Sustain on an acoustic guitar?

Does anyone know of a good way to get a lot of sustain on an acoustic electric guitar or just better sustain?

I suggest taking your acoustic to the music store and ask them to try it before buying.

Learning to generate tremolo with your left fingers also helps.

Don't expect that you can get really long sustains with an acoustic though.

Heavier strings on a weak guitar could break it, it is also possible that you'll never keep it in tune because the tension of the string could bend the guitar. If your guitar goes out of tune when you pull on the neck then I wouldn't recommend putting heavier strings on.

 

A compressor like the Boss CS-3 will not make the note last any longer than it already does - what it does is hold the volume level of the note constant for that time (ie it will not slowly decay naturally)... internally the CS-3 has a voltage controlled amplifer that gradually increase the gain (volume) as the note decays. You can mimic this on an electric guitar or mic'd up acousting by turning the volume control manually as the note is played.

 

Guitars sustain because the energy stays in the string and isn't lost through guitar body. This energy enters the guitar through the nut and the bridge and the dissipates into the guitar body by causing the body to vibrate at the string frequency. Obviously in an acoustic this vibration is a desirable thing because it amplifies the note so the audience can hear it, but it also means that the strings don't sustain very well. Heavier strings mean that you have to put more energy into the system to begin with, which gives you more energy to lose and so the note rings out for longer. The obvious ways of improving sustain is to make the body stiffer and more dense so that it doesn't absorb the string-energy, and making the machine heads (tuners), the nut and bridge hold the strings more rigidly so the string can "store" that energy efficiently. As Jacob has said in the second post of this thread - fingering also has an effect here - poor fretting or woolly fingering will dampen the note quicker. Of course making the guitar body stiffer requires some serious woodwork modifications.

I know that you know what we are talking about, my comment was not addressed at you, I was only trying to make the subject more clear to N-sz who is asking for some advice.

You did not contradict anything I said which is good news, indeed there are ways to actively extend string vibration (as you suggested in your first post, or the radical solution of the E-Bow) but sustainer pedals can be a decent passive way for getting longer sustain without having to modify your guitar hardware or playing with an E-Bow which requires an entirely different technique, that's just what I wanted to tell to N-sz.

From here on the choice is his.