Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike O'Malley
I always assumed that the changes with age are the result of the wood changing character, not viibrations--in grad school I did a fair amount of remodeling work on old rowhouses in San Francisco--old as in 70 years or so. The wood in those houses was hard to work--it was really hard to drive a nail into it compared to new lumber. It could be because they used "old growth" timber, but I doubt it--those were rowhouses that were built after the SF earthquake, in a hurry. My house was built in 1949, a typical DC area postwar brick cape cod, built in a hurry to standard specs, and the floor joists are similarly harder to nail and drill than new timber, and I just can't believe they were using some kind of old growth lumber in 1949. My guess is that the resins in the wood age and grow harder and more brittle. But who knows? I'm not even convinced that old instruments always sound better. I've played plenty of expensive old guitars that sounded blah. But I've never played a really old bass.
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This is something that I have been cogitating on for a while now and thinking about possible links between the aging process, which is bound to be related to chemical / physical changes that occur whether the wood is vibrated or not, and the vibrational process, which while it is something different, may interact with the chemical factor. Some here would warn that me thinking might be a risky undertaking or have even riskier results, but for what it might be worth, two things have occurred to me.
There are definitely chemical changes happening in the wood. Incidentally, the studs in my 1915 heart pine house will break a drill bit unless it is designed to drill through high grade steel, and those will generally burn through more than cut through, so the wood does get harder as observed by others. What has occurred to me lately is that the vibration of the wood may speed up this process. Almost every chemical process is speeded up by agitation of the reactants, and vibrating a piece of wood will certainly cause the components within it to move around, perhaps bringing more of the unstable chemicals into contact with the others that these react with.
The other consideration is that when we play an instrument, much of the energy we introduce to the wood is not converted into sound, but absorbed by the wood. This will be absorbed in the form of heat, a result of the friction between the moving molecules as some of the sound waves are absorbed, just like bending a piece of metal will heat it up. Heat is also known to accelerate chemical reactions. So the agitation and heat effects could be at work in speeding up the aging process and the term "warming up the bass" is more accurate than one might think at first.
Even though these effects are probably quite small, the general perception that there is a difference is considerable.