less likely (impossible?) to change.

Is there any recordings of such changes somewhere on the web? I'm rather doubtful about that.

OK, here's the story. My physics professor made very good violins and bows. He sold them to a lot of pro musicians. One of his customers went into the Peace Corps. in Africa and was so bored he played his violin for hours and hours a day for over a year. Then he broke it and sent it back to my professor for repair.

Once the instrument was playable my professor was shocked at its sound. It sounded like none of his other violins. It was loud and sweet and beautiful. So he took a recently finished instrument and hooked up a sound transducer directly to the bridge. He blasted a single frequency at very high amplitude into it. Within an hour the violin had a very strong resonance at that frequency. He asked many players to try it and they all noticed that a certain note was much louder than all the others. He tried this with other instruments at different frequencies with the same results.

With this knowledge he tried a broad range of frequencies covering everything a violin could produce. He kept it going for weeks on his first test instrument. When he tried the violin after this treatment he was completely floored and amazed by it's sound. It was loud, with an even and smooth tone like nothing he'd ever produced. He refined his treatment with the kind of experimentation a physics professor is capable of. He started offering some customers a choice of these treated violins without telling them what he'd done. They chose the treated ones so much that he just treated all his instruments after that.

He did some hard-core studies on what was going on and published some scientific papers on it. This is a very real effect and it has to do with changes in the elastic nature of the wood itself. I'm sorry that I have lost all these papers and can't find them online now. For acoustic instruments I believe it is very audible. I'm not so sure about electric ones. We process the bejeebers out of the signal anyway.

-Eric