Does Guitar Wood Need To Breathe? 

Wood doesn't have a cardiovascular system. Therefore a respiratory system isn't necessary for wood to live. That's basic biology.

Hey Chris thanks for the video. Working with coatings as a profession, I would also say it likely doesn't matter much on an acoustic either. Maybe with some type of softer finishes perhaps you may lose a bit of acoustic energy to some heat loss but likely not with something like a poly finish that cures hard. Given the durability and hardness of many finishes you would likely improve the ability for sound to resonate more freely. Having pores to "breath" would be like having small air gaps in the philosophy of sound dampening. You lose energy to the void spaces. Filling them allows more unintentionally energy transfer. That being said, much like a electric guitars pickups being more important than the wood choice, I'd wager that the quality of the bracing construction on an acoustic (points of contact) maters considerably more than the finish on the same guitar. Keep up the great content by the way!

Good point about wood absorbing moisture if untreated. Makes perfect sense.

Thank you. Thank you. As a recreational builder and a retired engineer I have been enamored with this wood question in solid bodies. I've learned that walnuts, mahogany. Maples do have an innate vibration peculiarity. However, it's contribution to the sound produced is nominal. Can't forget why Les Paul etal, needed these kind of guitars. Acoustics in large halls wasn't cutting it. So enter stage left. amplified instruments. In my opinion the exotic woods used today only make the guitars more beautiful and expensive. Much of today's popular music is modified by the amps and you seldom get to hear the pure sound of the guitar. Much more modification comes via pickups, capacitors, other electronic mods and of course the amplifiers. Well done Chris

You make SO much sense. I really enjoy your videos! I get a good chuckle along with extremely clear, logical explanations and ideas. Thanks for all your effort!👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 And yes, I agree fully. 👍🏻

Thank you. I think this may be one of your best videos.

Thank you Chris for explaining from all your experience as a Luther regarding solid body electric guitars , totally agree with your explanations . Only just found your channel and what a find .

You got my subscription A) because your video was great, but B) you said, “I hope, at the end of this video, I have earned your subscription.” I respect the way you conduct your page. I look forward exploring your channel.

Makes sense to me. Thanks for explaining all that.

Important is to keep the strings vibrating, if the wood starts to vibrate from the strings that will absorb the strings energy and so would actually damper the strings vibration. Good solid guitar wood is something that is very hard and dense so it will repell the vibration of the strings and keep them vibrate, ring for a longer time. Sorry if my words are not 100% accurate, hard to discribe something delicate in a not nativ language.

Great topic as always. Acoustic vs electric are definitely different in regards to finish. In regards to electric guitars, in 40 years I've yet to see much if any difference between a thick or thin finish on electric guitars or basses. The main thing is whether the wood has properly aged and is at stable moisture level. I personally use oil, french polish or wipe on poly because I great the results with those and I don't have a great area to spray. My only dislike of thick poly is the possibility of cracking the finish when installing hardware. Other than that, it's mostly personal preference. Here's a topic that you can tackle and is sure to be controversial: old vs new wood. Meaning that a 50 year old strat sounds better simply because the wood aged and was under string tension for 50 years.

Very interesting video, it makes sense and I like the logical explanations.

Beautiful presentation ❤️❤️ My favourite Channel and very interesting information in a unique way...⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐👌👌🙏👍👍

I don't know or care if wood needs to breathe but I quit using poly and now finish with hard wax/oils because it's less work, looks great, no fumes ,and the neck feels much better.

Thanks for your explanation. I totally agree with your conclusions.

Thank you. I learnt 🙏

I think it’s quite possible for a thick, soft finish such as 80’s imports can suffocate/ muffle a solid body. The hardness of most modern finishes that have come out should only help.

This video is comedic and informative, awesome job!

Breathe? Only if one does not put any filling or finish on the guitar. When finishing a guitar, I focus on one thing. To quote renowned woodworker Sam Maloof: “One of the most important aspects of finishes, I believe, is that they invite [one] to touch, to caress, and to take pleasure in the wood surface." Yes, if you finish the guitar, you will have a small or more (depending on the finish) sound on the guitar. Best to focus on Maloof's belief to appeal to the intelligent buyer.

Would expands and contracts due to temperature and humidity That I know is true. So I think a lite finish is better than no finish. I could see a thick heavy finish affecting the sustain

Great video. Thankyou

A great info video! Merry Xmas!

The guitar touching the wall experiment brings to mind a magic trick my dad used to fool us as kids. He took a silver dinner fork(hauled from silver chest for the demo) and pinched then released the tines exciting a resonance like a tuning fork. He would move his free hand from the fork to a glass and the sound changed noticeably when he dropped the sound into the glass. Unbeknownst to us kids, he pressed the base of the resonating fork to the table as his hand “dropped” the sound into the glass. The table resonated when touched by the fork altering the volume…. An excellent trick if properly executed with proper slight of hand…..

I have a weird single pickup ESP LTD eclipse with a bolt on that I found on guitar center for like a hundred bucks. Body is basswood, neck is just hard maple with a scarf joint and volute and rosewood fingerboard. Body is just basswood with black paint and satin finish. Hardware is passable, nothing special. I put a nice seymour duncan in it and it sounds great. as good as anything that is decently built and has a nice pickup in it can sound. I even put some locking tuners and after-market brass bridge and tailpiece on it with that nice pickup in there and it sounds great. The thing is, it has an awesome neck joint and really good fretwork with a well made nut. I really think those 3 things are the essence of an awesome electric guitar regardless of price.

I remember the tonewood conversations. And you are right about the arguments. Wood breathing also has been a debate. I have taken a lot of guitar bodies and used epoxy resin as my finish. Epoxy has been a great finish, but is a lot of work. Between a epoxy bodies and the pickups. I have not noticed any difference between tones. As far as the wood bodies being sealed. I really don't think humidity is going to affect a guitar solid body that has been coated in epoxy. As much as I have used epoxy, I kind of wonder what it would do on an acoustic guitar body. How much of a difference the sound of an acoustic would be.

I think when you say “resonance” what you mean is “Q” or quality factor. High Q = low damping, ie rings like a bell. Low Q equals high damping, ie wet blanket. I think overall you assessment is right and too much emphasis is placed on damping in the body of electric guitars. What probably matters most are the strings, and things that can damp the strings directly like the nut, bridge, frets and pickups, and then of course the electronics. I think a lot more fruitful investigation, would be evaluating the Q of the pickups, that should much more greatly affect if your tone is tight or loose or whatever else. Thanks for doing these videos, it’s great to see your process and why you make the design choices you do!

Thank you for covering this topic. It seems obvious that the type of finish on a solid body guitar has little to no effect on tone, and yet it seems every couple of months someone on the Gear Page makes a big stink about how poly finishes guitars sound "dead" and have no resonance. Next thing you know there are two camps arguing one side or the other of the issue. I've had guitars with poly, nitro, and oil finishes. All of them have sounded great, it's an esthetic choice more than a functional one. And of course, poly will always look good longer, unless you like the checking that happens with nitro. And an oil finish is very easy to repair if it gets damaged. But does one sound better than the other? No.

I always worked on my friends' guitars as weekend projects. When wrapping cars in vinyl was sort of a fever back in the early 2010s I couldn't keep one of my friends from wrapping his pretty decent squier in this horrible matte metallic orange color at a local car shop. I reassembled the little monstrosity and to my surprise it sounded like any other strat with ok pickups I've ever heard. Now, why this is still up to debate in 2022 I'll never know.

Hey Chris, I think you've got it right. If you want wood to breath you've got to add branches and leaves. I don't know how many RU-vid videos I've watched that claim to show differences in sound transmission to the pickups for different woods and finishes and not been able to detect anything. Perhaps it's RU-vid or my laptop but I suspect that it is more a 'placebo' effect. If there is a difference, it is so slight as to be insignificant and, anyway, who is going to notice these subtle differences when the sound is blasted out through effects pedals and a stack of speakers? I doubt that different woods etc. make any difference to the sound and think that a well-designed, well set up instrument will do the trick any time. Of course, it is nice to argue over such things and, if you have the cash, why not pander to your beliefs however, I happen to be a poor Scotsman more used to the subtleties of the bagpipes................

I don't think finish material or thickness has much effect on the way a guitar sounds, but I prefer oil finishes because they are easy to apply, don't smell too bad, and offer enough protection to the wood unless you sweat profusely or abuse the guitar in some way. I think the distance from the pickups to the strings has the most dramatic effect on tone. I have bought guitars that sounded great through somebody else's amp and when I played them through my rig I was pretty disappointed. But an hour or so playing around with pickup height brought the sound back to life for me. I use very light strings these days (.008 to .038) and some of my guitars actually sound louder to me with the pickups pretty far from the strings, and sustain seems better too. I know this seems counterintuitive, but I just go with what my ears are telling me. I don't know very much about electronics or magnetic fields, all I know is that some of my favorite guitarists lowered their pickups quite a bit.

I think you're correct that breath=resonate. You could do a whole series on all the wrong terms guitar players use! If people really believe that the finish is adversely affecting their electric guitar tone, why not insist on an oil finish. Or no finish!

Please wear a mask around my guitar.. it's been under the weather

I know from experience that paint will affect the tone I spent 5 days carefully painting my wamp ash guitar thencoated it with clear coat lacquer then after drying for 3 days excited plugged it in and 5he tone was dead horrible I had to scrape ll off to get the tone back

Yea! Jeff Jewitt!

Thanks Chris, enjoyed the video. One comment, the pick-ups are never hard attached to the body anyway. There is always something intervening like the pick guard or the hardware to raise and lower the pick-up. I would see all these as damping any string to body to pick-up resonance.

Guitar, being a percussive instrument as it's plucked, has lots of high frequency transients particularly in the attack part of the waveform. And the attack phase of the wave is the most important part of the timbre where you can identify an instrument. Roland's LA synthesis, during the late 80s, used only the few milliseconds of attack samples of instruments to simulate those instruments. When you get older, you lose the hearing range of those upper frequencies. Do not blame people when they honestly say they can hear the difference, it is there, but for older guys it is not heard at all. So do not forget that as an aging and experienced guy you have lost some of those frequencies in your hearing and you may not notice nuances younger people are hearing. I myself, am a middle aged person, and I remember when I was young, my strat bridge pickup sound was hurting my ears, it doesn't anymore, so I definitely don't hear some frequencies that hurt my ears back in time.

So many experiment's proved that there's no sound of wood for solid body electric guitars. Even if you consider the vibration of your pickups due to wood vibration it has such a small amplitude of movement compared to the one of the vibration of the string itself.

It's true that some factors make a little effect on the sound of electric guitar, but the number of these factors is at least more than 10 factors, our ears maybe can't hear of when one factor change the sound only 2 % but when we have 10 different factors ( pots, runners, kind of wood, nut, fret, finish .....) the sum of those small differences can be completely recognizable, then we can't Ignore those small factors yes we can't hear 2% difference in sound of guitar but what about 2%x10?

I think people just get confused about what their ears are hearing vs the physical vibrations coming from the guitar that they feel thru their hands and body in terms of how different guitars resonant. It is hard to distinguish hearing vs feeling sometimes. That's why we don't notice a difference when listening someone else play on youtube because we're not the ones touching the guitar.

I only play my guitar against real cedar paneling, with spruce studs behind, and connected by ye olde square nails. Never again will I play against that chalky drywall or pressboard paneling with pine or metal studs behind, connected by those newfangled drywall screws. Only real tonewalls for me.

here's a 1959 les paul - it was 2 trees a couple of years before that and has been dead for about 65 years and so isn't breathing too well

The wood does not need to breathe however coating the guitar with a thick finish may inhibit the guitar from vibrating as much and potentially decreasing sustain 🎸😁

As far as 'Tone Wood' is concerned it's usually a case of 'confirmation bias'. the wood does have an effect on the sounds coming from the guitar but it's such a small amount as to be nearly undetectable anyway...

I would trust this guy with my daughter by just watching his videos 😂

With that long hair and glasses you somehow make me think of ‘doc’ that professor guy from Back to the Future 😆 you are the guitar professor 😊 On topic, electric guitar bodies do need to breathe to avoid mold growth is my own experience. Closing all grains can cause moisture to grow underneath the finish. When I took of the finish and removed the moist it didnt came back anymore because the wood breathed. I had this experience in a high moisture climate country

Not every vibration is resonation. wiki: "Resonance describes the phenomenon of increased amplitude that occurs when the frequency of an applied periodic force (or a Fourier component of it) is equal or close to a natural frequency of the system on which it acts. When an oscillating force is applied at a resonant frequency of a dynamic system, the system will oscillate at a higher amplitude than when the same force is applied at other, non-resonant frequencies." You cannot have so many natural frequencies to cover whole guitar range of notes. Ususally there is 1-3, maybe 5 basic frequencies and theirs harmonics. In practice you can hear the buzzing of saddles on some notes - that is resonance and you wouldn't like it.

As the story that I read goes, Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar tech wanted to send out Stevie's number 1 to get refinished because a lot of the Finish has fallen off and the wood was being damaged. Stevie Vetoed the idea because he said since the Finish had fallen off he thought the guitar had a better tone. Now maybe he just didn't trust the people who were going to be working on his number 1 but that's the story. So I put together partscasters with no finish on the guitar body.

Iv nevre had a fixed neck so idk i guess it boils down to how it plays

I sanded two epiphone casinos which are fully Hollow, and even if they are électric guitars I noticed a great différence in the sound after having oiled them. I cannot say I found such a difference as I sanded solid Wood guitars. Even though don’t you think that the way the wood vibrates with or without a plastic or whatever thick finishing,coud transfer to the strings and make them vibrate differently in matters of frequences and sustain?

I'm down with you on your analogy! I'm fixing to move to a lakefront property with my son and am extremely concerned about controlling the humidity issues acoustics and electric? Humidifier in acoustic guitar and case & electric in case? It's probably going to be 6 months in RV or shed environment until I'll have a controlled environment for them! Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated Brother!! Have a Jamming Day! Thanks!!!

LOL! Soooo... How do you let acrylic "breath?" Not all guitars are made from wood. Trees breath mostly through leaves and inhale CO2 and exhale oxygen. Wood doesn't breath just like muscles don't. So unless your guitar is made of leaves, don't have to worry about breathing. But I've heard that the more rigid the material the guitar is made from the more tone in solid body electric guitars. Problem with acrylic and metal is that they are incredibly heavy. Reason we use wood is because it's rigid enough while not being fragile, and it's relatively light weight. So if that theory is correct than the more rigid the finish the better. But I doubt you can put enough finish on to make any noticeable difference.

I'm not into thick finishes because of unnecessary weight, not so much tone.

OK, want to go to extremes? Take your acoustic, dip it in melted wax. Wait ten minutes, then dip it again. Record it before and after. What do you think?

you missed 2 important points: 1 vibration transfer 2 wood still needs to dry further 1 when strings vibrate it goes through the bridge then through the finish and only then into the wood. Plastic doesnt have the same resonances wood does so its gonna eat some of the vibrations similar to how colored lenses make image darker when applied together (eg red and blue) they only let through freqs they have in common. now that could be desirable bc not everyone wants his guitar to sound supa woody and would rather prefer a balanced less resonant sound but still 2 Not sure about your custom guitars but most production guitars especially low-mid imports are MOIST(iwater + oils) when they arrive. it can take a while before it dries and it sounds noticeably worse b4 it does. Moist wood doesnt sound the same it has less high end which in most cases not desirable. CORT for instance is pushing their open pore finish to prob address this problem on their cheap imports. I would also guess that open pore finish makes it dry more evenly. That prob also makes vintage\old guitars sound better bc they are definitely dry and acclimatized (again its water + oils and oils can take a while to dry)

What are your thoughts on placing the neck scarf joint around the 3rd or 4th fret area like many guitar makers are now doing? It seems to me it might be alright unless the fretboard needs removal for some reason. I also wonder how the glue line will eventually react to constant rubbing of the hand around the 3rd or 4th fret area. Will the wear of the wood be consistent with the wear of the glue line? Why did makers move the scarf joint? Does it have something to do with board feet and how wood is purchased?

About wood breathe. I got two things to say. In the 50s Fender used something Called fullerplast wich they poorfilled their guitars with. The second is. Brian Mays guitar. Google how that one is built and what finish he used. Then get back to me.

Gotta quit the band my guitars got emphazema.

messing about on my bed the headstock touched the wall, a brick wall, and it was an electric guitar unplugged, and instantly it was 2 or 3 times louder, so the theory is the frequencies are going from the headstock, and coming off the wall and feeding back into the neck, along said neck, back to the body??

I know who it was in the comments. It was barfyman362. 😂🤣

Being a lefty just getting a good guitar was not heard of

Latest Bass I bought has a resin body 😅(1998 Ibanez Ergodyne EDB600) One of my favorite Bass has a plywood body .... I laugh and cringe at this topic 😉 Just go with what you can acquire and what looks good. I would however seal a raw body, if only to prevent moisture and various decay.

I’ve noticed that ‘look how smart and sophisticated I am’ syndrome in the comments section of a lot of guitar review videos. It often manifests itself in the form of comments about how the intonation is off when there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the intonation on said guitar.

Moisture is such a hassle... I say seal it as much as possible...

o so how true simple physics

I think it's just lingo, for lack of a better term

No.

who else paused at 10:00 to try the wall thing?

No, wood does not breathe. Not by the Webster’s definition or any other derivation of the word.

That's very easy to answer: no.

Paul Reed Smith would disagree and he knows everything.......just ask him.

People believe all kinds of baloney! ( they believe it so good...)

I've always felt like the dryer the wood the more resonance the guitar. I have wondered if guitars with commercial finish like Ibanez and Jackson do, will that wood dry anymore or is the moisture level locked in??

The tree is dead, so no, wood doesn't need to breathe. Plus, it no longer has leaves to breathe through...

10:07 I'm not sure I buy the idea that using a thick finish - even on an acoustic guitar - will have much effect on the tone, other than what a slightly thicker board would do. I know it's been said over and over, and I guess is makes some theoretical sense, but I've never seen any scientific proof. The finish should be fully bonded to the wood and vibrate with the wood. So adding more mass to the wood should be the same just using a thicker piece of wood. But with the thickness of typical finishes, would that even be perceptible?

There is so much mysticism in peoples' beliefs about guitars. Whether or not living trees breathe is irrelevant: guitars are made from dead wood. I think that even biologists will agree that dead organisms do not breathe. Even a piece of dead wood can absorb moisture from the air or from the player's sweaty hands and arms. This has nothing to do with breathing. While it would take years of study to confirm, I doubt that, even with a bare wood body, home players would ever experience a significant change in their solid body guitar other than discoloration from sweating on part of the wood. If you spend years going from hot stages and hot climates to freezing car trunks or cold climates and back again it would be more of a concern. Clearly the neck, a long, thin piece of wood under constant tension, is much more vulnerable to temperature and moisture change. It's too bad carbon fiber necks never caught on. I have a bass (a longer, thinner piece of wood under much greater tension) with a carbon fiber neck and it is the most stable instrument I've ever played. Paints were never chosen for their sonic properties - they were chosen because those were the paint systems available at the time. Nitrocellulose lacquer dried harder and faster than previously used paint systems, which is why it was used to paint cars. Guitars were never a consideration in the development of paint. Nitro was also available in a wide variety of colors, something which was a selling point for Fender. It's still a terrible paint system, being soft, toxic, having an extremely long curing time, and it continues to gas off and shrink for years. There's a reason that it was replaced in the auto industry by polyurethane paint systems. I'm sure that there are newer and better systems on the market now; I haven't kept up. I am willing to believe that someone in laboratory conditions might, and I emphasize might, be able to hear the difference between a softer finish system and a harder finish system, but so what? Your guitar has electronics. Your pedals have tone knobs. Your amplifier has a tone stack. If you are playing through a PA then the PA has tone controls. Your guitar's finish is meaningless, except for the look, and protection from dings, scrapes, and moisture.

No, not watched 10 seconds of video yet but, no defo.

The notion that solid body wood needs to "breath" in an electric guitar was a bizarre notion dreamed up by the science-challenged. Don't give it any further credence. Measurements of real guitars have shown actual body vibration to be very small. And in any case, any such vibration would represent loss from the strings, so not seen by the pickups. Luckily, measurements show that does not happen to any real extent - almost all vibrations are reflected back up the strings at the bridge. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the small string-vibration-induced body vibrations have any real effect on the pickups. You mention vibrations transferred via the bridge to the body, as if it is significant. But direct bridge admittance measurements show that to be very small, as I said. The "wall test" you did changes the resonant structure of the guitar, by connecting it to another resonant structure - so vibrations flow differently, particularly at the wall's resonant frequencies. Zoller has shown that test to affect the acoustic sound, but that it is not significant enough to affect the signal from the pickups. So all in all, resonance of the solid body is basically a non-issue. Resonance of the long, thin, flexible, composite neck is greater. It has been shown to induce narrow-band vibration losses from the strings via its resonant modal frequencies, that thus reduces measured sustain at those frequencies.

Wood breathing, pseudoscience and nothing more.

Love that intro 😂