Helen's question (and rastrelnikov's comments) about how instruments change with age is a fountainhead of folk wisdom and endless debate. Twenty five years ago, a friend of mine was importing Goya guitars from Sweden, and he found out setting up a big Kustom electric guitar amp in the storeroom and blasting it 24 hours a day for several weeks definitely helped the tone. When Fred (my Martin) was just a few months old, he sounded OK, but that fall I took him to his first Winfield festival. After three days of trying to play over banjos, hammered dulcimers, (as many as 8 at once) and the kind of volume large groups of string pickers make, I couldn't believe the difference when I got home. I went through three sets of medium strings that weekend, (none broken but by morning the sound was just dead on them) and used a heavy flat pick. Barefinger picking Fred at home, the volume increase was surprising. When I sent my 1935 Dobro to Don Teeter for a fretboard sanding and new frets, he didn't think much of it - I had slacked the strings off for shipping. He strung it up to pitch and left it lay for a week, and when he started work on it, he called me and said it was the loudest damn Dobro he'd ever played. So I guess it was getting the wood and metal stretched into tension. For the same reason, he wouldn't compensate Fred's bridge until he had weathered a couple of years, because he said guitars actually shrink a little the first few years, throwing the intonation off. When guitars are built lightly enough to sound good, you can feel the vibrations in your left hand and through your chest - really good ones almost give me an upset stomach.

Country Bob