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Does the colour of your guitar affect its tone?


davie

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I will say that color does affect your attitude to the guitar. You will approach a Seafoam green strat very differently to say EVH stripes.

 

And brown bursts just look like a Rottweiler's ass. I mean yuck I don't even want to touch the things never mind play them.

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"If I hadn't believed it I wouldn't have seen it"

So many other variables in a guitar, to do a test would have to be some sort of blind test with one guitars and different finishes. Then there would be memory problem... couldn't do an immediate A-B test... your subjective memory influenced by outside factors, such as what had for breakfast, state of relationship with significant other, humidity in the air...

Perhaps he was just having a go at interviewer... or Spinal Tap bit with "Don't even look at it!" regarding pristine vintage gits

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Too impractical a test.

 

You'd need to use the same body testing different finishes. If you use different bodies, you're using different chunks of wood with different grains so it disqualifies all your results.

 

Having done allot of refinishing work I might entertain the idea different types of finishes like Poly vs, Lacquer vs, oil might have some minor effect on the tone of some types of guitars, especially something like a semihollow where the wood resonance is a factor.

 

The different pigments in paint aren't going to have enough changes in density/rigidity to amount to a hill of beans.

 

Another question is whether it was taken down to the wood or simply painted over. If you read the Fender History, they'd often just spray one color over another to fill orders. Some bodies would have two or three different layers of paint plus the base coat of Fullerplast. Its said the guitars that had these multiple layers of paint had bad tone. compared to minimal finishes.

 

Again, the color of the paint was immaterial and how much or the acoustic tone translated to the strings would be tough to measure.

 

I could see someone removing a heavy poly finish and base coat, taking it down to the wood then using a traditional lacquer may have the greatest possibility of affecting the tone, but once that guitars cranked up to overdrive - all the overtones are going to be completely flattened. If there was any tonal changes, they get wiped out as soon as you gain the guitar .

 

If we were reliving the 60's where you had guitarists experimenting with psychedelics, yea you might get some to agree the body color will influence tone by the trip they were on. Anyone who's sober isn't going to give it any credence at all.

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i don`t think Jimi liked sunbursts ,dweezil zappa had one restored that Jimi smashed and burned at the miami pop festival it was sunburst ,he then gave it to frank zappa who was also playing that gig ,

if you watch live at the Albert hall he smashes a sunburst at the end of wild thing ,i never saw Jimi play a sunburst seriously ..by the way i think they were probs mostly cheap copies he smashed up, even the Monterey strat looked like a red cheapo painted up fancy then destroyed ,his black and white strats were his players.

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This make me want to play the Star Spangled Banner

 

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Purple Haze (or maybe Purple Flame)

 

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sparkles

 

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this is definitely hot

 

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and this is kind of cool

 

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