Building computers vs. Building/Assembling Guitars

Before getting interested in buildsembling guitars, I built a lot of computers, over the years between 1995 and 2005 (or so).   After having replaced almost every part of my desktop computer, I realized that if I had all the pieces, I could put them together and have a computer.  It was exciting to contemplate putting together exactly what I wanted, and I have to confess that a lot of this excitement related to being able to get a really cool case. At the time, all computers came in a boring IBM-inspired beige color.  I could get a cool translucent blue tower!

I did a bunch of reading on the web, and began to order parts.  I did indeed get the translucent blue case, and eventually got all the other parts, probably from newegg, assuming it existed then. Maybe I'm thinking of egghead?   It went very smoothly and I used the machine as a music server, running linux.  I went on to build many others, for myself or my kids.  While I never built anything that qualified as a "hot rod", I got pretty experienced, and even dared to do some laptop repairs, which is always quite an adventure because disassembling them is challenging, and probably impossible without a manual.  I got very confident was able to swap in parts very quickly.  I remember replacing a dead power supply one morning before work, working on my kitchen table and impressing my baby sitter.  I never did anything too gonzo, like heavy overclocking, but I did one solder in a new fan in a power supply for my brand-new Shuttle SV-24, the first of their now popular small breadboxy barebones machines.

It was always pretty clear that I wasn't saving money by doing this, but I suppose one could argue that I saved money on subsequent repairs because I could do them myself.  It's a bit of a stretch.  Certainly now, unless one wants specific ultra-good parts, it's hard to do better than getting a Dell or something like that.   If I had to get a new machine now, I would likely go for a Dell, unless I were to go Mac.

Assembling vs. Building

I, and other people who put together computers from parts, always refer to it as "building" computers, and not "assembling".   In the case of computers, there's a limit to how far one can go as far as creating individual components.   Almost no one can design and then build his own video card from scratch.  And even if he could, he'd be buying various ICs and other components for it.   This is a little different from the world of guitars, where it is not outside the realm of possibility that someone could, for example, build a body starting with a big rectangular piece of wood.  Even pickups can be made by hand, as they were back in the good old days. Because of this, guitar guys seem to be very touchy about differentiating between "assembling" and "building", reserving "building" for what real luthiers do, cutting bodies from wood planks, etc.   However it seems permissible to buy pickups.

Some Differences

There are some interesting difference between assembling computers and assembling guitars.  One is that guitars require some serious fine-tuning in the form of a "setup" in order to be usable.  This involves lots of fiddly adjustments, none of which may be rocket science, but which are complex (at least to me) when taken together.  With a computer, if the parts are put together correctly, that's it.  A DIMM is either correctly installed or it isn't, and there's no room for small adjustments.  Since the setup makes the difference between a guitar that's playable or not, it's a serious difference.  The closest thing I can think of to a setup for a computer would be maintenance like removing dust, replacing an old fan, reseating a card.  However fans don't die often, and the only time I had to re-seat a loose card was once when a card was loose in a machine that had just been shipped to me. They don't wriggle free on your desktop.

Another important difference is that instrument components are variable.  With computers, two components that are nominally the same, are functionally the same.  That is, an XYZ optical drive from NEC will be indistinguishable from another XYZ optical drive from NEC. And in fact, the new XYZ2 is probably ok too, perhaps a bit faster, though that may not be distinguishable for most purposes.  Guitar components, particularly those made of wood, are different.  It's very routine to hear people say "I got 3 swamp ash bodies, and they sound entirely different".  Statements like this aren't made very scientifically; that is, the person usually didn't compare the bodies when used with exactly the same components. And the comparison is subjective, i.e. it sounds different in some way.   It seems reasonable that this would be the case.  Two different pieces of wood, though of the same type (e.g. swamp ash) may still have different densities, defects, ages.  These are things that grew, not things that were etched into silicon wafers in a sterile environment.  A statement like "I swapped my Creative Labs XYZ sound card v1.2 for a different Creative Labs XYZ sound card v1.2  and the difference is phenomenal" is unthinkable.

Then there's the effect of aging.  With the possible exception of some classic IBM keyboards that appeal to a niche market, newer is always better with computer stuff (leaving aside products that turn out to have defects).  With guitar components, even electronics, aging is thought by many to be an important factor.  With electronics it seems to be the "they don't make 'em like they used to" kind of mentality, and it even extends to capacitors.   As above, it doesn't seem unreasonable that this might be the case for wood components.   Wood does (I think) change over time.  Certainly the piece of wood that's the top of your dining room table has changed since it was cut from a living tree which contained a substantial amount of water.  From a bit of googling, it seems that guitar wood can be around 6% water, and it's reasonable to expect this to change a bit over time. Air is supposed to be 1-3% water, so maybe guitar woods (if not sealed) migrate towards that.  I think this part of the argument made by nitrocellulose paint adherents - that nitro allows the pores of the wood to be open, and polyurethane doesn't, and that's bad.  However there is not universal agreement on this point.   It seems undeniable to me though that different pieces of wood, even of the same species, can have different acoustic properties.  As a side note, for trees, genus refers to a top level classification such as "Ash", and species refers to something like "Spunky Ash" (cf. this interesting note from Ron Kirn, a highly regarded luthier).

Commonality

In both cases, parts must be chosen (or built) that work together.   You wouldn't build a shredder with a vintage 21 fret neck.  You wouldn't put very  a high end video card into a system that's intended for browsing and email.  Both instruments and computers fall into wide classes ("high end graphics", "digital audio workstation", "shredder", "vintage strat") for which there are certain subsets of choices of components that make sense. 

Conclusion

There does seem to be a real difference here.  It seems much easier to assemble a perfectly satisfactory computer, due the lack of something analogous to the setup process.   Once the parts are assembled and it works, then it works.