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I have heard that heavier wood with tight grain and no soft spots give the best tone and sustain (obviously open to opinion). I had a possibly crazy idea after watching a video about deep sea exploration and watched as a polystyrene head was put under poop loads of pressure and came out shrunk. I was wondering, if you were to steam a hunk of wood for a guitar body and put it in such a machine to give an even compression would it tighten the grain of the wood, make it denser and improve the wood to give better tone and sustain? or would it be so dense that it would be brittle and dead sounding?

Just a bit of food for thought. Let me know if it sounds plausible or if anyone knows of a similar experiment.

This grain is probably even tighter:

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"Talking about music is like dancing over architecture".
See the most insane first guitar build: http://www.virgilguitar.com
http://www.youtube.com/VirgilGuitar

I think it would be a waste of time. Especially since your post begins with "I have heard...".
There's no proof to this or many of the other "myths" about wood and tone. Definitive, hard proof. With a sample set in the hundreds of guitars, not two or three or ten or twelve someone built to try to "prove" something they were really already expecting to "hear" anyway. You could get better tone simply by building with patience, care and skill, to the best of your ability. MHO.

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Mike

The only thing nescessary for evil to thrive is for good men to do nothing.

Short version: no.

Based on handling several hundred acoustic guitar tops (selecting at rivolta) I found no clear correlation between grain spaying, weight, stiffness or tap tone.

Why not use particle board? Imagine how tight that grain is after all the pressure they apply making it..

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Another day, another dollar.

lol
we scared him off?

too.... much......

PRESSURE?

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"Talking about music is like dancing over architecture".
See the most insane first guitar build: http://www.virgilguitar.com
http://www.youtube.com/VirgilGuitar

stiffness, not density. lead is dense, but a lead bell sounds like......"thud"

So far....best I can tell....stiffness = sustain.

So why pressure treat a piece of wood when you can just go buy some Ipe?

I promise a guitar neck and body made of Ipe is going to sustain...and you don't need a complex process to make it. It just grows all by itself.

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I read Emerson on the can. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...true...but a consistent reading of Emerson has its uses nevertheless.

StuMusic

I believe that tighter grain structures equals more treble or high end to the sound. Mass typically equals sustain.

If only we could come up with a way to make a tree grow to what it normally takes many years in just one year eliminating the seasonal growth rings and the grain lines. I can envision a more stable wood but a less attractive wood though.

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Another day, another dollar.

Good comments. Glad to know that doing this would be in vain. Seems like a lot of effort.

Really great attitude! I think you'll fit in well, here.

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Mike

The only thing nescessary for evil to thrive is for good men to do nothing.

I would guess the easiest way to eliminate seasonal growth lines would be to eliminate seasons... So grow it in a temperature controlled greenhouse.

It's clearly all about the piezo bridge.

You would not want to eliminate seasonal growth rings, they serve a very important structural purpose in softwoods used for tops, since the cells for support and the cells for the vascular functions are essentially the same cells.
During the warm season the cells grow rapidly and become very large, creating softer spongy sections of wood with more cell and less cell wall material per grain line. During the cold season the cell growth size wise slows down to near nothing, but the cells still divide often, but they are very tight and compact, mostly cell wall, creating a very hard section of horn-like material.
The medullary rays transport food across the tissues, perpendicular to the annular rings.

When the top billets are split perpendicular to the annular rings, the medullary rays are exposed and present themselves, more than about 2 degrees and they appear to go away.
When the annular rings, which are composed of the hard hornlike material from the slow growth season,are vertical, they create what could be considered support beams, kinda like floor joists, which in a flawless piece of wood are parallel to each other and evenly spaced, also kinda like floor joists, which is why wood is so super stiff across the grain. Along the grain they are very flexible, due to the softer spongy material between the "floor joist" beams.

If it weren't for the growth seasons, softwoods wouldn't have the cellular structure necessary for the correct stiffness to weight ratio to make good guitar tops.

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Old growth, shmold growth!

I agree that you certainly wouldn't want it for acoustic tops, and I'm not sure if you would for electric bodies either. I think it would be an interesting experiment though.

just build it, whatever it's made of.

Not sure you read the rest of my yaddah. I explained the reasoning behind my assumption, which is that the growth seasons were responsible for the structural aspects of the softwoods used for acoustic guitar tops, which contribute directly to the stiffness to weight weight ratio of the wood, so that my assumption is not an assumption, but instead a reasoned conclusion.

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Old growth, shmold growth!