Shake it

One of the problems with prototyping guitars is that you have to play them quite a bit before they fully develop their sound. It can take a while, at least six months of constant playing before they *really* start to sound great. For the first couple of hours, even the greatest guitars I've made sounded quite marginal...

That is a bit of a bummer when you are doing rapid prototyping. Using plywood back/sides & little concern for aesthetics, I can toss together an experimental guitar over a weekend. I won't know well the modifications worked, however, for a couple of months.

I also feel bad giving someone a relatively new guitar and say "here, play this one for a couple of months - I hope it will sound good".

So I splurged on one of these things:

http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Accessories/ToneRite/ToneRite.html

Basically what this does is vibrate the guitar in a manner similar to playing it. If you play a guitar an hour a day, this little gizmo will get a month's worth of playing in 24hours. Just slap it on a new guitar & come back in a couple of days...

It works.