bad acoustic guitar

dazzer22 · August 2022

What do you do if you dislike the sound of your acoustic guitar even after a set up, I only noticed how crap it sounded when i heard my friends guitar and it stood out much more , actually my friends guitars is a lot cheap too and to me it sounds better ,

drofluf · August 2022

What do you dislike about the sound? Perhaps a new or different set of strings?

When you’re comparing the sound with your friend’s is that what you hear when you’re playing their guitar or are you comparing what you hear whilst your friend is playing theirs? Acoustics often sound different to the player and audience.

Mellish · August 2022

OP, does yours play easily - nice action? What strings are you using? When you first played it, did you like what you heard? Or are you just miffed cos (to you) your friend's sounds better?

Maybe you can elaborate so we know a little more?

sev112 · August 2022

Put 13s on yours and get him to play it, and see if that makes a difference

Tannin · August 2022

dazzer22 said:

What do you do if you dislike the sound of your acoustic guitar

You think about why you dislike the sound. This is not always an easy question to answer, but it's a good thing to get a handle on because only then are you well placed to do something about it. (That might mean replacing it, or changing the strings, or perhaps something else.)

Possibilities include:

* It plays out of tune (All guitars do, but some do it more than others)
* It has an unpleasant envelope. E.g., notes sound loud at first but decay too fast, or it doesn't have enough attack, or too much attack.
* It has a poor bass-middle-treble balance.
* It has poor balance across the strings (e.g., the two plain strings are too loud compared to the wound strings)
* It doesn't "sing". The sound simply lacks cohesion or style, you could imagine getting the same sound out of a cardboard guitar.
* The tone does not appeal to you. (This can often be fixed by careful string choice.)
* It sounds great using Technique X but you are a Technique Y player. (E.g., it sounds great playing gentle fingerstyle but is hopeless for heavy strumming. Or vice-versa.)

Do any of those seem like descriptions of your issues.

Oh, one more thing. I gather you are mostly an electric player. It is a mistake to assume that just because you can play electric guitar you can play acoustic. (Or vice-versa.) They are quite different instruments, and learning to get a good sound out of the "other" sort of guitar takes a lot of time and effort. (Unless you are one of these effortlessly-master-any-instrument people, in which case I hate you.)

Teyeplayer · August 2022

Have you considered the physics of where you are sat when playing? You are holding your acoustic and the vast majority of the sound is projected forward from the sound hole and top, what you hear from the side is a pale imitation. Meanwhile your friend is sat playing and his guitar’s sound hole is facing you. As a result he sounds better, you worse. However, he is possibly thinking the same thing.

Add on factors such as string age and setup and you’ve an absolute wormhole to dive down.

DavidR · August 2022

Put new strings on. Try Monel strings!! 12 gauge to start.

Also, minor doodles. Try replacing bridge saddle and pins with bone, if you're playing with a plectrum, try nails, or fingers or picks, or vice versa! Try raising the note half a tone or a tone with a capo on the 1st or 2nd fret. This may match your notes with the natural resonant frequency of your soundbox, or it may not!

Or. the 'Trigger's Broom' option - buy another acoustic! Preferably one you like the sound of in the shop, try before you buy. Don't pay a lot in the expectation that you'll get a better guitar. Doesn't always work. Set your budget, even if its not much, and then go looking.

Have fun.

ICBM · August 2022

What type of guitar is it and what don’t you like about the sound?

Cost or quality are not always reliable indicators, because personal preference is a huge factor. I once had a Lowden which was a wonderful, beautifully-made, great-sounding guitar… and I genuinely preferred a plywood Hondo Everly Brothers copy I had. The Lowden just did not suit my playing or what I want from an acoustic guitar at all. (Luckily I had only bought it because someone was selling it cheap due to some cosmetic damage.)

Soupman · August 2022

@dazzer22 you don't give many details - if yours is a new guitar it may play in & open up to blow your friend's out of the water! Or not.
As already mentioned, try 12 gauge strings on it if you haven't already.

@Tannin lists a good set of questions above. He also has a running thread of strings & how certain brands sound with different wood combinations - all subjective of course, but a good starting point.
A new set of strings is cheaper than new guitar...

Of course, you could always change your choice of friends...

Whatever you decide, good hunting!

ToneControl · August 2022

sit facing a plastered wall or a door: glass or wood, and listen to the reflected sound when you play
do the same with your friend's guitar

Lewy · August 2022

Have you listened to your friend playing your guitar, or have you played his? What were the results?

bertie · August 2022

ToneControl said:

sit facing a plastered wall or a door: glass or wood, and listen to the reflected sound when you play
do the same with your friend's guitar

this, top of the stairs is a great place to sit. As has been said, acoustics sound a lot different to the person in front, than the person playing

If all of the afore mentioned things don't prove successful (to you) there's one easy option left

Sell it, buy a new one. Simples

Image: /plugins/EmojiExtender/emoji/fb/1.gif

Winny_Pooh · August 2022

Maybe it's a shit guitar... have spare cash? Hunt for a nicer one, play in person only, then flog the old one.

Dave_Mc · August 2022

What are the two guitars?

Do they have the same strings?

dazzer22 · August 2022

the guitar is a Epiphone DR-500MCE Masterbilt it feels well built , but to clear up what i mean by a bad sound, to my ears it sounds dull and flat - lacks tone , the other two guitar was a Crafter D-7 which sounded great and Alvarez which sounded great too ,

Tannin · August 2022

OK, now we are getting somewhere. Some questions for you @dazzer22 ;

(1) What strings does it have?
(2) How old are they?
(3) What style do you play (a strummer, rock rhythm, single note lead, jazz, Celtic folk, or whatever.)
(4) Pick? (if so how hard) Or fingerstyle (flesh or nails?)

Armed with answers to those questions, we can make some useful changes. We may or may not be able to make it exactly what you want, but we can very likely make a big difference.

guitarjack66 · August 2022

dazzer22 said:

the guitar is a Epiphone DR-500MCE Masterbilt it feels well built , but to clear up what i mean by a bad sound, to my ears it sounds dull and flat - lacks tone , the other two guitar was a Crafter D-7 which sounded great and Alvarez which sounded great too ,

I had one of those a couple of years back. Nice guitar but the dreadnought body was a bit too big for me. Its an electro acoustic so are we talking about being played acoustically or through a pick up or amp?

ICBM · August 2022

dazzer22 said:

the guitar is a Epiphone DR-500MCE Masterbilt it feels well built , but to clear up what i mean by a bad sound, to my ears it sounds dull and flat - lacks tone

Sell it and buy a better guitar. I've never played one single modern Epiphone acoustic that "lacks tone" is not a good description of. I say that as a fan of Gibson-style dreadnoughts too.

If possible and you don't need it for stage use, avoid electro-acoustics as well. You'll always get a better guitar for your money with a pure acoustic, and if you need to amplify it you can fit a separate pickup system later, which will not tie you in to built-in electronics which become obsolete faster than a good guitar improves with age.

Sorry to be blunt!

Tannin · August 2022

ICBM said:

If possible and you don't need it for stage use, avoid electro-acoustics as well. You'll always get a better guitar for your money with a pure acoustic

No you won't. (Sorry to be blunt.)

Many makers in many different parts of the world include a pickup system in every guitar they make, and they do it because it saves them money. Suppose it costs $100 USD to buy a pickup system at wholesale, say for a carton quantity of 20. Now let's do the sums.

A maker of any size doesn't buy 20 at a time, they buy hundreds at least, and would generally contract for thousands at a time. So instead of $100 USD, they are paying $65, if that.

Now what about the cost to install it? Practically none - the routing and drilling is done by their CNC machines, it's just a few minutes for a worker to drop it in as they go along doing other tasks. Cost? a couple of dollars, but let's be generous and call it $5 USD.

Other pickup-related costs? zero. Total cost: $70 USD. But much less than that for for makers who are serious about pickups - they are not buying in third-party designs, they have their own system, designed in-house, and this not only brings their costs down even further, in many cases it also results in a better quality pickup. (This certainly applies to Maton and Cole Clark, both famous for their pickup quality, and probably also to Takamine (who claim to have a great pickup system, though I don't know that for myself; probably not to Taylor who's "Expression System" seems to be regarded as just OK, nothing special.) So these makers are likely paying a good deal less than $70 USD per unit, maybe half that much.

Now let's look at the benefits.

(1) Increased sales, because for every buyer that walks away because for some misguided reason he or she does not want a pickup, there are three or four who (often for equally misguided reasons) do want the pickup and will tend to buy Brand X instead of Brand Y if Brand X has a pickup.

(2) Massively reduced inventory and overhead costs. Simply by fitting a pickup as standard, you have slashed your minimum stock levels by nearly half. Instead of needing to have (say) 1000 guitars in your warehouse to meet demand from retailers, you now only need 500 or 600. The retailer saves money too, because there is less chance of them not having the model someone wants to buy in stock if they don't have to buggerise about with both pickup and non-pickup guitars.

(3) Increased variety on the shelf ( = extra sales) because the retailer can have (e.g.) both a cutaway model and a non-cutaway model, or two different colours, or two different wood combinations.

(4) Lower manufacturing costs. Because every model is the same, you don't have to keep stopping and re-starting the line to make pickup and non-pickup models. You have fewer mix-ups, fewer mistakes, less management time wasted.

(5) Even lower buy prices for components because you have much better bargaining power with your suppliers when you can say "we will be fitting your pickup to every single guitar we make". That's a powerful bargaining incentive. Compare with "We will be fitting your (optional) pickup to some of our guitars, we don't really know how many but say 70%") If you have ever worked in sales, you know that the "70%" number can't be trusted, so you do your sums on your sell price assuming less than 50%, 'coz you don't want to go backwards on the deal. But 100% is 100% and you can confidently quote a very sharp price.

So what do all these saving add up to? Something like $200 USD is a reasonable guess. Certainly more than it costs to buggerise about with optional pickups.

These are the economic lessons the Japanese car industry taught the whole world in the 1970s and 1980s. Firms like Toyota and Honda figured out that it was cheaper to simply put a radio in every car than it was to penny-pinch and buggerise about. And customers loved it. Then they did the same thing with electric windows, and alloy wheels, and CD players, and so on and on. The established American and European and Australian manufacturers took a caning in the market before, little by little, they got the message. These days, every car made has a huge list of standard equipment and you can be 100% certain that Ford and VW don't do it because they love their customers. They do it because, all things considered, it is cheaper.

bertie · August 2022

Tannin said:

ICBM said:

If possible and you don't need it for stage use, avoid electro-acoustics as well. You'll always get a better guitar for your money with a pure acoustic

No you won't. (Sorry to be blunt.)

I think this was certainly true about 10+ years ago when having on board electrics (certainly at the mid / lower end) was more rare/costly and could (did) add about 15-20% to the cost of a (low to mid range) guitar(coupled with the fact most sounded awful), but these days with the demand/perception that everyone wants to "plug in" and massively cheaper manufacturing costs - there is very little separation.

dazzer22 · August 2022

guitarjack66 said:

dazzer22 said:

the guitar is a Epiphone DR-500MCE Masterbilt it feels well built , but to clear up what i mean by a bad sound, to my ears it sounds dull and flat - lacks tone , the other two guitar was a Crafter D-7 which sounded great and Alvarez which sounded great too ,

I had one of those a couple of years back. Nice guitar but the dreadnought body was a bit too big for me. Its an electro acoustic so are we talking about being played acoustically or through a pick up or amp?

when played acoustically i don't have an amp as of yet .

bluecat · August 2022

Thanks for that information Tannin, you're a wizard. Never looked at it quite that way before.

TheMadMick · August 2022

Ultimately, the pick up argument is irrelevant. If the guitar sounds good and you can afford it, then buy - pick up or not. You can always buy / save up for a pick up if that is important. If you don't need one (for whichever reason), so much the better.

Gomers · August 2022

It really is a case of buying another guitar you prefer the sound of, if a guitar 'lacks tone', it will do so irrelevant of the string type and set up, IME lacking tone is down to how it's built. Playabilty is also a must.

bertie · August 2022

remind me, did you get your mate ( s) to play it and you listen ? what was the outcome ?

maltingsaudio · August 2022

Epiphone and their Gibson equivalents tend to be “heavily “ made in comparison with the other two mentioned so not surprised yours sounds dull in comparison. It should open up given time, but if that open sound is what your after look elsewhere. If it’s mainly bashing out chords then keep at it.

My 2ps worth

ICBM · August 2022

Tannin said:

No you won't. (Sorry to be blunt.)

Many makers in many different parts of the world include a pickup system in every guitar they make, and they do it because it saves them money. Suppose it costs $100 USD to buy a pickup system at wholesale, say for a carton quantity of 20. Now let's do the sums.

A maker of any size doesn't buy 20 at a time, they buy hundreds at least, and would generally contract for thousands at a time. So instead of $100 USD, they are paying $65, if that.

Now what about the cost to install it? Practically none - the routing and drilling is done by their CNC machines, it's just a few minutes for a worker to drop it in as they go along doing other tasks. Cost? a couple of dollars, but let's be generous and call it $5 USD.

Other pickup-related costs? zero. Total cost: $70 USD. But much less than that for for makers who are serious about pickups - they are not buying in third-party designs, they have their own system, designed in-house, and this not only brings their costs down even further, in many cases it also results in a better quality pickup. (This certainly applies to Maton and Cole Clark, both famous for their pickup quality, and probably also to Takamine (who claim to have a great pickup system, though I don't know that for myself; probably not to Taylor who's "Expression System" seems to be regarded as just OK, nothing special.) So these makers are likely paying a good deal less than $70 USD per unit, maybe half that much.

Now let's look at the benefits.

(1) Increased sales, because for every buyer that walks away because for some misguided reason he or she does not want a pickup, there are three or four who (often for equally misguided reasons) do want the pickup and will tend to buy Brand X instead of Brand Y if Brand X has a pickup.

(2) Massively reduced inventory and overhead costs. Simply by fitting a pickup as standard, you have slashed your minimum stock levels by nearly half. Instead of needing to have (say) 1000 guitars in your warehouse to meet demand from retailers, you now only need 500 or 600. The retailer saves money too, because there is less chance of them not having the model someone wants to buy in stock if they don't have to buggerise about with both pickup and non-pickup guitars.

(3) Increased variety on the shelf ( = extra sales) because the retailer can have (e.g.) both a cutaway model and a non-cutaway model, or two different colours, or two different wood combinations.

(4) Lower manufacturing costs. Because every model is the same, you don't have to keep stopping and re-starting the line to make pickup and non-pickup models. You have fewer mix-ups, fewer mistakes, less management time wasted.

(5) Even lower buy prices for components because you have much better bargaining power with your suppliers when you can say "we will be fitting your pickup to every single guitar we make". That's a powerful bargaining incentive. Compare with "We will be fitting your (optional) pickup to some of our guitars, we don't really know how many but say 70%") If you have ever worked in sales, you know that the "70%" number can't be trusted, so you do your sums on your sell price assuming less than 50%, 'coz you don't want to go backwards on the deal. But 100% is 100% and you can confidently quote a very sharp price.

So what do all these saving add up to? Something like $200 USD is a reasonable guess. Certainly more than it costs to buggerise about with optional pickups.

These are the economic lessons the Japanese car industry taught the whole world in the 1970s and 1980s. Firms like Toyota and Honda figured out that it was cheaper to simply put a radio in every car than it was to penny-pinch and buggerise about. And customers loved it. Then they did the same thing with electric windows, and alloy wheels, and CD players, and so on and on. The established American and European and Australian manufacturers took a caning in the market before, little by little, they got the message. These days, every car made has a huge list of standard equipment and you can be 100% certain that Ford and VW don't do it because they love their customers. They do it because, all things considered, it is cheaper.

Sorry, I disagree with almost all that except for the bits about economic benefits *to the manufacturer*. (Not the buyer.) An electro-acoustic still costs more than an equivalent pure acoustic even now - hence, unless you actually *need* the onboard electronics for use on stage, it's worse value for money and you're still better off buying one without, since if your budget is limited it means you can buy a better guitar.

Bearing in mind we are almost always talking about complex systems with onboard preamps - you really need to just avoid these unless you need the functionality for hands-on control, since they add potential unreliability (I have a lot of experience of this as a repairer), inevitable obsolescence, and in some people's opinion actually affect the acoustic tone of the guitar for the worse. And not least, an ugly plastic box in the side of the guitar. A simple pickup and jack, even with an active buffer and a battery holder on the inside, not so much.

I don't even think they sound that good. Ironically, the most natural amplified acoustic sound you can get now is in some ways the least natural in terms of technology - a plain undersaddle transducer driving digital modelling which effectively gives studio-quality mic'ed sounds, so you're not actually hearing the sound of the guitar at all really. As it happens I've just removed a quite highly regarded pickup/mic system from a guitar and replaced it with a plain UST and an offboard modelling preamp - it sounds better amplified, and I can replace the offboard unit at any time the technology improves further.

So, no I would not buy an electro-acoustic given the choice, even though manufacturers would like me to.

Dave_Mc · August 2022

dazzer22 said:

the guitar is a Epiphone DR-500MCE Masterbilt it feels well built , but to clear up what i mean by a bad sound, to my ears it sounds dull and flat - lacks tone , the other two guitar was a Crafter D-7 which sounded great and Alvarez which sounded great too ,

LOL guess how many of those I've tried? I'll leave the suggestions to the people who've actually tried them, lol.

dazzer22 · August 2022

maltingsaudio said:

Epiphone and their Gibson equivalents tend to be “heavily “ made in comparison with the other two mentioned so not surprised yours sounds dull in comparison. It should open up given time, but if that open sound is what your after look elsewhere. If it’s mainly bashing out chords then keep at it.

My 2ps worth

Are you saying it will sound better after a few years ? I do strum chords a lot i know if i sell it i would be selling it for a big loss as with most things you buy new . the sound feels lower in volume like i said the other guitars sound louder and brighter,

BillDL · August 2022

If you think about the bridge slot and saddle on an acoustic guitar with an under-saddle piezo strip or cable, the saddle has to be very slightly looser in the slot than on an acoustic with the same kind of saddle but without a piezo transducer under it. The reason for this is that you need the base of the saddle to be making good contact with the piezo element, and if it is too tight in the slot it may not be doing that. A slot that grips the saddle just tightly enough that you can lift the guitar by holding the saddle, but not so tight that you have to pull it out with pliers, is going to transfer much more of the vibrations through the bridge and top than a saddle that needs to be be slightly looser. Depending on the thickness of the bridge itself and the thickness of the piezo element, the saddle can often lean forward very slightly as it is usually sitting much higher in the slot with less of it down into the slot. This position can cause loss of tone.

A good example was an early 80s Yamaha acoustic that I fitted with a Shadow piezo unit a couple of years after I had bought it new. It was the type that has a high enough output not to need a preamp, and had individual hard saddles set into a narrow metal box profile with the piezo element sandwiched permanently in between them. I had to widen the saddle slot very slightly to accommodate it. One of the saddles became a bit dodgy so a while back I removed it, shaved down the original hard "urea" plastic saddle, and put it back into the guitar on top of a fairly standard under-saddle piezo strip (using one of those integrated end-pin preamps). The saddle leaned very slightly forward and the resultant unamplified tone was dull and uninspiring. I have other electro-acoustics anyway, so I removed it, made a new bone saddle that fits tightly, and the improvement in tone was immediate and startling. You definitely get better quality of unamplified sound with a properly fitted hard saddle (Bone / Tusq) making good contact with the wood in the slot than from a looser fitting saddle with a piezo strip under it.

drofluf · August 2022

@BillDL makes a very good point. I’ve just restrung my son’s guitar that has a Piezo and a correspondingly loose saddle. Whilst restringing the saddle slipped up and forward, the downward force from the strings held it in place but tone (and intonation) suffered.

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