GUITAR FINISH AND TONE

Hi everyone, in this post I'm going to discuss a little bit about guitar finish and how it will affect your tone. Hopefully you can apply this knowledge when you are choosing a new future guitar or working on a project with your guitar.

Neglected?
Yes, guitar finish is the most underrated aspect of tone. When it comes to guitar tone, people will automatically think about replacement pickup. The truth: yes, the pickup will contribute to the guitar's overall tone to a certain degree; however, there's something that makes two guitars sound different although they use same materials and pickups.

I'm not an expert in wood and anything related to it. Nonetheless, I am pretty sure about the fact that guitar finishing will contribute to the sound-dimension of the guitar.

Good finish.
A good guitar finish is usually applied very thinly to your guitar. I can never tell directly how good is my guitar's finish but there's a way to check it. Unscrew your strap screw and see inside the screw hole how thick is the finish layer until you can see the border between the finishing and the natural wood. If it is thin and almost not noticeable, then you have a good finishing guitar.

Here are some of the usual suspects for guitar's finishing:
Nitrocellulose lacquer finish
It sounds vintage, this is the hardest one to work with and it is extremely thin. This guitar finish does not really clog the wood pores on the guitar and this lets the wood breath and age over time(which is good because then you will have a more resonant guitar by the time your guitar is 30 years old). This will make the guitar looks old though, a white guitar will turn yellowish with this finish but who cares?? as long as it sounds good, no one cares!

Polyurethane finish
A bit thicker compared to the Nitrocellulose finish but doesn't really sound worse than it. There is a caveat though: you have to apply this finish thinly and not using filler or anything between the wood and the Poly to get a great resonant guitar. Some companies don't understand this, they just spray hard on the woods and make it look sharp but in the end the guitar is pretty dead when you try to play clean. Make sure this doesn't happen to your guitar. Otherwise, when applied properly, you'll get amazing tone, as good or maybe even better compared to the nitro finish.

Polyester finish
Avoid this at all cost. This is the thickest and the worst sounding finish you'll ever get. This will dampen your guitar completely and you'll never get a good tone out of it. Sustain will not be present, there will be no overtone harmonics and you can't get that rich bright sparkly headroom that you should have.

Good finish vs bad finish.
As we compared three of the finishes above, we should already know that a good guitar finish will usually give you a good headroom and sparkle when you dial the guitar on its very natural sound-state: clean channel amp. This will help you so much when you are trying to nail some good clean tone. This is where it gets tricky: there is a trade between look and sound. It's up to you how far you will go to chase your guitar tone and cares about the look and how well does the finish protect the original wood of the guitar.

I personally don't care about the look, as long as it gets a good tone, I'm all up for it. But that's totally personal, some of my friends prefer a thicker finish so that their guitars can stand some beating on the road without looking horrible.

But I'm stuck with my guitar and it has bad finishing. What should I do?
There is still some hope on increasing the tone of your guitar in terms of finishing: SCRAP THE FINISHING ON THE BACK OF YOUR GUITAR. Some people that had done it says that it sounds very good after they took the finishing off the unseen part of the guitar. Try it for yourselves! I'll try it with my guitar soon!

I hope you enjoy this post, I'll post some more similar posts soon!

Cheers and God bless :)