OK, ladies and gents ... here we have it.

Six different mahogany / Adirondack square-shouldered dreads, played with a flatpick and then played fingerstyle. Mind you, I basically never play with a flatpick so you're not going to be able to get as good of an idea of how these guitars sound as you would if a competent player were at the helm ... but I did what I could.

All instruments have the same new strings (EJ17s), the same string break-in period, and the same recording setup (no processing, same distance to the mic, mono, using a Rode K2 tube mic).

When you've finished listening, answer the survey below. Responses are anonymous.


FLATPICK SAMPLES

Guitar 1
Guitar 2
Guitar 3
Guitar 4
Guitar 5
Guitar 6


FINGERSTYLE SAMPLES

Guitar 1
Guitar 2
Guitar 3
Guitar 4
Guitar 5
Guitar 6

Question:
What is your #1 flatpicked guitar?

Choices:
Guitar 1
Guitar 2
Guitar 3
Guitar 4
Guitar 5
Guitar 6

Question:
What is your #2 flatpicked guitar?

Choices:
Guitar 1
Guitar 2
Guitar 3
Guitar 4
Guitar 5
Guitar 6

Question:
What is your #1 fingerstyle guitar?

Choices:
Guitar 1
Guitar 2
Guitar 3
Guitar 4
Guitar 5
Guitar 6

Question:
What is your #2 fingerstyle guitar?

Choices:
Guitar 1
Guitar 2
Guitar 3
Guitar 4
Guitar 5
Guitar 6

 

Very interesting indeed Mike!

I gave it a once through in < 5 minutes and my choices were quite clear in both categories. Even through headphones [Sony MDR V600, old school...)

I'm going to go home and listen through speakers before I vote, however.

And hey, are you sure #6 is in tune??

Regards, Mark.

PS I played an OM I thought you might like today. Surprising to me, actually, how much I liked it. I'll send you offline. ML.

Yeah, one of the strings on #6 never did sound exactly right. Call it poor quality control at D'Addario. I was sorta tired of changing strings and messing around with it by that point, though.

Ha. Interesting. When I first got my D3 several years ago I had all kinds of trouble with tuning and strange sounds on the B string. After much fretting (pun intended) about this and that, I let first things be first and changed just that string. Presto...Change-Oh!

ML.

Very interesting. I look forward to finding out what guitars are what. I would have a guess at which one is the Collings but as for the rest, I could only say which ones have the Martin tone. And I could well be wrong.
Thanks for the effort.

Thanks for playing the guitars, sharing this test, and setting up the poll.

Nice picking.

Disclosures: Mahogany and red spruce dreads with ebony fingerboards and with medium strings are my favorite guitars, and I tend to play bare fingered rather than using any type of picks. My ears are 56 years old.

I listened to the cuts multiple times through good quality headphones via a Delta Omni i/o.

My preferences:

Flatpicked: Surprisingly, in the order they were presented, although you could have swapped guitar #2 and #3. The trebles on #1 actually sounded muted compared to the rest but I liked the overall tone of the guitar on this piece.

Guitar #2 sounded different to me than all the rest.

I'd like to hear guitar #3 played again on a different piece.

Guitars #4, 5, & 6 all projected very well, but I prefer the sound of the first three.

Fingerstyle: I ranked them as guitar #3, 4, 2, 1, 5, 6, but liked all of the first 4 about equal for different reasons.

For both styles, I almost felt like downloading all of the clips, saving them as separate tracks, and playing them simultaneously, just to see how they sounded against each other.

Hope you reveal the guitars !

Thanks again.

Mark D.

I oscillated between 1 & 5 as my favorites. I chose 1 then 5 for the poll but on further listening, I really liked 5. I reckon 3 is a Collings, certainly the loudest to my ears and Collings like in tone. They all sound great and I would agree that 2 sounded quite different to the rest (Goodall?).

I love it... well done that man. Three is a clear favourite of mine for both flatpicking and fingerpicking. I'm dying to find out makes/models.

I just hope that my favorite is not a Recording King instead of a Borges OM-28.

Nice playing and a great idea, Mike. There were a couple of minor tuning issues to my ear, which may prove a confound to the experiment. I know on the recordings I post on my site, if I get even one string a tiny bit off it makes the chords sound just enough "off" that the full richness of the tone doesn't come through. I'm unfortunately too lazy to go through teh process again, so i usually jsut hope nobody else notices! ( :

Andrew

I'll disclose the guitars Sunday evening to make sure everybody who is interested has had a chance to vote.

I will say this much ... there's not a bad one in the bunch. A couple of them just don't record as well as the others. It was extremely interesting to me to have all of these around at the same time and to be able to play them side by side. I could go to my grave with any one of them and be perfectly content.

Thanks for all the work you put into this. I enjoyed hearing all those different tonal varieties.