How to Examine The Bracing of a Used Guitar

Video Transcript

"KIP BRADFORD: Hi, my name's Kip and I'm here on behalf of Expert Village. Today, we're taking a look at used acoustic guitars in terms of determining whether or not they're worth purchasing with playability in mind, not collectability or vintage instruments in mind. We've now done a total visual inspection of the instrument short of one. And that one is going to be a little difficult to do without putting strings on, but you might be able to find a sign of it without strings on the premises. If we've come this far and the instrument is seemed sound and its inexpensive enough, then its maybe worth either putting some strings on it at the garage sale or purchasing it and taking it home and putting some strings on it to do the rest of it. If you're not going to go that far then, what you're going to be looking for is what we call a belly-up or a hump behind the bridge where the sound board is secured with the bracings from underneath the sound board. Let's take a look at what you're going to be looking for to determine whether you have some problems going on on the inside of your instrument. In this portion right here, if from the tension of the strings and the bridge has not pulled up, the sound board can still pull up because there's some bracing underneath the sound board. Then the bracing is there to give the instrument strength, and there is bracing that is called tone bracing to help to stabilize the tone or to create the tone of the instrument that you're looking for. And there's a fine line that the Luthier's and guitar designers will walk between strength and tone, because if you put too much strength in the instrument, it won't vibrate. And in order to make sound of any kind, be it from a guitar, to speaking, to speakers or whatever. You must have vibration. And so you really want the instrument to vibrate as much as it can when you strum the stings, but you want it to be strong enough to handle the tension of the strings. And so, you make it vibrate too much then you'll have more damage. If you make it so strong that you cannot get damage then the instrument will not sound good. So, but as this section in here you're looking and it will tend to get a hump in it, more obvious would the strings on than with the strings off. You can also tap and just see if you hear any vibrating, anything that clicks, where you might find some bracing that has gone amiss. The other thing that you might want to do--the other thing you might want to do if you're real serious about taking a look at the inside of your guitar is take a mechanic's mirror and a little light if there's not enough in there and take a look at the bracing on the inside of this instrument and see if you can determine whether anything has come lose. And you can see quite a bit with this little mirror."