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But gluing three thin veneers (for backs and sides) requires a HUGE amount of glue compared to the weight of the wood. So any damping from, e.g., Titebond, could make a tonal difference (as opposed to, say, gluing braces.
It's like two rubbery membranes between a sandwich of three veneers.
Most high-end "regular" guitars use solid woods, so the issue doesn't arise there.
Of course, if you test it and can't tell the difference, then there is no difference.
These hearing tests, comparing the sound of this or that are scientifically impossible in my mind. People argue over different glues, Strad sound, speaker cables... there's much more. Ear isn't a constant instrument. Maybe I should say ear/brain conjunction. It's a dynamic thing. Simple example, you might drive home from work and blast some music on the speakers and listen to it without thinking twice about the volume level. Your "ears" are adapted. Next morning, it's early and you're leaving for work and hit play using the same volume as yesterday. What happens? Something along the lines of "whoa, way too loud!!!". But wait , nothing changed and yet you were ok with it the day before and now it's blasting your ears. I know I have been there. Knowing this, I don't think it's possible to conduct any blind test along these lines and expect anything consistent.
I have a close friend who firmly believes once you're using a decent enough speaker cable, nothing can further improve the sound. I'm convinced otherwise. We compared a regular cable and a super high-end one I borrowed from work and I could tell on his face that he heard a difference but he claimed it's just a placebo. Whatever, he can think that and it's fine, I'll use the cable I hear as sounding better, both are ok.
I remember reading something about a military experiment. Something about detecting the enemy soldiers. WWI or WWII, I don't remember. Ultimately it was decided regardless of the technology that was used, human ear was unreliable for it to be useful.
either of those glues, to me, would be a poor choice for laminating a back. They are both full of water, so glueing up thin layers, they have a high chance of warping things (ask me how I know....)
But if you're glueing properly, you should have minimal glue, either way. You're talking about a space between two layers of wood which basically doesn't exist. The glue is going to get partially absorbed in the surface of the wood but the wood layers will more or less be in contact with each other. It's not like the glue is interfacing between the wood...the wood layers are touching each other.
I don't think aliphatic/yellow glues are "rubbery", they are maybe less "hard" than hide glue but they are still pretty hard.
But the other thing is that the back and sides are not contributing hugely to the sound of guitars in general and these guitars in particular. At least in my understanding. A laminated back that's fairly heavily braced is not doing a ton of resonating. To me, thinks that don't vibrate a lot don't influence to tone a lot. Just my opinion. My best educated guess based entirely on absolutely nothing and making it up is that the glue used to laminate the back and sides is .01% of a guitars sound. It would be an incredibly small influence on something which doesn't have a huge effect on the sound of the guitar, so I would suggest that it's meaningless.
Yeah that's basically the whole thing with a lot of this. I can't do a double blind testing of two different glues used to laminate backs (I don't generally laminate backs but anyway). It's impossible. It would mean that I made two sonically identical guitars that were alike in every way except for the glue I used to laminate the back.
This is impossible and impractical:
Impossible because It is difficult but not impossible to get guitars to sound "similar" but no two guitars are ever going to be exactly the same. Maybe lower end guitars that sound equally "fine" or "ok" or "bad" but high end guitars that are pushing the envelope, each one is going to be different. So it's not possible to make two guitars that are alike enough that you could isolate the specific sonic difference in the back glue.
Impractical because it takes me maybe 2 months to make a guitar. I'm not going to invest a ton of effort into a low value experiment about back glue lamination because it's not going to move my sound needle very far at all as far as making my guitars better and there's a lot more low hanging fruit of things that I want to experiment with.
I have to go with sort of educated guesses. Everything goes to show me that glue ultimately doesn't make much, if any difference. My preference is to use hide glue for stuff on the soundboard (braces in particular) because MAYBE there's a touch of potential sonic difference. I don't think there is but it's easy enough for me to use it. But as far as on the back and sides, or anything that's laminated, I'm going to use a PVA glue like Gorilla Glue because it has no water in it, has pretty nice characteristics and seems pretty hard once it's dried. So in that case it isn't really sound that matters as much as its mechanical qualities.
Speaker cables would be a breeze to check out, relatively. Have someone plug one in and another one in while your back is turned. Do it 50x, can you tell greater than 50% of the time which is which?
Guitar stuff is more like, make some experiments, try to remember which experiment you made, 2 months later, finish the guitar, try to figure out which experiment did what to the sound. Ultimately you sort of develop a style of what you do that's based on narrowing down what you think makes a good guitar. But there's no A/B testing of any given thing.
But that's just the thing. I don't think it's possible to deduct anything in any of these tests. Because (and this is nothing scientific, just my gut feeling and my perception, perhaps naive) brain will perceive and interpret things differently. Like in my above example of brain perceiving the same volume level differently in two different situations.
What would be really interesting is to conduct a test asking people if they can hear a difference between several different guitars, give some details but a vague description of each guitar but then play the same guitar and and my guess would be that nobody would say that they heard the same thing over and over. I think people would describe different things.
Agreed, many times on here I have tried to emphasise the player's fingers make the biggest contribution to the end result, ie what the listener hears. As a relative beginner who would impress nobody, that same nobody would not know if I was playing your fave Busato, Favino or Selmer, while Angelo Debarre on a $300 LAG still sounds like Angelo.
That all makes sense about the more hands involved increases variables, but although I have never played one, the perceived wisdom from the 'experts' on here seems to imply that over the span of near twenty years the original Selmers did in fact vary a lot in build quality and sound which rather goes against your suggestion that Selmer "standardized shop practices that could produce a consistent product." Or are those variables heard today just down to the vagaries of time; how the guitar was cared for, stored, played or just neglected?
So I'm fucked. :(
And to take that further, I am convinced 95% of guitar players have a pre-conceived idea of what a name or brand on a guitar should mean and I include myself in this.
First, there is the basic show-off wish to impress, as in "hey, check out my pre-CBS Telecaster", or "This '70s D28 was a bargain at only $5k", or maybe the less vocal just quietly showing up at a jam with that new $15k Selmer and hoping the headstock label does the talking.
I do not consider myself a serious player, not serious enough to have a valid opinion on the finer points of high-end guitars except to say down the years I have tried most types of guitars and still say the player is more important than the instrument. There are of course physical differences that affect player comfort; example I had one of those modern Asian D'Angelico archtops that was a real beauty in every way except it was just too big for me to find a comfortable position for my right upper arm. Then there were quite a few vintage Di Mauros that while extremely light and sounding authentic always seemed to have narrow but thick necks, something my left hand never got used to. So I gave up on them, but just to prove the point that not all vintage guitars are in some way superior, I made more progress in six months on a $1k Altamira even though it was not vintage, not made in France, and not ever going to get the 'wow' factor.
Another quirk of guitarist's behaviour is that spending big bucks on a guitar in an attempt to convince themselves it will improve their playing often then causes them to even lie to themselves that they can hear the difference because the guilt of having blown a few grand makes them need to justify it to whoever may listen.
The oft repeated tales of the variability of the sound and quality of, for example, vintage Selmers, is probably another reason why so many of them end up never being played but stored in some rich person's private collection as investments while the average gigging player is making music on a reasonably priced and fairly modern replica.
Its ok folks, I am not having a go at any of you, I have done exactly the same, but when talking in ever more esoteric and intangible tones about why X is better (or worse) than Y lets keep our feet on the ground.
Well I can actually test the guitars with objective tests. Top deflection, fundamental vibration modes, mass of top/braces/back. I can correlate those things to guitars which have worked well and the ones that haven't worked well.
It's not perfect system at all but Michael Greenfield calls it a "recipe". The goal is to get use a combination of testing and intuition to hit a goal. Maybe it's hard to explain but something like changing the glue or even changing the wood of the back and sides would have very little effect compared to something like how many braces you have, how heavy they are, where your top modes are in relation to scale tones*. Each individual factor becomes less important and you're trying to design and tune things to be a harmonious whole. At least, I think so...
*if you have one of your major modes end up on a frequency really close to the frequency of a note in A440 tuning the mode will interact with the note and create a wolf. That's one thing you definitely can't really mess with in traditional guitar making.