Tonerite On A Solid Body Jaguar Or Jazzmaster?

[andy_tchp]

Make sure you treat the fretboard with high quality snake oil to keep it in optimal playing condition. 'Tonerite' will probably sell you some.


Big ups to InLimbo for the magic wand reference/pic.

[Fiddy]

Never heard of it before but it does sound like a crock of shit.

[Kinx]

I finally did an A/B test with my strat - this guitar sat unused for months, so I recorded "before" state, put tonerite on it for 76 hours and then recorded "after" take.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8dh0_VGTPo

[Ceylon]

I finally did an A/B test with my strat - this guitar sat unused for months, so I recorded "before" state, put tonerite on it for 76 hours and then recorded "after" take.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8dh0_VGTPo

This is the kind of A/B-testing without which threads like these are ultimately pointless, so a big thanks for taking the time to record it!

I don't have the best soundsystem but I can tell absolutely no difference between the before/after clips.

[Kinx]

thanks I cant hear anything either TBH, regardless ofwhat kind of monitors/headphones I'm using.

[hexes]

The guy that invented the tonerite was my neighbor for a couple years. He’s actually a great cellist and nice dude. Before it was patented and sold, he said it was for acoustic instruments to season/wear in the top. I asked if it could be used for noise purposes on an electric guitar and he shrugged it off.

Surprised to see them now marketed to solid body bass guitars and drum shells.

[Kinx]

I guess Tonerite makes sense on brand new solid top stringed instruments, but I doubt it does anything to solidbody guitars I have quite a few corksniffing types around me who say that their les pauls and strats sound dead without tonerite treatment, so I wanted to see for myself.

[timtam]

Study from Stanford/UCB suggests that even for acoustic guitars, the Tonerite (applied for 348 hours) makes no measurable frequency difference to the guitars. And experienced guitarists can't pick the "treated" guitar of treated/untreated same-model guitar pairs in blinded listening/playing tests. Despite being told that an unknown guitar in each pair had undergone a vibration treatment (which biases them to expect that one guitar in each pair is "different", and also plays into common player biases to "expect" to hear a sonic difference from vibration treatment).
https://www.savartjournal.org/articles/22/about.html

Any evidence that any acoustic musical instruments can be "played in" by either real playing or artificial treatment is very limited.
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... or_Fiction
The extent to which woods of various species and initial mechanical/moisture/acoustic properties in acoustic guitars can evolve mechanically and/or sonically over time of their own accord is of course a separate question.

[epizootics]

Most types of placebo will work well when assessing the actual difference between A and B is based on sensory informations.

There have been a bunch of studies where people were given a sugary drink that was either pop or pop and booze. The subjects were divided in four groups: boozy drink but the subjects were told it was pop, boozy drink & told it was booze, pop & told it was pop, pop and told it was booze.
After a while the subjects were asked to assess how drunk they felt. They were also monitored for visible signs of drunkenness. The ones who felt and acted the drunkest were the ones in the fourth group, who were given no alcohol but were told they'd had some.

As an 18 year-old student in psychology, I remember thinking 'gee, that's how marketing works for guitars!'
And with that interesting piece of science in mind, I still proceeded to try and find the perfect guitar for years

Not saying that everything is the same out there - just that we are really bad at assessing those differences.

Recently, I was commissioned to build a bass. My client is a great bassist with years of training in classical guitar, but for some reason he thinks of himself as a 'Sunday bass player'. He got a friend of his, who is a New-York-trained jazz hot shot, to give the bass a spin. The guy told him it was one of the nicest 34" he'd ever played (which made me blush to no end when my client told me about it, 'cause none of us are immune to compliment). My client now plays a much better instrument than the one he had been playing before he asked the guy. That doesn't make him an idiot, it is just the way our brain works.

Whatever makes us feel better about our instrument makes us play better...So why the hell not?

The one thing that always makes me smile is how people think that maple is harder than rosewood because the open pores on the latter suggest a softer material. They then go on to apply those perceived characteristics to their description of how different they sound. That doesn't make them idiots either - having worked with both I will tend to think I hear the opposite, with maple fretboards sounding 'softer', whatever that means. We fuse all of our sensory experiences together when we try and describe a sound. I know I couldn't tell the difference in a blind test, but with my eyes open my brain insists on adding informations to what I hear. If anything, I find it endearing - "aaah, good old Brain has its ways."