A dumb guitar metaphysical question

[Zerberus]

I´m with Ace, if the core is gone, it´s a different guitar. I mean, if you take all the hadware off a strat and slap it onto a tele, is it still a strat? No, so how can it realistically be the same guitar.?

The Ship of Theseus thought experiment only works because a ship, or the human body, has so many single components than can be changed out and replaced independently that removing one or even close to half of them simultaneously and immediately replacing them with new facsimilies will have zero tangible impact. But as soon as you put a different neck on a guitar, the feel and tone can change noiticably, because the single components have a much greater impact on the overall sytem.

Where it changes a bit is "living" istruments, like a Hank, Norbert, or whatever... beause there teh instrument is viewed almost more like a pet or other living breathing entity.. but even if Hank suddenly wakes up one day as an Explorer, he´s no longer Hank the strat, though he´s arguably still Hank :friday:

 

[beaubrummels]

You have about 36 trillion cells in your body and replace about 33 billion every day. Which means about every three years you've replaced all the cells in your body. Are you the same person? : P

If they are replaced, you are the same person. If they are replaced with someone else's cells, you are a mutant.

 

[Securb]

The funny thing is that I changed the pickguard on my Strat and added a neck pickup two weeks ago, and at least four people asked me if it was a new guitar. It seems like the same guitar to me, whether it is HSH, H, or HS; it has been all three configurations.

 

[Mincer]

I'd say that as long as my connection to the instrument doesn't change (like, changing a neck makes me not want to pick it up anymore), then mentally, it is the same to me. I'm not thinking I got a new guitar- I am thinking I love this guitar I already have.

 

[IMENATOR]

For me it is the body and neck and anything I need to touch in the instrument in order to play a note. I can replace electronics and hardware and I consider it the same guitar with upgrades. If I replaced the neck and keep the body I would have a different feel and tha would be to me a different guitar. Even strings, some guitars just beg you to use 9-42, others 10-46 in Eb and so on, using the wrong straing gauge can make the instrument unusable for me, a different instrument.

 

[beaubrummels]

The funny thing is that I changed the pickguard on my Strat and added a neck pickup two weeks ago, and at least four people asked me if it was a new guitar. It seems like the same guitar to me, whether it is HSH, H, or HS; it has been all three configurations.

If it's my wife, they are all the same guitar. A couple years back I bought a Rosewood Tele. A couple days after that, I was playing my SG and my wife walked by and said, "Is that your new guitar?"

(This is a stock photo, but it's what mine looked like at the time.)

 

[MikeS]

On a guitar like a Strat, you can choose a neck ("C", "D", sharp "V", soft "V", etc) to make THAT guitar more comfortable for you to play. It is still the same guitar.
You can change the pups, pots, etc. to make it sound the way you want. It is still the same guitar.
You can change the color to make it prettier to your taste. It is still the same guitar.
But if you change the body or the scale length, I think you now have a different guitar.

I was about to say that the body was the guitar, but the note on scale length resonated.

I've neck swapped my red strat and considered it the same guitar. I've had 3 different necks on my white strat. The two 25-1/2" necks made it essentially "the same" guitar. The baritone conversion neck made it a different guitar.

 

[GuitarDoc]

^ +1.
Yeah, if it's a different scale length, it's a different guitar.

 

[Securb]

If it's my wife, they are all the same guitar. A couple years back I bought a Rosewood Tele. A couple days after that, I was playing my SG and my wife walked by and said, "Is that your new guitar?"

I couldn't get away with that. Eleni noticed when I went from gold covers to open coils on the Les Paul recently.

 

[Artie]

I gotta back pedal on my 1st answer a bit. I've had a couple guitars that were lifeless and uninteresting. New pups, (usually Duncans), made them "new" guitars, that I loved.

 

[GuitarDoc]

I gotta back pedal on my 1st answer a bit. I've had a couple guitars that were lifeless and uninteresting. New pups, (usually Duncans), made them "new" guitars, that I loved.

Perhaps the new pups just brought "new life" to your old guitars.

 

[GuitarDoc]

So, that just made me think of another question...
If your old guitar becomes lifeless (dead) for some reason, say bad pickups. And putting new pickups in them brings them back to life, are the guitars now zombies?

 

[Artie]

Perhaps the new pups just brought "new life" to your old guitars.

Perhaps. And I might steal that "zombie" moniker when I concoct my next project.

 

[Seashore]

Closer to Frankenstein's monster than a zombie, since we're talking about replacement parts.

 

[RanchManSandy]

zombies don't come back to life, they're still dead, just re-animated.

 

[MikeS]

I gotta back pedal on my 1st answer a bit. I've had a couple guitars that were lifeless and uninteresting. New pups, (usually Duncans), made them "new" guitars, that I loved.

Same guitar, it was just going through a phase. My Soltero went through a P-Rails phase and I practically stopped playing it. When I installed a Super Distortion with a 36th Anny PAF it found its voice again. Same guitar, though.

 

[Artie]

Same guitar, it was just going through a phase. My Soltero went through a P-Rails phase and I practically stopped playing it. When I installed a Super Distortion with a 36th Anny PAF it found its voice again. Same guitar, though.

But the question was metaphysical. "As I perceive it." It's a different guitar.

 

[GuitarDoc]

zombies don't come back to life, they're still dead, just re-animated.

So then the guitar was resurrected? Or reincarnated?
Or maybe it's just a guitar and there's nothing metaphysical or ethereal or mystical about it. Just wood and metal. And you can call it whatever you want to.

 

[Chistopher]

So if changing the scale length of the neck makes it spiritually a different guitar, what if I remove the frets on my bass. It's a completely different instrument without any new components.

Also we keep connecting this discussion to replacing parts rather than changing what you have. If Hank get's painted, body contouring, neck reprofiling, a different string gauge and tuning, and the trem blocked, is it any less of a Hank than if he had been replaced piece by piece with identical OEM parts?

 

[RanchManSandy]

So then the guitar was resurrected? Or reincarnated?
Or maybe it's just a guitar and there's nothing metaphysical or ethereal or mystical about it. Just wood and metal. And you can call it whatever you want to.

If it was previously life-full, became lifeless somehow, and then was brought that previous state of life-full-ness, sure that could be a resurrection, or perhaps resuscitation.

Reincarnation, no... that is when the "soul" (let's use that term in a broad sense) transfers or is born again in a different body/form. So I guess if you had a guitar "die" (so to speak) but then found a different guitar somewhere that had the same vibe, that could, perhaps, be considered reincarnation.

But is a guitar truly ever "dead"? If anything on it stops working it can be replaced and continue functioning more or less normally. Like getting an organ transplant while alive. (since we don't usually do transplants on dead people and expect them to recover lmao)

Guitars are basically immortal with interchangeable parts.

They're noisy LEGOs.

Maybe they're Highlanders? I can only think of one way to truly kill a guitar: burn it to ash.

Hm, or maybe guitars are like classical golems--crafted from inanimate components and brought to a sort of "life" through magic (our imaginations expressed via mechanical articulation). Not totally unlike frankenstein's monster. And that monster is certainly not a zombie (if it bites you, you do not turn into one).