I thought Basswood was for cheap guitars?

Philly_Q

ICBM said:

He’s also wrong about it being dead-sounding. I had an Ibanez RG550 on loan last year - basswood body, Floyd Rose, thin neck, 9 gauge strings… all the things the tone snobs say kill the resonance of a guitar. It sounded absolutely huge, you could feel the vibration from it through your body playing it unplugged. The problem was the stock humbuckers, they’re why the guitar sounded a bit uninspiring amplified. A set of Evos fixed that.

Although strangely, he's right about obeche (or "African basswood") ringing, at least in my limited experience.  My Mira X is amazingly loud and resonant unplugged, it's like a little piano or something.  And it weighs 5 pounds.

ICBM

Philly_Q said:

Although strangely, he's right about obeche (or "African basswood") ringing, at least in my limited experience.  My Mira X is amazingly loud and resonant unplugged, it's like a little piano or something.  And it weighs 5 pounds.

I don’t doubt that at all .

But I wonder if it’s actually more to do with wood quality selection for the neck and body combined with a precision neck joint and a good bridge than it is with any ‘magic’ properties of the wood species…

prlgmnr

WezV said:

Are you saying Wenge like Henge, or by its proper pronunciation  when-gay?

I'm saying it by its proper pronunciation even when not gay

Philly_Q

ICBM said:

Philly_Q said:

Although strangely, he's right about obeche (or "African basswood") ringing, at least in my limited experience.  My Mira X is amazingly loud and resonant unplugged, it's like a little piano or something.  And it weighs 5 pounds.

I don’t doubt that at all .

But I wonder if it’s actually more to do with wood quality selection for the neck and body combined with a precision neck joint and a good bridge than it is with any ‘magic’ properties of the wood species…

Oh yes, it could very well be all those things, but it does sound different from all my other PRSes.

I just got it out (for the first time in ages) to check... it really does ring like crazy.  And I wish my other Miras had wide-fat necks!

Dave_Mc

ICBM said:

He’s also wrong about it being dead-sounding. I had an Ibanez RG550 on loan last year - basswood body, Floyd Rose, thin neck, 9 gauge strings… all the things the tone snobs say kill the resonance of a guitar. It sounded absolutely huge, you could feel the vibration from it through your body playing it unplugged. The problem was the stock humbuckers, they’re why the guitar sounded a bit uninspiring amplified. A set of Evos fixed that.

To be clear, I'm not saying I agree with him! The Japanese Ibanezes are killer, I agree (I have two of them!). Definitely the cheaper ones are hampered with middling (at best) Ibanez pickups (my RG470 had the same ones as the 550 you had on loan, they're not great).

I think a lot of people write them off because of the pickups, and act like that's their tone, set in stone. Even the ones with good pickups usually have more modern-sounding pickups- I'm not saying for a second that putting a set of PAFs will turn it into a Les Paul, but if you know you would hate those pickups even if they were in a Les Paul, it doesn't seem fair to me to blame the guitar...