This acoustic came in with some phantom rattles that our client was having trouble identifying. Once we had it on the bench, we checked for the obvious culprits: loose braces and loose wires.
After a thorough inspection, all of the braces looked to be in good shape. All of the cabling seemed to be nicely tied down, too… except for one tiny 4 inch wire that was touching the soundboard.
The conundrum is that you never want to attach a double-stick-tape wire-tie to the soundboard. This is the piece of wood that vibrates the most to generate your guitar’s volume and tone. Attaching something to it will change the vibration patterns – not good.
So we kept the solution simple. We cut a 3 inch long piece of foam and slit it down the center. We then coated the inside of the foam with some rubber cement and wrapped it around the offending wire. This will keep the wire from rattling with out having to actually glue anything onto the soundboard.
