How big a factor is resonance in what makes a good electric?

Cirrus

Kittyfrisk said:

Cirrus said:

thegummy said:

If I uploaded a few clips and said they were all recorded with the same Burstbuckers and one of them was with them in a 335 and the rest were in a Les Paul, how confident would you be that you could pick out the 335?

You can listen for yourself if you like - 

Explorer, firebird neck pickup, clean amp;

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uJrcIaHkh-A_0sQWqScPWbmsqH6zE27N/view?usp=sharing

Les Paul, Firebird neck pickup, same clean amp settings;

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YmDjUdZNXhMYoM7tyBQKSLx0RQk4CwFT/view?usp=sharing



Excuse the U2 riff...

Were the clips recorded with the same pickup in two different guitars, or just the same type of pickup?

Already covered that pal - same pickup, first in one guitar then moved into the other.

roberty

From my experience I believe that the amplified sound is to do with the interaction of the tone (EQ) of the acoustic sound of the guitar and the pickups. The acoustic volume of the guitar is unimportant. I would like to know people's thoughts on this

thegummy

roberty said:

From my experience I believe that the amplified sound is to do with the interaction of the tone (EQ) of the acoustic sound of the guitar and the pickups. The acoustic volume of the guitar is unimportant. I would like to know people's thoughts on this

It makes sense because the actual volume for electric guitars is irrelevant when we can just turn the amp up. But it may be the case that the tone of the unplugged sound is correlated with its loudness.

Similarly to how I think about pickups - the output level of a pickup itself is, IMO, irrelevant because we have master volume amps and pedals to choose how much gain and how loud our end signals are. It's just that the pickups that happen to be lower output generally have a different tone to those that have higher output (at least in my experience).

Moe_Zambeek

thegummy said:

Moe_Zambeek said:

With strats,  how much of the unplugged ‘resonance’ is often in fact related to the resonance of the springs?

Strum your strat and put your hand on and off the strings to dampen it and see how/if the sound changes.

Maybe I was being a bit Socratic there.

thegummy

Moe_Zambeek said:

Maybe I was being a bit Socratic there.

Nothing against that but being empiric is even better

WezV

Cirrus said:

b; if the top is resonating, the pickups may be physically moving a bit too, and their movement relative to the strings is just as good at generating current as the string's movement relative to the pickups. This is more a thing on hollow bodies, admittedly...

I actually do think these is something to this. It also explains why direct mount pickups can be noticeably different too

Every change in the sound of an electric guitar has to be understood in terms of the strings vibration, the magnetic field it is moving in, and the electrical components that follow on from that.

WiresDreamDisasters

It's a non-issue for me. I am interested in how a guitar sounds when it's plugged in. Not in how it sounds when I take it down off the wall after a long day at the law office and plug into my Katana for 5 minutes whilst the wife scoops out the Grey Poupon.

Kittyfrisk

Cirrus said:

Kittyfrisk said:

Cirrus said:

thegummy said:

If I uploaded a few clips and said they were all recorded with the same Burstbuckers and one of them was with them in a 335 and the rest were in a Les Paul, how confident would you be that you could pick out the 335?

You can listen for yourself if you like - 

Explorer, firebird neck pickup, clean amp;

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uJrcIaHkh-A_0sQWqScPWbmsqH6zE27N/view?usp=sharing

Les Paul, Firebird neck pickup, same clean amp settings;

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YmDjUdZNXhMYoM7tyBQKSLx0RQk4CwFT/view?usp=sharing



Excuse the U2 riff...

Were the clips recorded with the same pickup in two different guitars, or just the same type of pickup?

Already covered that pal - same pickup, first in one guitar then moved into the other.

Doh! Missed that paragraph 

BillDL

Moe_Zambeek said:

With strats,  how much of the unplugged ‘resonance’ is often in fact related to the resonance of the springs?

Hey Moe.  I noticed The Kelpies in your profile pic straight away.  I need to take my old Mum back up there again for a visit, but I'll have to find out if the shop and bogs are open again.

I think that a lot of what makes a Strat sound like a Strat unplugged and plugged in is the stretched springs, the way the strings are fixed into the bridge, the hollow cavity the springs sit in, and the scale length that makes the strings tighter than a guitar with a Gibson scale.  Some would also argue about additional resonance from the extra length of the thinner strings on the headstock side of the nut (or vice versa in the case of Hendrix), but I think string trees negate this as a factor.  I have certainly had issues on a couple of Strat-styled guitars with annoying sympathetic vibrations of the strings on the headstock side that have been cured by adding a string tree.

On a tremolo-equipped Strat that has been "Hard Tailed" I find that it sounds a bit different from a non-tremolo hard tail strat with the strings in ferrules on the back, even when I have damped the springs with foam, but they still sound like Strats plugged or unplugged.  I have never sat down and evaluated this though, because none of my Strats sound exactly the same anyway and I have rosewood and maple fingerboards in each of the varieties of tremolo and hard-tailed.

Talking about resonance and sustain in electric guitars veers dangerously close to the hotly debated "tonewoods" arguments that have gone on for ages.  My take on this is that, although a magnetic coil pickup does only translate the disturbance in its field by metal strings to an electric signal and nothing more, the manner in which the strings are vibrated is affected by what they are mounted on at either end.  The firm belief by many that dense wood in the body and neck of an electric guitar always means more sustain is, in my opinion and experience, erroneous because I have had poplar or alder-bodied guitars with maple necks that rang out for longer than mahohany or ash bodies with maple necks.  The 80s fashion of using brass nuts seemed to increase sustain in electric guitars (unamplified AND amplified), but did this make them sound better?  No, I hated the clinical characterless sound of brass nuts.  Increased sustain doesn't always make an electric guitar sound good unless everything else is vibrating harmoniously and captured well by the pickups.

Disregarding the woods used, there are a lot of variables able to affect the string vibration and introduce sympathetic resonance, harmonics, overtones, etc, including what material is used for the bridge/saddle and how it is all cobbled together.  In general I have found that I DO prefer the electrified sound of all guitars that have had nice unamplified resonance over those that have sounded sterile or dead.

dindude

It matters only how you connect with an instrument. I do think the unplugged sound is important because I’m an unashamed home player, so lower volumes and nooddling for me. I had a Suhr Alt T and it was a great guitar but I hated the SS frets, added a real thin plinky sound which you could still hear at bedroom volumes. 

The conclusion I’ve come to is that some guitars seems to take a bigger part of their sound from the pickups, you get the feeling you could put them on a tennis racket and get a similar effect. Other guitars seem to take a smaller balance from the pickups and these guitars I find more responsive and connect with.

HAL9000

My most resonant guitar by quite some margin is a Yamaha 611HFM, and I love the way it feels lively in the hands. However I’m not convinced that this resonance has much, if any, bearing on the amplified sound. Once plugged in it really doesn’t sound any more (or less) resonant than my other guitars (Strat and Tele).

My own view is that resonance makes a guitar feel nicer but that’s about it.

Moe_Zambeek

@BillDL last time I was at Helix park over the summer the coffee shop and toilets were open again  

richardhomer

I’m not sure there is any ‘science’ behind this. I used to own a ‘63 Strat, which played unplugged wasn’t remotely bright/‘plinky’. It had ‘a lot’ of low end. Plugged in, it sounded similarly fat/deep - whilst still sounding like a Strat.

The nearest I’ve got in a modern Fender is my CS ‘56 Relic (from 2006). It has an Ash body and a one-piece maple neck - both of which are supposed to sound ‘bright’ - yet it doesn’t. It’s much warmer/fatter than the rosewood board/alder bodied ‘59 reissue that it replaced. Through an amp, these characteristics are preserved.

Mattharrier

thegummy said:

Don't want to go too deep in to this as, while it's day one basics for psychologists, I don't think the general public have any idea how unreliable our own perceptions are (and I think there might even be some who may desire it to not be true) but it's sometimes worth pointing out when people are looking for advice - how they think they perceive it is pretty much how they're always going to perceive it and how other people are going to perceive the sound is unlikely to have been tested.

I certainly agree with this - a common manifestation is when people start learning an instrument, and will often play faster and faster as they play through a song. I have done it (still do) myself - I'd swear blind I was playing at a consistent speed, but when I've recorded myself, I've been playing much faster at the end than I started.

I don't have enough experience with different guitars to really say, but my gut feeling, and logic, says that the pickup, pedals, amp and speaker will have far more impact on a guitar's sound than the wood it's made of, when talking about solid body electrics.

The only way to really test it is to have the same pickup, and wiring loom, in multiple guitars of differing woods, construction methods etc and do double blind testing with random control groups.

If you do tests with guitarists where they know what they're listening to, confirmation bias will occur. If you did a test with non musicians, they would likely not be able to tell the difference - as far as my mum is concerned, all three of my guitars sound much the same.

As far resonance specifically is concerned, I would say that it has an impact - if energy in the string is being transferred elsewhere, you're losing that energy, but as all of the strings are connected, energy from one string will effect the other strings (if you don't mute the other strings while tuning, you'll hear other strings ring out) - but again, if you start putting the signal from the guitar through lots of additional circuitry, the natural resonance will be "hidden" to some extent.

TeleMaster

I’ve had some guitars that really resonated unplugged and sounded just as good as those that were quieter unplugged and were less resonate. I think it’s a whole load of guitar marketing hoo hah.

Blueingreen

For me personally it's not an issue.  Of all the variables that make a difference to the overall sound of an amplified electric guitar I think the two that matter to me, as far as the guitar itself is concerned, are the pickups and how well it plays. Apart from those the things that matter are the player, the amp and cab, and any effects being used.  Compared to those factors, many of the other things that people obsess about - strings, wood, chunkiness of the neck, the finish, resonance etc are irrelevant.  I'm not saying these things don't affect the sound in small ways, I'm saying they don't affect it in ways that matter to me.

thegummy

Mattharrier said:

I don't have enough experience with different guitars to really say, but my gut feeling, and logic, says that the pickup, pedals, amp and speaker will have far more impact on a guitar's sound than the wood it's made of, when talking about solid body electrics.

I don't know if there are people who think the wood makes as big a difference as pickups/pedals/amps (or almost as big a difference) but if there are I think it's a bit far fetched personally.

I thought the ol' tonewood debate was "it makes a subtle difference" vs. "it makes zero difference" but maybe some people take it further than that.

I'd be impressed if someone could tell from a recorded clip of a standard humbucker whether the guitar it was in was even a Fender or a Gibson, never mind anything more specific than that. So that's basically everything except the pickup being different.

Maybe we could even do it as a thread and choose as popular a pickup as possible, something from Seymour Duncan maybe, and everyone who has one in a guitar uploads a clip and see if anyone has a clue what guitar it's in.

dindude

I don’t get the obsession with blind tests / double blind tests - most of what we’re talking about is how it makes the player feel. A more interesting, and I think valid, test would be to take two almost identical guitars and record the same player having a good old time - you know not playing an E chord and letting ring out, actually digging in and making music, then letting others decide which clip was more inspired. 

And as for the old body wood debate, haven’t we got past that - P90s in mahogany sound different to P90s in poplar - subtle with recited through high gain for sure, but it’s there. 

BillDL

thegummy said:

I thought the ol' tonewood debate was "it makes a subtle difference" vs. "it makes zero difference" but maybe some people take it further than that.

Yeah, back when the debate was at its peak there were people at each others' throats on various forums and in YouTube and social media comments threatening to find out where other people lived and do them in for daring to agree or disagree with whichever way somebody had chosen to present their case.  It was really over the top at times, with YouTubers slagging off other YouTubers' "scientific" comparisons.  I guess Covid came along and gave people something more important to consider.

alexh

thegummy said:

If I uploaded a few clips and said they were all recorded with the same Burstbuckers and one of them was with them in a 335 and the rest were in a Les Paul, how confident would you be that you could pick out the 335?

Then instead of the 335 imagine it was just a different guitar from the same model line of Les Pauls (so any differences in resonances weren't due to the design of the body but only to the differences in the actual guitars) and think how much difference in sound there would be.

Less typing more recording of clips please. An experiment trumps all the bullshit that is about to be written here over the coming days.