I think that one variable that was overlooked here was a control element,meaning a 2nd guitar that was unchanged in both before and after recordings.If the control guitar sounded identical in both before and after recordings then you know that something in the recording process hasn't changed and caused an apparent difference.Because i can clearly hear a difference in the 2nd recording itself other than the guitars sound.
Yup. In the dirty example, the distortion from the drive suddenly is much duller. In no way, shape, or form, can any part of the guitar itself change that so much. Bumped a mic or knob 100%. Hell, could even be cold tubes vs warmed up tubes.
No need for this for me as a custom painter, from my experience the sound differences are repeatable, I have painted many guitars in both and the sound differences are always similar. The more Poly you put on a guitar the tub-ier it sounds with a bit of a dong ring. My first electric guitar SG I refinished it many, many times over the years, first in nitro in the late '70s, then nitro cleared with polyurethane, then more and more... each time it had a very noticeable difference that was consistent the more poly you spray on it... I have gone back to Nitro for all my color work for many reasons but on guitars because of this...
Yes, it felt like the recording sounded completely different. Almost as if the mic placement as a centimeter off or so. Almost like the nitro recording has more clear/presence as if it was closer to the center of the speaker and the second recording for the poly sounded like the mic wasnt in the same spot facing the speaker. The second recording also sounds more direct and the nitro recording sounds more 3D. interesting experiment though
@@shinyredguitar It is always necessary if you want to compare something. That is actually how scientific research works. Otherwise, you don't really know what else differed between the two takes.
I like how you think, but no -- the polyurethane guitar followed by the same guitar refinished is the best you can do. You can't really have a second guitar unless you can duplicate EVERY SINGLE THING on two guitars down to the provenance of its wood grain. The other problem is that the human ear is fallible -- just now you had three people listening, and they couldn't even agree. Besides, one man's harsh is another man's sparkly is a third man's hiss. You really need instruments measuring the waveforms and the amplitudes, and then Fourier analysis to split them apart and then figure out if there's a difference at all and where exactly it is. And THEN you'd have to reverse-engineer the sounds you got from your measurements and play them to a group sufficiently large to create a normal margin of error. Now, you can shortcut that and do a semi-scientific test, but you're still not going to get around the identical guitars problem. We know that his guitar is basically the same underneath the two coats (hopefully, the pickups were put _exactly_ back in the same spot); otherwise, I'm going to want to know every last detail about the two guitars. How many times are the pickups wound? What factories did they come out of? Were they created within a few days of one another? What climates have they passed through? And on and on and on. All of this is why nobody can agree on how much of a guitar's sound is acoustic and how much is electric, it's always done "guitar one way" and then "same guitar done differently". The fact that it's inherently unscientific is why people still debate things like whether top-loaded strings versus through-loaded strings have a different sound. No one is even sure whether the acoustic properties of a guitar matter AT ALL. I mean, there are individuals who are sure, but the point is getting them all to agree, and that's not happening any time soon. PS: The before and after test that was the most obvious was "how does this bass sound when run through a $15 chord versus a $125 chord"? The answer was, "much, MUCH, *MUCH* better". Through the expensive cord, you could literally hear a few microseconds of the guy's skin running across the string before it was plucked. Discovering that all the tiny tweaks I do to enhance my sound get gobbled up because the signal is run through a copper wire instead of gold is one of those things I wish I didn't know.
for having removed this layer of plastic from my telecaster and having repainted it in nitro from an acoustic point of view the sound changes greatly compared to one of my other poly guitars but once connected to an amp I perceive no difference
That’s my putty knife!!! (Scraping the poly) I was a house painter for YEARS and I always had that little guy in my pocket. It’s from Lowe’s or Home Depot so it’s not really anything special but man. Huge sentimental value - I called it my little friend. Used it every day, had it all worn in with rounded edges and thinned down from years of scraping/patching walls…Dr. Schroom, you just took me back :)
The truth is ... Leo Fender had been using poly as a grain sealer since the late 1950s I think... And nitro was sprayed on top for sunburst or solid colors.... So this entire topic is a mute point... Leo used both .... Jeff Beck until passing his white strat i think was poly finish.. Its the player that makes the guitar sound great .... Hendrix played brand new Fender strats off the rack and they were poly finished... Interesting topic though..... :)
"fullerplast" literally full of plastic. The cork sniffy shit drives me nuts! It's so ahistorical and disinterested in reality. I think the reason vintage fenders "relic" the way they do is because the lacquer top coats actually don't bond well to the sealer and check heavily, then flake.
Yes, it could be the difference between nitro and poly. Or it could be the 4% difference in weight. Or it could be the process of taking the guitar apart, desoldering pickups and electronics, stripping it, cleaning it up for refinishing, reassembly, re-soldering pickups and electronics, and doing what I imagine is a top-notch setup on the guitar to get it ready to play again. Honestly, folks, I used to be a die-hard advocate for finishes and tone woods, but I've seen so many tests that have stripped these influences away and found that the ONLY significant influences on electric guitar tone involve direct changes to pickups, electronics, and strings. Because there's SO much that happened to the guitar as a part of refinishing, I'd be far more inclined to suspect messing with electronics and doing a setup than any real impact of nitro v. poly. If you're interested in some pretty thorough testing of these elements, check out Jim Lill's YT channel.
Yep... apart from the instrument its the human element as well. Anyone can try this simple experiment: Record a guitar part. Then next day, take the same guitar and record the same part again. Compare the 2 recordings....they will NEVER sound exactly the same.
Maybe the room was hotter/colder on one of the days, this is like the light/heavy string debate. I think we should concentrate more on studying and improving playing the instrument. Of course I understand the logic for these video$ exi$tence.
Agreed... I ask this next sentence be read aloud in the voice of Simpsons comic book guy... "Clearly the %20 vs %40 graphite impregnated nut, along with a stainless steel washers on the truss rod and synthetic fret markers are the keys to sounding like Eric Johnson" 😅😅😅😅
Truth : a small change in action height can totally change the sound of a guitar : a lower action thins up the sound , higher action has more bass and punch . It could also be the strings : brand new set of strings VS one a few days old can already account for the difference . I believe Nitro VS Poly can make a difference on a jazz archtop acoustic : a fully hollow guitar with solid wood top : It can make this kind of guitar much lighter and much more resonant . I've seen it done on a 90's Epi Casino : the guitar went from 7 lbs to 3lbs and felt like a different instrument : , but it was the thickest coat of poly ever .
Sounded like when the microphone positions changes on the speaker. which I believe you kept the same between the two. Crazy how how it changed. Would have been cool to get a DI of each to do a frequency analysis on, eliminate as many variables as possible.
@@zaldvalencia at 8:00 area, you can clearly see the same guy playing both finishes - he's wearing the same necklace. Yes, he's wearing different shirt/jacket, but that's because it was days apart. Each player played both finishes.
I actually thought the poly finish was a little snappier if that makes sense...gritty? The nitro sounded warmer and a bit more open. There's definitely a difference between the two! I think there's a place for both sonically. Great comparison video Mason!
People always do these tests by ear. We need spectral frequency graph and wave form comparison to see what's really happening. That being said the poly had more bass and I didn't hear any difference on the top end between the 2 finishes. Again spectral frequency results would confirm this or not. When it comes to signal you want as much information from the guitar as possible, because you can always EQ it out. it's much harder if not impossible to EQ it back in. So poly for me in this case
Another problem. I doubt the test is truly blind. When I hold a guitar with poly finish, I can feel it (I believe this is easy.) So if I was doing this test, I'd always know which guitar I was playing.
That would defeat the purpose. If you analyze with machines there’s no difference. Same with all audio. The home audiophiles are just as bad if not worse about weird things effecting sound.
@TeensierPython If you measure on a frequency response graph, you are literally getting a picture of what you are hearing. If it sounds different, it will appear different on the graph. But people's ear health and hearing is an unwanted variable. And people are susceptible to prior bias when analyzing the sound of two instruments. The "machines" are not. The original commenter is correct. I would suggest looking up Glenn Fricker if you don't know who that UA-camr is. He has painstakingly gone over tone myths and busted many.
Yeah, they didnt show any of the settings either and did the tests probably weeks apart. No way the mics didnt get nudged or the amps settings tweaked. A very flawed test that proves nothing whatsoever.
@@thomasritter3391they are claiming the cabinet used is in an iso box that does not get regular access. So in this case the cabinet mic should be consistent if that is true. The amp settings however I cannot speak to other than the “we kept the settings the same” comment. I mean IMO, if they are using a recording studio then I would almost lean more towards, they logged the settings after then initial test, and then put the amp back at the assumed settings for the second test. This would result in different sounds because of the slight difference in knob placement, but the user could still assume they are the exact same settings based on visuals. If this was a personal rig that goes unused for the weeks in between then I would be more inclined to believe it but again, they used what looks like a legit working studio to do this.
Speakers are usually the last element most think about, but they can entirely change the sound of the amp. Ideally, I like mixing alnicos and ceramics for the high and low end details each provide.
Two things I noticed as a woodworker that also plays guitar: 1) that original body was never sanded or finished because there was no need to with that thick layer of polyurethane finish. 2) because of the aforementioned, it makes me wonder if manufacturers would hide poorer quality pieces of lumber under thick finishes to make them seem more appealing. Different lumbers have different properties; having an effect on the timbre and resonance of an instrument so it would most certainly effect the sound.
Good take!! A mate of mine stripped his Squier Tele, changed pickups (JJs local to us), CTS pots, wire etc... Built from 2 pieces of Alder, it came out well, so well his mate asked him to strip his 02 US Strat.. The Strat was 4 pieces of Alder! (maybe why it was a solid colour?). Apart from drying time, both guitars sound great. Edit: both had a poly filler coat/s under the top coats that needed sanding to remove.
This is an absolutely genius hypothesis that I never would have even considered had I not decided to read some of the comments. You have completely shaken my entire stance on this whole debate
Of course it goes without saying that guitar manufacturers are going to separate high quality woods with good visual Aesthetics from knotty wood and they're going to use opaque colors on the naughty wood and expose the Grain on the high quality good-looking stuff
We hear with our eyes first. These videos are pretty useless without addressing bias. Didn’t that guy with all those tone deconstructing videos put all this to rest? These videos prime people, everyone ‘knows’ nitro is supposed to sound better, and so it will because you primed that response by labelling everything.
Could the pickups have ended up being farther from the strings once the pickguard was sitting on a thinner nitro finish? This could possibly explain some of the change in the tonal balance and gain structure. Regardless, I do believe you on the guitar sounding better acoustically with nitro :)
I mean they did say that original polyurethane finish was substantially thicker then the new nitrocellulose so you make a good point. I’m not sure if a 1/32-3/32” would change sound THAT much though, on the other hand.
Pickup height is measured from the bottom of the string to the top of the pickup, so if they set it up right (and I assume they did), then what is under the pickguard would not matter.
@@traceo6 I am not sure about the pick up height. He says in the video he took off the pick guard and so the pick ups are at the exact same height. That would mean the first commentor is correct, in the lower signal or less bass could be associated to the thinner finish, dropping the pickguards a little bit 🤷🏽♂️ The other question I personally have is did they also get a brand new set of strings each time, or were the poly strings older?
Ive seen a hack how removing the neck and re screwing it with a certain technique give the guitar way better sustain. I wonder if that was a factor opposed to the paint finish.
I love nitro on my guitars, not even for the sound, but just how it feels. Poly is like playing with a toy, while nitro feels like handling a piece of art.
Fender used fullerplast to seal the wood back in the 50’s and 60’s. In case you don’t notice, the plast in fullerplast means plastic. They only used nitrocellulose lacquer because it was what was available back then.
I have a roasted alder Warmoth strat body. No finish at all. Neck is goncalo alves with bocote fretboard. No finish there either. 100% natural. Neck is Plek'ed. Plays and sounds like a strat on steroids. Body and neck adjust relatively quickly to different temperatures and humidities. Danny at Straight Frets suggested that I put finish on it. I said no thanks. No regrets.
I had a special run strat with hand rubbed oil. Nitro is my favorite. I don't believe that oil finish is better, even it's thinner than nitro. Nitro is definitely better than poly. It's a good protection material for guitars and also a good tone shaper.
Everything about this video feels like a parody. Let’s not forget - this is a company that wants to sell you their product - or that of a guitar repainting company. Without a proper control group, controlled variables and video proof of amp settings, guitar setup, microphone placement, pre-amp settings and picking technique this might as well be a parody. LOL.
We're not in the business of refinishing guitars. So what product are we selling? Secondly, the control was the DI (failsafe backup), the rest of the stuff, even if shown on video, would be just as easy to manipulate the results so there is a certain part of "faith" that needs to be provided by the viewer. The real test is can someone repeat the results as anyone can manipulate a finding even when showing you every step. We have another follow up video coming out showing the DI results recorded at the same time, as well as EQ analysis. I presume however that the polyurethane apologists with remain polyamorous nonetheless.
@@VertexEffectsInc Schroom Custom Guitarworks does, don’t they? Without actual proper evidence I’m not buying it. I’m sorry. Not worth arguing either. I’ve gotta say though - pretty rough and harsh way of communicating. Good luck on future videos.
One of the main points made is that the poly finish was thick - about the tickness of a credit card. So, what is the thickness of the nitro finish? That thickness needs to be considered for all significant meeting surfaces on the guitar: the bridge, the pickguard, the neck pocket and the back of the neck. Let's consider that the bridge and pickguard moved in the same direction, as did the neck, however the neck has two meeting surfaces that experienced a change in thickness (the neck and the neck pocket). The sum difference in those surfaces between poly and nitro essentially changed the plane of the strings as they travel over the pickups (they moved closer to the pickups). This means you not only changed the finish, but also changed the geometry of the neck join and how the strings interact with the pickups. That needs to be considered - so, was the tonal shift simply from the change finish composition, or change in thickness of the finish - i.e. was the tonal change from the finish, from changing the angle/distance of the strings or even both? I'm not sure, but I think there's more at play here than just the finish composition.
This is exactly what I have experienced with two Jackson warriors I owned. One is gloss black poly, the other was sanded and oiled. Both had EMG 57's. Active pickups. The raw oiled one had so much more of an open, harmonically rich sound. It was acoustically louder when not plugged in. Everyone that played and heard it in person noted the same thing. Which also debunks the myth that actives will sound the same in any guitar. Thing is, pickups pickup string vibrations, people don't seem to get the wood vibrating, is vibrating the stationary points of the string (bridge and nut)) and the neck "whips" like a bridge with traffic on it (you know how you can feel it shake and vibrate?) This feedbacks (not feedback) into the string vibration. You can hear it in the harmonic content, mostly. I make guitars and have made two teles, one a set neck, the other a bolt on. I put the same humbucker in both, there is a difference in these things; granted it is subtle. But the biggest difference I have found is not in the wood type (provided they are all dry) but rather in the difference of how thick the finish is. The thick finishes do sound more like there is covering on the sound, a blanket or object in front of the speaker. Like it isn't as present. Just my experience. When building I only worry about woods for looks and physical properties for what it has to accomplish in the build (like neck stiffness and stability, ability to hold frets, weight, etc), and for finishes, as thin as possible or oiled. PRS has concluded that thickness of the finish matters more than whether it is poly or nitro.
Pickups are not microphones, they cant capture soundwaves, they just capture the changes in a magnetic field cause by the vibration of the strings (metal strings), so paint finish as type of wood/material are irrelevant (take a look at James Trussart guitars), the only thing that matters is how well is build, tune, intonates, performs and of course mainly the electronics!
there are infinitive variables, if i have to guess the player/playing, atmospheric pressure, temperature and humidity in the aire, big factors in how the instrument is going to perfom!
@@jannatinkarlen8702 im sorry but not their not microphonic, it just pickup disturbances/alterations in the magnetic field, they dont capture any soundwave at all, thats why they are called pickups and not microphones!
It’s pretty understandable why Fender chose their Poly finish recipe. Now, other manufacturers have their recipe where they use a small amount of polo with nitro
Holy cow. Night and day. I've gotta rethink my whole life now. Would've been really cool to hear a sample putting a microphone and playing the guitar resonating acoustically without amp. Cool video, man!
How did I miss this Ep?!? Had no idea it was that easy to take off the paint & finish! I’ve always wanted to try a bare wood strat! Thank you for letting us in on this! 🤘👽👽👽🎸
Vertes, thank you for conducting these tests. I'm hearing a lot of reverb during one test. Shouldn't these tests be done with no reverb and tone controls on flat?
The setup did change after removing the thick poly shell. The neck is lower, with better contact in the pocket, the pickguard (and Bridge) is lower as well. As for playing, it is a hell of a lot more forgiving to fly sweaty hands over a nitro finish. When I shoot nitro I never spray the neck pocket and my necks are very lightly finished as well. That connection seems to help the strings ring better. Enjoyed the episode Mason.
Wasn't the argument of wood/finish/etc. being responsible for "tone" already debunked? Some guy created a guitar with no body or neck, and compared the same string/pick-up config in an actual guitar, and there was no significant change.
@@joseislanio8910 any test or experiment like this can only ever hope to show one thing: how that specific test pans out; running with those specific variables: wood, guitar, strings, pickups, pick, player, instrument cable, microphone…etc. There's literally not a test that exists that can disprove tone wood. And it doesn't help that when you play a Les Paul with an all mahogany body there's clearly a difference in pick attack to the ones with maple tops; or the difference with the Norlin era maple neck LPs are to traditional mahogany ones, or how much brighter an ash or alder bodies on the early PRS CEs sound compared to a mahogany and mahogany/maple top bodied models.
This shows what I found when I stripped the poly finish off my own strat. It sounded better with the poly finish! Not what I was expecting when I did it because of all the "nitro sound best & poly kills tone" comments on the web - but it almost sounds like a buffer is on with poly and off when it's nitro.
“Feel” to the fingers and hands - that is definitely a difference players can notice. I would personally attribute any perceptible difference in SOUND nitro vs. poly to be how “feel” influences the playing & not resonance, EQ, volume, etc. These comparisons are always highly subjective and personal at the end of the day. If the differences could be measured and quantified (e.g. frequency analyzer) then that would be more objective. My advice: don’t let someone else influence what YOU like better, and use your own hands & ears to be the final say in your own preferences. That’s ultimately what matters most… VERY interesting comparison with before/after in WEIGHT of the instrument - that is a difference worth considering for sure! Great video, and well done by the contributors.
Extreme EQ differences in the examples, I’m having a hard time believing its just the finish. I spent 3 years manufacturing these in Fender, I could be wrong but I suspect something changed in the signal chain in the month or months between the recording examples.
The part over looked in this debate to me is that the pickups are floating on plastic not connected to the wood. Not saying finish doesn’t matter but wouldn’t pick guard have more of an influence?
I'm gobsmacked that there is that much difference. However I'll still always go for poly. I want the finish on a guitar to protect it. There are lots of different ways to tweak the sound of a guitar, but to date, the only effective way to protect it, is with a strong finish (or just always leave it in the case...)
@@VertexEffectsInc Got it. Very cool to hear the results. I have a strat with a poly finish and your video sounds the exact same to mine. Can’t believe the tone I’ve been hunting for has to do with the finish of my guitar. That’s crazy.
Saying that guitar woods need to breathe is absolute cow dung. Trees die after being cut, no more breathing. Period. In woodworking, which guitar building basically is, you have to provide expansion joints for the wood for when they expand or contract. Wood absorbs and loses moisture seasonally or when it is moved from place to place with different weather and humidity levels.
Almost sounds like 2 different strats and like both but if I had to pick one based on tone Poly overall sounded like more output, deeper bass, smoother high end and the mids seemed more present.
um, i think this was not conducted properly. If you want to do a blind test, the researcher cannot be a test subject. A sample size of 3 is not a lot, not enough to get good statistical data. It is good that it was the same guitar but painted nitro. I'm not sure if you had the same recording set up as the camera angle was different for some shots. Any discernable differences I heard i dismissed because of the differences I saw and in the way it was being played. Things I would do differently, I would just have the same guitar spec in nitro vs poly as getting it painted would cost a lot and you'd have a lot of time between recording. You could maybe just borrow some guitars for this but it would also seem like quite an ordeal to test. what a researcher would probably do is get just the bodies, then suspend the body from something like springs or rubberbands. It would be in an anechoic chamber. Then maybe do several tests like a knock (done by a machine or contraption that knocks the same way) on the body in a specific spot, nitro vs poly, then have the recording analyzed with a spectrograph and look at the differences in resonance. you could also play a short sound at the body, then somehow record the body afterwards to see if the body resonates at that frequency and then do this for a sweep of 20-20k hertz. That way you would have actual DATA on nitro vs poly. Not just some guy saying "oh i thought it sounded sparkly' or muddy or whatever nonscientific term. in my opinion, i like nitro over poly just because of the way it looks when it ages, that's it, but I would be interested of the tonal differences between the two in a scientific context. perhaps there was already research done on this? I'm not going to check right now but you would look up online on physics or acustosonic journal sites of nitrocellulose vs poly.
@@timwhite5562 i can hear differences, but if you know about testing you will know this was conducted incorrectly which means you have to throw all the "data" out.
@@sonicase ive been a luthier for 25 years. I've built and worked on thousands and thousands of guitars, but it doesn't take that many before you start seeing and hearing patterns. I became aware of the effect different finishes and woods have years before I started to see on forums that apparently it was all in my head. Stringed instruments work through resonance, the strings are what get it to resonate, but the strings themselves contribute very little to the sound. This is the case even with solid body guitars. The pickups are picking up the vibrations of the strings, but how they vibrate: the frequency, duration, etc are all influenced by what they're mounted to. It's the instrument itself that's making the sound, and wrapping it in plastic is going to have an effect. Nitro lacquer and acrylic have the ability to resonate all on their own, polyester and urethane does not. Modern nitro allows the instrument to resonate more freely, while polys restrict them. The lacquer they used back in the 50s and into the 60s actually contributed to the total resonance of the guitars because it used to set into a hard glass-like finish that had a ring to it. They started adding plasticizers and inhibitors because while the wood expanded and contracted with temp and moisture changes, the hard finish didn't and would start to cheque and crack easily. Today people like that, but they didn't back then. This same type of quality applies to the hide glue they use on higher end guitars: hide glue has a resonant quality of its own, normal carpenters glue doesn't. Actually it applies even more to the glue because the wood actually absorbs it, it's a "self-clamping" adhesive and bonds on a molecular level. This results in that it's as close to getting two pieces of wood to act like a single solid piece as you'll be able to achieve, while with normal wood glue there will always be a film that separates them. *Normally I wouldn't expect urethane to have this much of a difference, it's usually a much more subtle thing than a polyester finish. The benefits of urethane is that you don't need to apply anywhere near as many coats as you do with lacquer, you can do two or three where lacquer is going to take several. This guitar had an especially heavy finish for some reason.
@@sonicase dude, this isn't a university study and no one is splitting the atom here. They're trying something out and seeing what happens. The only reason people are interested is that they're curious to see what happens.
It's not crazy, it's a HUGE difference and if you can't hear it your speakers suck or your ears are blown lol Both have a good sound, I'd have to play them to decide which I really preferred but just hearing them through this video, the difference was surprising and vivid to my ears at least. It would have been cool if you picked up the guitar when it was completely stripped and just played it bare... oiling the body just like one would do on the neck, something like that would be intriguing.
The thing is, after playing a ton of guitars over 25 years, whatever changes the "feel" of the guitar makes an absolutely huge difference. I pick up my tele with a satin neck and I just play it differently than my les Paul. I'm absolutely positive that the guitars are their own unique beasts, and how they feel determines how you play them! So when you hear the guys say the neck is satin, it's that change that makes all the difference. Next rest, give them a poly guitar a D then satin the neck, they will play it differently!
Yes, the guitar influences the guitarist and the guitar player him or herself makes a huge difference. I own a mid tier 90s SG and a friend (who plays way better than me) has a 60s SG. He sounds so much better, I always thought, I want to get one of those once I save up the money. Then he played my guitar. And he sounded again so much better than me. I haven't bought the vintage guitar yet. 😂
Interesting perspective, where asthetically, I prefer Poly over Nitro. The tonal difference is more the same difference, that gets discussed with changing the trem block on a strat, or a Floyd Rose, in which really, we are changing the resonent freaquency in all aspects. The lack of weight kinda shows that, in this demonstration. Add that humidity, and temperature are other variables, that can be kept consistant, but are not always perfect. You'd probably have fun testing saddle material, as well as block material like copper, or titanium for the block, on that strat for research purposes. Thanks for the video on what you found going the route of Poly versus Nitro.
I'm with you -- PU sounded more jangle-pop to me, while NC was bassier, but it seemed like the mic location was different for the before and after. Unless your test guitarists weren't told that you were changing the finish and instead were just told "I'm having my guitar setup changed -- tell me what you think", I'm surprised they didn't know which was which just by looking at it. PU gives you a mirror finish, while NC scatters the light a bit. IMO it's the reason that bursts on a Gibson just look better, while metallic type finishes like Candy Apple Red look better in Polyurethane. Either way, you'll take my telecaster when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. About the difference in the looks: if I saw that guitar, I'd stare at it forEVER thinking "That's a black strat. Except it's not. Except it obviously is." So, even if nothing else, you've got an instrument that looks nice, is unique, and is going to leave gear nerds scratching their heads.
There’s a poly clear coat under the nitro on my Fender guitars. I’ve one of those Clapton Strats! It’s a “Blackie” model with Lace gold pickups. It’s a pity these were not nitro. I find the Fender USA polyurethane is thinner than the Fender Mex polyester. The reason I like nitro is because I don’t have to worry about dings and scratches the in same way with a poly finish as it just shatters and cracks if impacted.
I'd like to see an A/B comparison with all of the same work done, minus changing the finish. In other words, disassemble, de-solder, etc., then wait a couple months and put it back together again.
Interesting test! I preferred the more open, brighter, livelier sound of the nitro....but, could the test have been a bit more controlled? Same microphone, and EXACT same mic placement? Tubes aged a couple of months in between tests? Take that out of the equation with a Kemper or similar with exact recreatable settings? Same pick and picking location? How about testing the guitar in between with NO finish?
In the end it really doesn't matter what paint or what wood you got on your guitar. Nothing you could adjust with an EQ. Don't overthink on something like this, play what you like and make music.
Show me 2 guitars with the same wood, same finish, same neck, same pickups and setup, played by the same guy in the same amp that sound the same and i will believe in tonewood, tonefinish and tonewhatever. One can argue about vibration and how different finishes let the wood vibrate more or less, but that wont make you a better player.
It won’t make you a better player, but refinishing my partscaster with nitro makes it feel more MINE so I’m more motivated to play it so I’ll get better (is the hope?)
Another really interesting video / shootout - hey guys, or mason, anyone know what the vibey steve luke, mike landau style 80s clean song that comes on at the 5:50 second mark in the chapter "refinishing the guitar" ? * Very human nature / MJ esque sounding or basically mateus asato on any given day of the week lol. Please lmk ! Im sure im not the only one who was curious. Thanks in advance 🙏🤟
Anyone!?? I’m still trying to figure this one out too. Very Huff/Landau/Luke like. I can hear what sounds like Tri-Stereo Chorus, MicroPitch, Compression - typical 80’s/early 90’s rhythm guitar track. Sounds so familiar - surely someone knows…!?
Very interesting test. The polyurithane has more presence, tighter sound.. more definition, more articulated. Sounds a little more "plastic". The nitro sounds more muddy, darker sound overall.. the acoustic nature comes through the pickups, kinda like it has more air in the sound.. the notes blend together nicer imo.. sounds more organic, like you can hear the wood feedback on the strings better, which is probably the case. I like it more.
Very interesting. Definitely 100% was able to blindly pick out the differences between the two (purposely listened only the first time to make sure it was fair blind A/B). There is a very clear difference. The good news for anyone listening (that preferred the nitro over poly and doesn’t have the ability to get theirs refinished) is any stock EQ in your DAW would be able to match the two. In this example, a subtle cut in the low mids (medium Q) and some subtle top end would have evened them out sonically. Thanks for doing this experiment. @vertex effects please do a similar one comparing the same guitar with a maple neck versus a rosewood neck (of the same specs - only difference being the fretboard layer). That should be very interesting too. Cheers
I have always been a nitro fan and have heard even bigger differences on other refin's in the case of this Strat add a band and the Sonic differences may be lost but the loss of weight and the feel of the neck alone are a big plus.
Sounds like new strings on the nitro takes. Did you put new strings on for the poly take? Some clips had a notable volume difference. Thanks for doing this, I know it was a lot of work.
This is kinda crazy to me. The first demo (clean test) i preferred the nitro, a little more bell like on the top, but the second demo ( edge of breakup) the nitro sounded dead in comparison! Granted I didn't think there was all that much difference between coats, but it was enough to notice just through my computer speakers. I just don't play clean like that, ever, so I always have the option to boost whatever frequency and get whatever sound I want. Personally, I would never re finish a guitar for audio purposes. That is a purely aesthetic choice imo and it costs so much to have done/ really time consuming to do it yourself (I've tried several times!) that, for me, I would just get the guitar I want when I buy it (paint, sound etc). If the paint chips or scratches through it's life then so be it, it's my guitar!
I call bs or poor test controls. Clear difference between recordings aside from guitar. Should have had a control DI reamp to ensure no difference in recording methods.
Gosh, all you people saying that wood and finish doesn’t matter are killing me. Do you have ears? Do you not hear the clear difference? This is SO definitive.
Has anyone tried shellack french polishing on a solidbody? As a piano builder I use it on soundboards when I restore Grand Pianos. Sounds great.I am thinking about buying a squier CV 50 Tele and french polish it. Great Video! Greetings from Germany
Sounds like the mic is in a different position on the speaker. Should've taken a DI and reamped both in the same session so the rigs weren't just "as close as possible"
I recently modded a project guitar, and one of the changes I made was treating the fingerboard with epoxy, which I then sanded to the thinnest layer possible. Twenty fours hours later …. the guitar sounded terrible ! I was shocked at how terrible. It was like that airy ‘synthetic harmonic’ sound of piezo pickups. Second day … the same. I was major.y disappointed. Third day … wow ! It sounded better than ever. Point : the resin finally fully cured, and was not so elastic - and just the effect of the surface of the fingerboard made a very significant difference. Conclusion : the hardness factor of the coating results in differences due to the sonic reflectivity of the surface in relation to different frequencies. The bouncing around of vibrations in the body of an electric guitar *must* influence the output of magnetic pickups, because they are transducing the output of the strings which are mechanically connected to the body. So saying ‘it’s only string vibrations, the body has nothing to do with it’ is ignoring the mechanical acoustic coupling of the body and strings via the bridge and fretboard.
Hi "Have you guys checked the guitar, point by point, regarding the soldering you did? Secondly, compare it without the pickguard and with the guitar unpainted; it may surprise you with the sounds you hear. I worked on one guitar, and it gave me a lot of resonance and sustain. I only used an oil finish for the body and neck. Good video
Well that was pretty much a science-free zone ! You obviously went to a lot of trouble, but your results are totally inconclusive because of all the flaws in the methodology. Firstly, you refinished both the neck and body. They are very different structures. The objective evidence for their sonic role in solid-body electric guitars is very different. Also, by refinishing the neck, you allowed the possibility of playability biasing your players' sonic impressions. Had you just refinished the neck or just the body, you would still have messed up by not having any control guitars. That is, at least the addition of one poly guitar and/or one nitro guitar that was not refinished, but was disassembled, re-strung, re-setup, etc like the refinished one, and played through what was "supposedly" an identical rig in the post-test. While you say you reproduced the setup as closely as possible, there are many sonically-influential things that are difficult to be sure are reproduced exactly, and you showed us none of those efforts anyway (amongst those many things, for example you said nothing about the trem setup). You even betrayed your own bias with the finish chip: "I noticed that the thickness of the paint here was almost the thickness of a credit card and I thought man that couldn't possibly be good for the tone of this guitar to be covered in a finish that's that thick and based in sort of a plastic material". As it stands, when the players recorded the second session (post-refin), they knew they were playing a "different" guitar right ? (were the other two told what the difference was ?) So it wasn't a "blinded" test at all. They were unavoidably biased. That's why you need control guitars. In some instances, one player appeared to know what another had already said about a guitar when asked for his impressions - totally breaking any notion of a "clean" experimental protocol. And then you didn't blind the recordings you played for us - you labelled which was which on the screen ! So what could have been a somewhat "clean" listening test was basically rendered biased and therefore useless. When given only two guitars' recordings to listen to, listeners are conditioned to expect to hear a difference - since they know each recording is a different guitar. You need several repeats of each blinded recording included in the listening test, to remove that bias. You don't say how long there was between the two recording sessions (several months it seems ?), where you somehow expected the players to play identically (!). Having said all that, it did appear that there may well have been some heard sonic differences. What is entirely unknown is what they might have been due to, because of the absence of any control guitars. And even regarding the sonic differences that you all contended to have heard, you have one guy saying one guitar was muddier, and another saying it was cleaner ! So exactly what you all were hearing is very unclear. Next time if you're going to spend so much time on an "experiment", consult an expert in valid experimental protocols for discerning heard differences due to a single element.
I was a skeptical of there being a difference in sound and tone related to the finish on a guitar. That being said, from this demonstration: to my ears the Nitro sounded clearer in general and the high end was more bell like. Poly sounded more bass overall.
I love these types of experiments. I think as you said finish thickness alone being a significant variable, the difference is clear. I would be curious haw a poly finish in comparable thickness would sound similarly. Nobody goes out of their way to strip a perfectly good Nitro finish to do poly😂. So that point never may be realized. But finish thickness alone I would bet makes more difference than Nitro versus Poly. Nitro even a month after spraying is still not at it’s full hardness where Poly is cured 24hrs after spraying and 100% full hardness/cure a week latter. Nitro can cure for decades after initial spray and assembly before it is done off gassing and reaches full hardness. So a bit more nuanced.
I was surprised it was that huge of a difference. I almost wondered if the TBX switch was at a different setting, or the mid boost circuit was at a different setting.
I'm a bit late to the party but wanted to say this has been by the the most worthwhile guitar experiment on youtube, I have been toying with the idea of getting my strat refinished in nitro for a while now as the poly finish has chipped off in huge chunks and this just confirms what I hypothesised. I think to be fair to the customer all USA fenders should be nitro as standard and everything else like squire, MIM etc should by poly if that's what they want but definitely made in USA & MIJ should be nitro. Great video thanks
With polyester and thicker urethane finishes you're basically getting all the sound from the pickups and hardware, the wood is playing much less of a role, especially since the pickups are pretty much floating in space. You can get more of it if you deck the tremolo. When done right urethane can get very close to nitro. You can get away with using much fewer coats of finish than you can with lacquer, i don't know why they apply it so heavily.
Taylor uses poly but can go thinner than some nitro finishes…that might be superior in the long run. I played a guys squire strat that he just removed the finish and strung it back up…made the acoustic sound sooooo much better….plugged in, not so sure it made a difference.
I would say that the lesser thickness of the Nitro has lowered the Pickup height by the width of a Credit card.. that could be the reason for the higher gain and bloatedness of the Poly finish. Mason mentioned that pickup height in the pickguard wasnt changed... but the finish was thinned substantially, hence forth.
It seems to me something was almost certainly overlooked, don't know what. In the first example nitro was brighter, in the second poly was brighter. I think there's just too many variables.
I just have a few questions for the variables. Was there poly covering the neck was pick up height measured in accordance to the strings or did you simply leave the pick up height the same when reinstalling on the nitro finish and the final question I have is regarding the strings; did you use brand new sets both times you went to record? Other than that I know we all agree tone is subjective so saying poly can’t be good for a guitar tone is kind of silly to me lol. If it works for someone then it works 😂
Believe or not I even think that the different torque of the neck to body screws could make some difference when the guitar was re-assembled. If a torque wrench was used when dissembling and re-tightening the neck screws to the same torque would also be interesting to know if this would make a difference to sustain and resonance.
Great video. I really appreciate the job evolving to produce a video like this, it is really very interesting. I always wondered the difference beetwen this different finishes, but I've never could do a comparison like this own my own, so for this, thank you very much. It's really scientific in very aspects and we can clearly notice a difference. For me personally, i dig it all the tones with nitro a poly and then i question myself about all the variants we can observe when we are trying to reach a tone and the lots of things we pursue to reach a tone we have in your mind. I don't try to invalidate this work, actually i admire a video like this, for sure. But sometimes i wonder myself if we are not harming all the fun about playing a guitar or killing the surprise of having a happy accident like all our idols had before us. But of course all the experimentation and work around these has it's value. No doubt. So anyway, thank you very much Mason and team (considering there is a team). You always bring me the best knowledge and thoughts about tone, equipment and music. All the best! Alex.
I always find this pretty funny. The sole purpose of the body of a solid body electric guitar is to reduce the transfer of string vibration energy. So it is designed to have the the least possible acoustic properties as well as a high mass. And here we are, constantly discussing the acoustic properties of the body 😂
one thing to consider is the guitar never did get a chance to open up it went from the poly to the nitro and it takes a long time for the wood to season so I wouldn't have painted it , id have gone with a natural nitro finish and let the guitar hang that way . in a year maybe paint it with a nitro based paint you'll notice a huge difference, also the guitar has a battery powered preamp built in it . id go with the Illitch system and put some good regular singles no battery
It's the first time that I have a nitro finish guitar (Fender MIJ Takashi Kato signature Stratocaster) of course I couldn't make the finish experiment like you guys did so the only thing I can say about is the feeling. For me, the nitro finish feels more inviting to play, is more comfortable, and personally, I like the look. I can't make any comparison because the other Strats with Poly finish that I have have different pickups, so, of course, it will sound different.
Someone could post a 4 hour loop of Schroom peeling that poly finish off of that guitar to r/oddlysatisfying and my day would be over.
I think that one variable that was overlooked here was a control element,meaning a 2nd guitar that was unchanged in both before and after recordings.If the control guitar sounded identical in both before and after recordings then you know that something in the recording process hasn't changed and caused an apparent difference.Because i can clearly hear a difference in the 2nd recording itself other than the guitars sound.
Yup. In the dirty example, the distortion from the drive suddenly is much duller. In no way, shape, or form, can any part of the guitar itself change that so much. Bumped a mic or knob 100%. Hell, could even be cold tubes vs warmed up tubes.
No need for this for me as a custom painter, from my experience the sound differences are repeatable, I have painted many guitars in both and the sound differences are always similar. The more Poly you put on a guitar the tub-ier it sounds with a bit of a dong ring. My first electric guitar SG I refinished it many, many times over the years, first in nitro in the late '70s, then nitro cleared with polyurethane, then more and more... each time it had a very noticeable difference that was consistent the more poly you spray on it... I have gone back to Nitro for all my color work for many reasons but on guitars because of this...
Yes, it felt like the recording sounded completely different. Almost as if the mic placement as a centimeter off or so. Almost like the nitro recording has more clear/presence as if it was closer to the center of the speaker and the second recording for the poly sounded like the mic wasnt in the same spot facing the speaker. The second recording also sounds more direct and the nitro recording sounds more 3D. interesting experiment though
@@shinyredguitar It is always necessary if you want to compare something. That is actually how scientific research works. Otherwise, you don't really know what else differed between the two takes.
I like how you think, but no -- the polyurethane guitar followed by the same guitar refinished is the best you can do. You can't really have a second guitar unless you can duplicate EVERY SINGLE THING on two guitars down to the provenance of its wood grain. The other problem is that the human ear is fallible -- just now you had three people listening, and they couldn't even agree. Besides, one man's harsh is another man's sparkly is a third man's hiss. You really need instruments measuring the waveforms and the amplitudes, and then Fourier analysis to split them apart and then figure out if there's a difference at all and where exactly it is. And THEN you'd have to reverse-engineer the sounds you got from your measurements and play them to a group sufficiently large to create a normal margin of error.
Now, you can shortcut that and do a semi-scientific test, but you're still not going to get around the identical guitars problem. We know that his guitar is basically the same underneath the two coats (hopefully, the pickups were put _exactly_ back in the same spot); otherwise, I'm going to want to know every last detail about the two guitars. How many times are the pickups wound? What factories did they come out of? Were they created within a few days of one another? What climates have they passed through? And on and on and on.
All of this is why nobody can agree on how much of a guitar's sound is acoustic and how much is electric, it's always done "guitar one way" and then "same guitar done differently". The fact that it's inherently unscientific is why people still debate things like whether top-loaded strings versus through-loaded strings have a different sound. No one is even sure whether the acoustic properties of a guitar matter AT ALL. I mean, there are individuals who are sure, but the point is getting them all to agree, and that's not happening any time soon.
PS: The before and after test that was the most obvious was "how does this bass sound when run through a $15 chord versus a $125 chord"? The answer was, "much, MUCH, *MUCH* better". Through the expensive cord, you could literally hear a few microseconds of the guy's skin running across the string before it was plucked. Discovering that all the tiny tweaks I do to enhance my sound get gobbled up because the signal is run through a copper wire instead of gold is one of those things I wish I didn't know.
for having removed this layer of plastic from my telecaster and having repainted it in nitro from an acoustic point of view the sound changes greatly compared to one of my other poly guitars but once connected to an amp I perceive no difference
That’s my putty knife!!! (Scraping the poly)
I was a house painter for YEARS and I always had that little guy in my pocket. It’s from Lowe’s or Home Depot so it’s not really anything special but man. Huge sentimental value - I called it my little friend. Used it every day, had it all worn in with rounded edges and thinned down from years of scraping/patching walls…Dr. Schroom, you just took me back :)
That and a "5-in-1" was all ya' needed!!!
I used to carry a 3-inch brush with the handle cut off for a duster too!!!
@ you know it bud. My 5way was pretty curved up too
The truth is ...
Leo Fender had been using poly as a grain sealer since the late 1950s I think...
And nitro was sprayed on top for sunburst or solid colors....
So this entire topic is a mute point... Leo used both ....
Jeff Beck until passing his white strat i think was poly finish..
Its the player that makes the guitar sound great ....
Hendrix played brand new Fender strats off the rack and they were poly finished...
Interesting topic though..... :)
Moot point, not mute.
"fullerplast" literally full of plastic. The cork sniffy shit drives me nuts! It's so ahistorical and disinterested in reality. I think the reason vintage fenders "relic" the way they do is because the lacquer top coats actually don't bond well to the sealer and check heavily, then flake.
Man, you just kill my hopes of playing better after refinishing my guitar. Just joking. Great point.
I don’t care what leo or jeff beck did.
I have both and prefer nitro
Nitro has soul. Plastic doesn't .
Would like to have heard it with no finish vs nitro and poly.
I was just gonna say it is kind of a missed opportunity!
Totally agree. Really a missed opportunity
Yeah me too
Yep. That would’ve been interesting to compare.
So why hasn’t someone done that yet?
Yes, it could be the difference between nitro and poly. Or it could be the 4% difference in weight.
Or it could be the process of taking the guitar apart, desoldering pickups and electronics, stripping it, cleaning it up for refinishing, reassembly, re-soldering pickups and electronics, and doing what I imagine is a top-notch setup on the guitar to get it ready to play again.
Honestly, folks, I used to be a die-hard advocate for finishes and tone woods, but I've seen so many tests that have stripped these influences away and found that the ONLY significant influences on electric guitar tone involve direct changes to pickups, electronics, and strings. Because there's SO much that happened to the guitar as a part of refinishing, I'd be far more inclined to suspect messing with electronics and doing a setup than any real impact of nitro v. poly.
If you're interested in some pretty thorough testing of these elements, check out Jim Lill's YT channel.
Yep... apart from the instrument its the human element as well.
Anyone can try this simple experiment:
Record a guitar part. Then next day, take the same guitar and record the same part again. Compare the 2 recordings....they will NEVER sound exactly the same.
Maybe the room was hotter/colder on one of the days, this is like the light/heavy string debate. I think we should concentrate more on studying and improving playing the instrument. Of course I understand the logic for these video$ exi$tence.
Exactly. Guitar players beard stroking like hifi enthusiasts is cringe.
Agreed... I ask this next sentence be read aloud in the voice of Simpsons comic book guy...
"Clearly the %20 vs %40 graphite impregnated nut, along with a stainless steel washers on the truss rod and synthetic fret markers are the keys to sounding like Eric Johnson" 😅😅😅😅
Truth : a small change in action height can totally change the sound of a guitar : a lower action thins up the sound , higher action has more bass and punch .
It could also be the strings : brand new set of strings VS one a few days old can already account for the difference .
I believe Nitro VS Poly can make a difference on a jazz archtop acoustic : a fully hollow guitar with solid wood top : It can make this kind of guitar much lighter and much more resonant .
I've seen it done on a 90's Epi Casino : the guitar went from 7 lbs to 3lbs and felt like a different instrument : , but it was the thickest coat of poly ever .
Sounded like when the microphone positions changes on the speaker. which I believe you kept the same between the two. Crazy how how it changed. Would have been cool to get a DI of each to do a frequency analysis on, eliminate as many variables as possible.
@@zaldvalenciathey did!
@@zaldvalencia at 8:00 area, you can clearly see the same guy playing both finishes - he's wearing the same necklace. Yes, he's wearing different shirt/jacket, but that's because it was days apart. Each player played both finishes.
I actually thought the poly finish was a little snappier if that makes sense...gritty? The nitro sounded warmer and a bit more open. There's definitely a difference between the two! I think there's a place for both sonically. Great comparison video Mason!
What is a “snappier” sound? What is “warm” “open” none of these are useful descriptions of sound.
People always do these tests by ear. We need spectral frequency graph and wave form comparison to see what's really happening.
That being said the poly had more bass and I didn't hear any difference on the top end between the 2 finishes. Again spectral frequency results would confirm this or not.
When it comes to signal you want as much information from the guitar as possible, because you can always EQ it out. it's much harder if not impossible to EQ it back in.
So poly for me in this case
Another problem. I doubt the test is truly blind. When I hold a guitar with poly finish, I can feel it (I believe this is easy.) So if I was doing this test, I'd always know which guitar I was playing.
That would defeat the purpose. If you analyze with machines there’s no difference.
Same with all audio. The home audiophiles are just as bad if not worse about weird things effecting sound.
@TeensierPython If you measure on a frequency response graph, you are literally getting a picture of what you are hearing. If it sounds different, it will appear different on the graph. But people's ear health and hearing is an unwanted variable. And people are susceptible to prior bias when analyzing the sound of two instruments. The "machines" are not. The original commenter is correct. I would suggest looking up Glenn Fricker if you don't know who that UA-camr is. He has painstakingly gone over tone myths and busted many.
It’s about the speakers. Quality electronics have more effect upon your sound than paint.
Yeah, they didnt show any of the settings either and did the tests probably weeks apart. No way the mics didnt get nudged or the amps settings tweaked. A very flawed test that proves nothing whatsoever.
@@thomasritter3391they are claiming the cabinet used is in an iso box that does not get regular access. So in this case the cabinet mic should be consistent if that is true. The amp settings however I cannot speak to other than the “we kept the settings the same” comment.
I mean IMO, if they are using a recording studio then I would almost lean more towards, they logged the settings after then initial test, and then put the amp back at the assumed settings for the second test. This would result in different sounds because of the slight difference in knob placement, but the user could still assume they are the exact same settings based on visuals. If this was a personal rig that goes unused for the weeks in between then I would be more inclined to believe it but again, they used what looks like a legit working studio to do this.
Speakers are usually the last element most think about, but they can entirely change the sound of the amp.
Ideally, I like mixing alnicos and ceramics for the high and low end details each provide.
Two things I noticed as a woodworker that also plays guitar: 1) that original body was never sanded or finished because there was no need to with that thick layer of polyurethane finish. 2) because of the aforementioned, it makes me wonder if manufacturers would hide poorer quality pieces of lumber under thick finishes to make them seem more appealing.
Different lumbers have different properties; having an effect on the timbre and resonance of an instrument so it would most certainly effect the sound.
Good take!!
A mate of mine stripped his Squier Tele, changed pickups (JJs local to us), CTS pots, wire etc...
Built from 2 pieces of Alder, it came out well, so well his mate asked him to strip his 02 US Strat..
The Strat was 4 pieces of Alder! (maybe why it was a solid colour?).
Apart from drying time, both guitars sound great.
Edit: both had a poly filler coat/s under the top coats that needed sanding to remove.
This is an absolutely genius hypothesis that I never would have even considered had I not decided to read some of the comments.
You have completely shaken my entire stance on this whole debate
@@Aespos295 Thanks man!
Of course it goes without saying that guitar manufacturers are going to separate high quality woods with good visual Aesthetics from knotty wood and they're going to use opaque colors on the naughty wood and expose the Grain on the high quality good-looking stuff
We hear with our eyes first. These videos are pretty useless without addressing bias. Didn’t that guy with all those tone deconstructing videos put all this to rest?
These videos prime people, everyone ‘knows’ nitro is supposed to sound better, and so it will because you primed that response by labelling everything.
Could the pickups have ended up being farther from the strings once the pickguard was sitting on a thinner nitro finish? This could possibly explain some of the change in the tonal balance and gain structure. Regardless, I do believe you on the guitar sounding better acoustically with nitro :)
I mean they did say that original polyurethane finish was substantially thicker then the new nitrocellulose so you make a good point. I’m not sure if a 1/32-3/32” would change sound THAT much though, on the other hand.
Pickup height is measured from the bottom of the string to the top of the pickup, so if they set it up right (and I assume they did), then what is under the pickguard would not matter.
Good catch!
@@traceo6 I am not sure about the pick up height. He says in the video he took off the pick guard and so the pick ups are at the exact same height. That would mean the first commentor is correct, in the lower signal or less bass could be associated to the thinner finish, dropping the pickguards a little bit 🤷🏽♂️
The other question I personally have is did they also get a brand new set of strings each time, or were the poly strings older?
These guys know how to setup guitars which should include pickup heights. However it’s still a good question to be asking
Ive seen a hack how removing the neck and re screwing it with a certain technique give the guitar way better sustain. I wonder if that was a factor opposed to the paint finish.
So, changing the pickups was yesterday's tonewood.
Today - hail the King! Changing finishes 🎉
great A/B test. I've finished a few of my guitars in nitro and love the way the neck feels
I love nitro on my guitars, not even for the sound, but just how it feels. Poly is like playing with a toy, while nitro feels like handling a piece of art.
I also love the smell when I open the case ;)
Great phrase!
Fender used fullerplast to seal the wood back in the 50’s and 60’s. In case you don’t notice, the plast in fullerplast means plastic. They only used nitrocellulose lacquer because it was what was available back then.
I’ve done this to two of my Warmoth Guitars. Absolutely there’s a significant difference in both weight and tone. Refinished in oil only.
I have a roasted alder Warmoth strat body. No finish at all. Neck is goncalo alves with bocote fretboard. No finish there either. 100% natural. Neck is Plek'ed. Plays and sounds like a strat on steroids. Body and neck adjust relatively quickly to different temperatures and humidities. Danny at Straight Frets suggested that I put finish on it. I said no thanks. No regrets.
Yup I'm in the boat also. No finish on a paduak neck, tung oil on an alder body. LOVE IT! IT'S ALIVE!! :)
I had a special run strat with hand rubbed oil. Nitro is my favorite. I don't believe that oil finish is better, even it's thinner than nitro. Nitro is definitely better than poly. It's a good protection material for guitars and also a good tone shaper.
Your more recent videos have been great to watch. Like what your doing with your resources and it makes for great content that is relevant to us all.
Can't help but to hear the superior sound of the nitro.
Everything about this video feels like a parody.
Let’s not forget - this is a company that wants to sell you their product - or that of a guitar repainting company.
Without a proper control group, controlled variables and video proof of amp settings, guitar setup, microphone placement, pre-amp settings and picking technique this might as well be a parody. LOL.
We're not in the business of refinishing guitars. So what product are we selling? Secondly, the control was the DI (failsafe backup), the rest of the stuff, even if shown on video, would be just as easy to manipulate the results so there is a certain part of "faith" that needs to be provided by the viewer. The real test is can someone repeat the results as anyone can manipulate a finding even when showing you every step. We have another follow up video coming out showing the DI results recorded at the same time, as well as EQ analysis. I presume however that the polyurethane apologists with remain polyamorous nonetheless.
@@VertexEffectsInc Schroom Custom Guitarworks does, don’t they?
Without actual proper evidence I’m not buying it. I’m sorry. Not worth arguing either.
I’ve gotta say though - pretty rough and harsh way of communicating. Good luck on future videos.
One of the main points made is that the poly finish was thick - about the tickness of a credit card. So, what is the thickness of the nitro finish? That thickness needs to be considered for all significant meeting surfaces on the guitar: the bridge, the pickguard, the neck pocket and the back of the neck.
Let's consider that the bridge and pickguard moved in the same direction, as did the neck, however the neck has two meeting surfaces that experienced a change in thickness (the neck and the neck pocket). The sum difference in those surfaces between poly and nitro essentially changed the plane of the strings as they travel over the pickups (they moved closer to the pickups). This means you not only changed the finish, but also changed the geometry of the neck join and how the strings interact with the pickups. That needs to be considered - so, was the tonal shift simply from the change finish composition, or change in thickness of the finish - i.e. was the tonal change from the finish, from changing the angle/distance of the strings or even both?
I'm not sure, but I think there's more at play here than just the finish composition.
This is exactly what I have experienced with two Jackson warriors I owned. One is gloss black poly, the other was sanded and oiled. Both had EMG 57's. Active pickups. The raw oiled one had so much more of an open, harmonically rich sound. It was acoustically louder when not plugged in. Everyone that played and heard it in person noted the same thing. Which also debunks the myth that actives will sound the same in any guitar. Thing is, pickups pickup string vibrations, people don't seem to get the wood vibrating, is vibrating the stationary points of the string (bridge and nut)) and the neck "whips" like a bridge with traffic on it (you know how you can feel it shake and vibrate?) This feedbacks (not feedback) into the string vibration. You can hear it in the harmonic content, mostly. I make guitars and have made two teles, one a set neck, the other a bolt on. I put the same humbucker in both, there is a difference in these things; granted it is subtle. But the biggest difference I have found is not in the wood type (provided they are all dry) but rather in the difference of how thick the finish is. The thick finishes do sound more like there is covering on the sound, a blanket or object in front of the speaker. Like it isn't as present. Just my experience. When building I only worry about woods for looks and physical properties for what it has to accomplish in the build (like neck stiffness and stability, ability to hold frets, weight, etc), and for finishes, as thin as possible or oiled. PRS has concluded that thickness of the finish matters more than whether it is poly or nitro.
Pickups are not microphones, they cant capture soundwaves, they just capture the changes in a magnetic field cause by the vibration of the strings (metal strings), so paint finish as type of wood/material are irrelevant (take a look at James Trussart guitars), the only thing that matters is how well is build, tune, intonates, performs and of course mainly the electronics!
Why is there a huge difference in sound than?
there are infinitive variables, if i have to guess the player/playing, atmospheric pressure, temperature and humidity in the aire, big factors in how the instrument is going to perfom!
@@jannatinkarlen8702 im sorry but not their not microphonic, it just pickup disturbances/alterations in the magnetic field, they dont capture any soundwave at all, thats why they are called pickups and not microphones!
100% difference! The only question I have is did you put fresh strings on the poly guitar before recording?
The paint that Leo used was DuPont automotive paint, which had lead in it. That old paint didn’t let the wood breathe.
The brain damage resulting to guitarists from the lead paint ensured debates about tone wood and coatings would persist for the next seventy years. 😂
Guitar woods are dead. They don’t breathe.
It’s pretty understandable why Fender chose their Poly finish recipe. Now, other manufacturers have their recipe where they use a small amount of polo with nitro
My car run fast because is painted with Nitro 👀👀!!😂😂🤦🏻♂️
Holy cow. Night and day. I've gotta rethink my whole life now. Would've been really cool to hear a sample putting a microphone and playing the guitar resonating acoustically without amp. Cool video, man!
How did I miss this Ep?!? Had no idea it was that easy to take off the paint & finish! I’ve always wanted to try a bare wood strat! Thank you for letting us in on this! 🤘👽👽👽🎸
Vertes, thank you for conducting these tests. I'm hearing a lot of reverb during one test. Shouldn't these tests be done with no reverb and tone controls on flat?
The setup did change after removing the thick poly shell. The neck is lower, with better contact in the pocket, the pickguard (and Bridge) is lower as well. As for playing, it is a hell of a lot more forgiving to fly sweaty hands over a nitro finish. When I shoot nitro I never spray the neck pocket and my necks are very lightly finished as well. That connection seems to help the strings ring better. Enjoyed the episode Mason.
Wasn't the argument of wood/finish/etc. being responsible for "tone" already debunked? Some guy created a guitar with no body or neck, and compared the same string/pick-up config in an actual guitar, and there was no significant change.
Yeah, in poorly run experiments that leave variables out of them.
@@timwhite5562can you point out how exactly?
@@joseislanio8910 any test or experiment like this can only ever hope to show one thing: how that specific test pans out; running with those specific variables: wood, guitar, strings, pickups, pick, player, instrument cable, microphone…etc. There's literally not a test that exists that can disprove tone wood. And it doesn't help that when you play a Les Paul with an all mahogany body there's clearly a difference in pick attack to the ones with maple tops; or the difference with the Norlin era maple neck LPs are to traditional mahogany ones, or how much brighter an ash or alder bodies on the early PRS CEs sound compared to a mahogany and mahogany/maple top bodied models.
@@timwhite5562 so, the test the guy in the first comment was talking about is about removing all variables but the body wood.
Yeah Jim Lill has some deep thru stuff
This shows what I found when I stripped the poly finish off my own strat. It sounded better with the poly finish! Not what I was expecting when I did it because of all the "nitro sound best & poly kills tone" comments on the web - but it almost sounds like a buffer is on with poly and off when it's nitro.
“Feel” to the fingers and hands - that is definitely a difference players can notice. I would personally attribute any perceptible difference in SOUND nitro vs. poly to be how “feel” influences the playing & not resonance, EQ, volume, etc.
These comparisons are always highly subjective and personal at the end of the day. If the differences could be measured and quantified (e.g. frequency analyzer) then that would be more objective.
My advice: don’t let someone else influence what YOU like better, and use your own hands & ears to be the final say in your own preferences. That’s ultimately what matters most…
VERY interesting comparison with before/after in WEIGHT of the instrument - that is a difference worth considering for sure!
Great video, and well done by the contributors.
Extreme EQ differences in the examples, I’m having a hard time believing its just the finish. I spent 3 years manufacturing these in Fender, I could be wrong but I suspect something changed in the signal chain in the month or months between the recording examples.
The part over looked in this debate to me is that the pickups are floating on plastic not connected to the wood.
Not saying finish doesn’t matter but wouldn’t pick guard have more of an influence?
No, if anything it evens out the playing field for everything else.
I'm gobsmacked that there is that much difference. However I'll still always go for poly. I want the finish on a guitar to protect it. There are lots of different ways to tweak the sound of a guitar, but to date, the only effective way to protect it, is with a strong finish (or just always leave it in the case...)
Not using a cab sim is a big miss for me. That’s a big variable that could have been taken away. Cool video though.
It’s an iso cabinet in a chamber under the house. Nothing changed there. We also recorded DI as well. Still same results.
@@VertexEffectsInc Got it. Very cool to hear the results. I have a strat with a poly finish and your video sounds the exact same to mine. Can’t believe the tone I’ve been hunting for has to do with the finish of my guitar. That’s crazy.
Saying that guitar woods need to breathe is absolute cow dung. Trees die after being cut, no more breathing. Period. In woodworking, which guitar building basically is, you have to provide expansion joints for the wood for when they expand or contract. Wood absorbs and loses moisture seasonally or when it is moved from place to place with different weather and humidity levels.
Almost sounds like 2 different strats and like both but if I had to pick one based on tone Poly overall sounded like more output, deeper bass, smoother high end and the mids seemed more present.
I dug the nitro all a round more. But, I wouldn’t kick either out the bed! However, there is definitely a vast difference immediately!
It was around the 8 minute mark that I realized that this video is not a joke.
My 71 pbass was stripped in 1976 and finished with Linseed oil several times over the years and people love the tone.
Dude I have wanted this video for a long time
It's more than subtle. That's amazing. I've got a late 80s mij strat that I've been thinking about doing this to and you might have sold me on it.
The paint does not affect the sound of the guitars pickups. The pick ups, strings, the player and the amp are what affect the tone.
I've very curious what the cost on the refin was.
Cool experiment, and I loved having different outcomes from different listeners.
um, i think this was not conducted properly. If you want to do a blind test, the researcher cannot be a test subject. A sample size of 3 is not a lot, not enough to get good statistical data. It is good that it was the same guitar but painted nitro. I'm not sure if you had the same recording set up as the camera angle was different for some shots. Any discernable differences I heard i dismissed because of the differences I saw and in the way it was being played.
Things I would do differently, I would just have the same guitar spec in nitro vs poly as getting it painted would cost a lot and you'd have a lot of time between recording. You could maybe just borrow some guitars for this but it would also seem like quite an ordeal to test. what a researcher would probably do is get just the bodies, then suspend the body from something like springs or rubberbands. It would be in an anechoic chamber. Then maybe do several tests like a knock (done by a machine or contraption that knocks the same way) on the body in a specific spot, nitro vs poly, then have the recording analyzed with a spectrograph and look at the differences in resonance. you could also play a short sound at the body, then somehow record the body afterwards to see if the body resonates at that frequency and then do this for a sweep of 20-20k hertz. That way you would have actual DATA on nitro vs poly. Not just some guy saying "oh i thought it sounded sparkly' or muddy or whatever nonscientific term.
in my opinion, i like nitro over poly just because of the way it looks when it ages, that's it, but I would be interested of the tonal differences between the two in a scientific context. perhaps there was already research done on this? I'm not going to check right now but you would look up online on physics or acustosonic journal sites of nitrocellulose vs poly.
😮💨Seriously dude? Even when you can clearly hear it you still don't want to admit it?
@@timwhite5562 i can hear differences, but if you know about testing you will know this was conducted incorrectly which means you have to throw all the "data" out.
@@sonicase ive been a luthier for 25 years. I've built and worked on thousands and thousands of guitars, but it doesn't take that many before you start seeing and hearing patterns. I became aware of the effect different finishes and woods have years before I started to see on forums that apparently it was all in my head. Stringed instruments work through resonance, the strings are what get it to resonate, but the strings themselves contribute very little to the sound. This is the case even with solid body guitars. The pickups are picking up the vibrations of the strings, but how they vibrate: the frequency, duration, etc are all influenced by what they're mounted to. It's the instrument itself that's making the sound, and wrapping it in plastic is going to have an effect. Nitro lacquer and acrylic have the ability to resonate all on their own, polyester and urethane does not.
Modern nitro allows the instrument to resonate more freely, while polys restrict them. The lacquer they used back in the 50s and into the 60s actually contributed to the total resonance of the guitars because it used to set into a hard glass-like finish that had a ring to it. They started adding plasticizers and inhibitors because while the wood expanded and contracted with temp and moisture changes, the hard finish didn't and would start to cheque and crack easily. Today people like that, but they didn't back then. This same type of quality applies to the hide glue they use on higher end guitars: hide glue has a resonant quality of its own, normal carpenters glue doesn't. Actually it applies even more to the glue because the wood actually absorbs it, it's a "self-clamping" adhesive and bonds on a molecular level. This results in that it's as close to getting two pieces of wood to act like a single solid piece as you'll be able to achieve, while with normal wood glue there will always be a film that separates them.
*Normally I wouldn't expect urethane to have this much of a difference, it's usually a much more subtle thing than a polyester finish. The benefits of urethane is that you don't need to apply anywhere near as many coats as you do with lacquer, you can do two or three where lacquer is going to take several. This guitar had an especially heavy finish for some reason.
@@timwhite5562 wether it does or not is irrelevant to my argument. the test is flawed
@@sonicase dude, this isn't a university study and no one is splitting the atom here. They're trying something out and seeing what happens. The only reason people are interested is that they're curious to see what happens.
It's not crazy, it's a HUGE difference and if you can't hear it your speakers suck or your ears are blown lol
Both have a good sound, I'd have to play them to decide which I really preferred but just hearing them through this video, the difference was surprising and vivid to my ears at least.
It would have been cool if you picked up the guitar when it was completely stripped and just played it bare... oiling the body just like one would do on the neck, something like that would be intriguing.
The thing is, after playing a ton of guitars over 25 years, whatever changes the "feel" of the guitar makes an absolutely huge difference. I pick up my tele with a satin neck and I just play it differently than my les Paul. I'm absolutely positive that the guitars are their own unique beasts, and how they feel determines how you play them! So when you hear the guys say the neck is satin, it's that change that makes all the difference. Next rest, give them a poly guitar a D then satin the neck, they will play it differently!
Yes, the guitar influences the guitarist and the guitar player him or herself makes a huge difference. I own a mid tier 90s SG and a friend (who plays way better than me) has a 60s SG.
He sounds so much better, I always thought, I want to get one of those once I save up the money. Then he played my guitar. And he sounded again so much better than me. I haven't bought the vintage guitar yet. 😂
Interesting perspective, where asthetically, I prefer Poly over Nitro. The tonal difference is more the same difference, that gets discussed with changing the trem block on a strat, or a Floyd Rose, in which really, we are changing the resonent freaquency in all aspects. The lack of weight kinda shows that, in this demonstration. Add that humidity, and temperature are other variables, that can be kept consistant, but are not always perfect. You'd probably have fun testing saddle material, as well as block material like copper, or titanium for the block, on that strat for research purposes. Thanks for the video on what you found going the route of Poly versus Nitro.
nitro - '50s tech for '50s minds.
The nitrocellulose sounds better because we’re guitar players and we listen with our eyes and judge with our biases
I'm with you -- PU sounded more jangle-pop to me, while NC was bassier, but it seemed like the mic location was different for the before and after. Unless your test guitarists weren't told that you were changing the finish and instead were just told "I'm having my guitar setup changed -- tell me what you think", I'm surprised they didn't know which was which just by looking at it. PU gives you a mirror finish, while NC scatters the light a bit. IMO it's the reason that bursts on a Gibson just look better, while metallic type finishes like Candy Apple Red look better in Polyurethane. Either way, you'll take my telecaster when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
About the difference in the looks: if I saw that guitar, I'd stare at it forEVER thinking "That's a black strat. Except it's not. Except it obviously is."
So, even if nothing else, you've got an instrument that looks nice, is unique, and is going to leave gear nerds scratching their heads.
There’s a poly clear coat under the nitro on my Fender guitars.
I’ve one of those Clapton Strats! It’s a “Blackie” model with Lace gold pickups. It’s a pity these were not nitro.
I find the Fender USA polyurethane is thinner than the Fender Mex polyester.
The reason I like nitro is because I don’t have to worry about dings and scratches the in same way with a poly finish as it just shatters and cracks if impacted.
I'd like to see an A/B comparison with all of the same work done, minus changing the finish. In other words, disassemble, de-solder, etc., then wait a couple months and put it back together again.
Interesting test! I preferred the more open, brighter, livelier sound of the nitro....but, could the test have been a bit more controlled? Same microphone, and EXACT same mic placement? Tubes aged a couple of months in between tests? Take that out of the equation with a Kemper or similar with exact recreatable settings? Same pick and picking location? How about testing the guitar in between with NO finish?
In the end it really doesn't matter what paint or what wood you got on your guitar. Nothing you could adjust with an EQ.
Don't overthink on something like this, play what you like and make music.
Show me 2 guitars with the same wood, same finish, same neck, same pickups and setup, played by the same guy in the same amp that sound the same and i will believe in tonewood, tonefinish and tonewhatever. One can argue about vibration and how different finishes let the wood vibrate more or less, but that wont make you a better player.
It won’t make you a better player, but refinishing my partscaster with nitro makes it feel more MINE so I’m more motivated to play it so I’ll get better (is the hope?)
I think that the difference is because he removed the neck and now it sit better. The paint give a very marginal difference in an electric guitar.
Its called the placebo effect. Some people get rig of deceases just by the power pf suggestion, nothing wrong with that.@@hyrumjensen4712
When it feels better. It sounds better whole thing works I’m in
You’re right , screw the laws of physics. Balsa wood can sound like mahogany with the right pickups ? I dunno
Hi. Since the ROTOSPHERE is discontinued, what's the second best rotary speaker pedal? 🎸
Still Rotosphere I or II.
Another really interesting video / shootout
- hey guys, or mason, anyone know what the vibey steve luke, mike landau style 80s clean song that comes on at the 5:50 second mark in the chapter "refinishing the guitar" ?
* Very human nature / MJ esque sounding or basically mateus asato on any given day of the week lol.
Please lmk ! Im sure im not the only one who was curious.
Thanks in advance 🙏🤟
Anyone!?? I’m still trying to figure this one out too. Very Huff/Landau/Luke like. I can hear what sounds like Tri-Stereo Chorus, MicroPitch, Compression - typical 80’s/early 90’s rhythm guitar track. Sounds so familiar - surely someone knows…!?
Very interesting test. The polyurithane has more presence, tighter sound.. more definition, more articulated. Sounds a little more "plastic". The nitro sounds more muddy, darker sound overall.. the acoustic nature comes through the pickups, kinda like it has more air in the sound.. the notes blend together nicer imo.. sounds more organic, like you can hear the wood feedback on the strings better, which is probably the case. I like it more.
Very interesting. Definitely 100% was able to blindly pick out the differences between the two (purposely listened only the first time to make sure it was fair blind A/B). There is a very clear difference. The good news for anyone listening (that preferred the nitro over poly and doesn’t have the ability to get theirs refinished) is any stock EQ in your DAW would be able to match the two. In this example, a subtle cut in the low mids (medium Q) and some subtle top end would have evened them out sonically. Thanks for doing this experiment. @vertex effects please do a similar one comparing the same guitar with a maple neck versus a rosewood neck (of the same specs - only difference being the fretboard layer). That should be very interesting too. Cheers
Fun fact: the tree stops "breathing" once it's cut into various pieces.
Great!! Always awesome, entertaining and educational. Greetings from Mexico Dr
I have always been a nitro fan and have heard even bigger differences on other refin's in the case of this Strat add a band and the Sonic differences may be lost but the loss of weight and the feel of the neck alone are a big plus.
Sounds like new strings on the nitro takes. Did you put new strings on for the poly take? Some clips had a notable volume difference. Thanks for doing this, I know it was a lot of work.
Same brand, same gauge, same everything. Both brand new strings in both examples.
This is why I had my car done in nitro. No way that thick enameled auto paint could let the tone of my engine through.....
I’m surprised that a spectrum analyzer wasn’t used to show the sonic differences.
I've stripped the poly off of several guitars and if nothing else, that is the most elegant poly pull I've ever seen. It's usually a nightmare.
This is kinda crazy to me. The first demo (clean test) i preferred the nitro, a little more bell like on the top, but the second demo ( edge of breakup) the nitro sounded dead in comparison! Granted I didn't think there was all that much difference between coats, but it was enough to notice just through my computer speakers. I just don't play clean like that, ever, so I always have the option to boost whatever frequency and get whatever sound I want. Personally, I would never re finish a guitar for audio purposes. That is a purely aesthetic choice imo and it costs so much to have done/ really time consuming to do it yourself (I've tried several times!) that, for me, I would just get the guitar I want when I buy it (paint, sound etc). If the paint chips or scratches through it's life then so be it, it's my guitar!
I call bs or poor test controls. Clear difference between recordings aside from guitar. Should have had a control DI reamp to ensure no difference in recording methods.
Gosh, all you people saying that wood and finish doesn’t matter are killing me. Do you have ears? Do you not hear the clear difference? This is SO definitive.
Has anyone tried shellack french polishing on a solidbody? As a piano builder I use it on soundboards when I restore Grand Pianos. Sounds great.I am thinking about buying a squier CV 50 Tele and french polish it. Great Video! Greetings from Germany
Sounds like the mic is in a different position on the speaker. Should've taken a DI and reamped both in the same session so the rigs weren't just "as close as possible"
I recently modded a project guitar, and one of the changes I made was treating the fingerboard with epoxy, which I then sanded to the thinnest layer possible.
Twenty fours hours later …. the guitar sounded terrible !
I was shocked at how terrible. It was like that airy ‘synthetic harmonic’ sound of piezo pickups.
Second day … the same. I was major.y disappointed.
Third day … wow ! It sounded better than ever.
Point : the resin finally fully cured, and was not so elastic - and just the effect of the surface of the fingerboard made a very significant difference.
Conclusion : the hardness factor of the coating results in differences due to the sonic reflectivity of the surface in relation to different frequencies.
The bouncing around of vibrations in the body of an electric guitar *must* influence the output of magnetic pickups, because they are transducing the output of the strings which are mechanically connected to the body.
So saying ‘it’s only string vibrations, the body has nothing to do with it’ is ignoring the mechanical acoustic coupling of the body and strings via the bridge and fretboard.
Hi "Have you guys checked the guitar, point by point, regarding the soldering you did? Secondly, compare it without the pickguard and with the guitar unpainted; it may surprise you with the sounds you hear. I worked on one guitar, and it gave me a lot of resonance and sustain. I only used an oil finish for the body and neck. Good video
Well that was pretty much a science-free zone ! You obviously went to a lot of trouble, but your results are totally inconclusive because of all the flaws in the methodology.
Firstly, you refinished both the neck and body. They are very different structures. The objective evidence for their sonic role in solid-body electric guitars is very different. Also, by refinishing the neck, you allowed the possibility of playability biasing your players' sonic impressions.
Had you just refinished the neck or just the body, you would still have messed up by not having any control guitars. That is, at least the addition of one poly guitar and/or one nitro guitar that was not refinished, but was disassembled, re-strung, re-setup, etc like the refinished one, and played through what was "supposedly" an identical rig in the post-test. While you say you reproduced the setup as closely as possible, there are many sonically-influential things that are difficult to be sure are reproduced exactly, and you showed us none of those efforts anyway (amongst those many things, for example you said nothing about the trem setup).
You even betrayed your own bias with the finish chip: "I noticed that the thickness of the paint here was almost the thickness of a credit card and I thought man that couldn't possibly be good for the tone of this guitar to be covered in a finish that's that thick and based in sort of a plastic material".
As it stands, when the players recorded the second session (post-refin), they knew they were playing a "different" guitar right ? (were the other two told what the difference was ?) So it wasn't a "blinded" test at all. They were unavoidably biased. That's why you need control guitars. In some instances, one player appeared to know what another had already said about a guitar when asked for his impressions - totally breaking any notion of a "clean" experimental protocol.
And then you didn't blind the recordings you played for us - you labelled which was which on the screen ! So what could have been a somewhat "clean" listening test was basically rendered biased and therefore useless.
When given only two guitars' recordings to listen to, listeners are conditioned to expect to hear a difference - since they know each recording is a different guitar. You need several repeats of each blinded recording included in the listening test, to remove that bias. You don't say how long there was between the two recording sessions (several months it seems ?), where you somehow expected the players to play identically (!).
Having said all that, it did appear that there may well have been some heard sonic differences. What is entirely unknown is what they might have been due to, because of the absence of any control guitars.
And even regarding the sonic differences that you all contended to have heard, you have one guy saying one guitar was muddier, and another saying it was cleaner ! So exactly what you all were hearing is very unclear.
Next time if you're going to spend so much time on an "experiment", consult an expert in valid experimental protocols for discerning heard differences due to a single element.
I was a skeptical of there being a difference in sound and tone related to the finish on a guitar.
That being said, from this demonstration: to my ears the Nitro sounded clearer in general and the high end was more bell like.
Poly sounded more bass overall.
I love these types of experiments. I think as you said finish thickness alone being a significant variable, the difference is clear. I would be curious haw a poly finish in comparable thickness would sound similarly. Nobody goes out of their way to strip a perfectly good Nitro finish to do poly😂. So that point never may be realized. But finish thickness alone I would bet makes more difference than Nitro versus Poly. Nitro even a month after spraying is still not at it’s full hardness where Poly is cured 24hrs after spraying and 100% full hardness/cure a week latter. Nitro can cure for decades after initial spray and assembly before it is done off gassing and reaches full hardness. So a bit more nuanced.
I was surprised it was that huge of a difference. I almost wondered if the TBX switch was at a different setting, or the mid boost circuit was at a different setting.
The theme music is great,where do I find it?
I'm a bit late to the party but wanted to say this has been by the the most worthwhile guitar experiment on youtube, I have been toying with the idea of getting my strat refinished in nitro for a while now as the poly finish has chipped off in huge chunks and this just confirms what I hypothesised.
I think to be fair to the customer all USA fenders should be nitro as standard and everything else like squire, MIM etc should by poly if that's what they want but definitely made in USA & MIJ should be nitro. Great video thanks
Looking at the video the first example has the bass end of the neck pickup further from the strings. That's going to make a difference.
With polyester and thicker urethane finishes you're basically getting all the sound from the pickups and hardware, the wood is playing much less of a role, especially since the pickups are pretty much floating in space. You can get more of it if you deck the tremolo. When done right urethane can get very close to nitro. You can get away with using much fewer coats of finish than you can with lacquer, i don't know why they apply it so heavily.
I would argue the difference is more due to finish thickness than finish material.
Taylor uses poly but can go thinner than some nitro finishes…that might be superior in the long run. I played a guys squire strat that he just removed the finish and strung it back up…made the acoustic sound sooooo much better….plugged in, not so sure it made a difference.
I would say that the lesser thickness of the Nitro has lowered the Pickup height by the width of a Credit card.. that could be the reason for the higher gain and bloatedness of the Poly finish. Mason mentioned that pickup height in the pickguard wasnt changed... but the finish was thinned substantially, hence forth.
It seems to me something was almost certainly overlooked, don't know what. In the first example nitro was brighter, in the second poly was brighter. I think there's just too many variables.
I just have a few questions for the variables. Was there poly covering the neck was pick up height measured in accordance to the strings or did you simply leave the pick up height the same when reinstalling on the nitro finish and the final question I have is regarding the strings; did you use brand new sets both times you went to record?
Other than that I know we all agree tone is subjective so saying poly can’t be good for a guitar tone is kind of silly to me lol. If it works for someone then it works 😂
Believe or not I even think that the different torque of the neck to body screws could make some difference when the guitar was re-assembled. If a torque wrench was used when dissembling and re-tightening the neck screws to the same torque would also be interesting to know if this would make a difference to sustain and resonance.
My question is how much it costs to refinish the guitar versus how much it costs to EQ a poly finished guitar so it sounds like a nitro finish guitar?
Great video. I really appreciate the job evolving to produce a video like this, it is really very interesting. I always wondered the difference beetwen this different finishes, but I've never could do a comparison like this own my own, so for this, thank you very much. It's really scientific in very aspects and we can clearly notice a difference. For me personally, i dig it all the tones with nitro a poly and then i question myself about all the variants we can observe when we are trying to reach a tone and the lots of things we pursue to reach a tone we have in your mind. I don't try to invalidate this work, actually i admire a video like this, for sure. But sometimes i wonder myself if we are not harming all the fun about playing a guitar or killing the surprise of having a happy accident like all our idols had before us. But of course all the experimentation and work around these has it's value. No doubt. So anyway, thank you very much Mason and team (considering there is a team). You always bring me the best knowledge and thoughts about tone, equipment and music. All the best! Alex.
I always find this pretty funny. The sole purpose of the body of a solid body electric guitar is to reduce the transfer of string vibration energy. So it is designed to have the the least possible acoustic properties as well as a high mass.
And here we are, constantly discussing the acoustic properties of the body 😂
one thing to consider is the guitar never did get a chance to open up it went from the poly to the nitro and it takes a long time for the wood to season so I wouldn't have painted it , id have gone with a natural nitro finish and let the guitar hang that way . in a year maybe paint it with a nitro based paint you'll notice a huge difference, also the guitar has a battery powered preamp built in it . id go with the Illitch system and put some good regular singles no battery
The #2 one, way much more musical sounding!
I don’t believe the finish has any bearing on tone.
Actually, the tone is in the felt washer for the strap buttons. Very few people know this.
@@junjuan7695 lol
It's the first time that I have a nitro finish guitar (Fender MIJ Takashi Kato signature Stratocaster) of course I couldn't make the finish experiment like you guys did so the only thing I can say about is the feeling. For me, the nitro finish feels more inviting to play, is more comfortable, and personally, I like the look. I can't make any comparison because the other Strats with Poly finish that I have have different pickups, so, of course, it will sound different.