That Fine Fake-Old Finish

by R.M. Motola

Originally published in American Lutherie #117, 2014



I received an interesting question a while back from someone asking about ways to build a guitar so that it would have a darker tone or how to retrofit an existing instrument for darker tone. Although the term “darker” is fairly ambiguous and certainly open to personal interpretation, if I were to attempt to make an instrument sound darker myself, the first thing I would do to that end is give it a dark-colored finish.

From a strictly sonic perspective, this advice is utterly foolish — the color of the paint is not going to affect the sound even a little bit. This is both intuitively obvious and could easily be confirmed using either measurement of the instrument’s sonic output or by blind listening evaluation. But although such techniques are useful for research purposes, they do not necessarily emulate the conditions under which instruments are “heard” in the real world.