Why do some guitars feel more dynamic than others?

Cirrus

Assuming they've been set up properly - obvs if the action's paper-thickness, the string movement will be limited by the fretboard. It's just something I can't quite get my head around. If you just pick a note and play from quiet to loud, different guitars have different envelopes. Some seem to keep giving more - you can really lay into them and get aggression, grunt, grind, spank, whatever adjective you want. Others seem to reach a plateau earlier when extra energy into the strings from your picking hand doesn't seem to make it to the amp.

Pickups obvs play a big part in it but it doesn't feel like it's the whole story, I've swapped pickups on plenty of guitars and still heard the same character coming through...

bertie

wood/construction.   cos despite the "facts"  * cough *   they do play a massive part

guitars4you

Even comparing two identical guitars you will often find that one has something more about it than the other one - Sometimes the difference is more subtle - You are then really looking at the tone/resonance/dynamics within the wood

Comparing two different guitars, be it different price points of a similar guitar, be it say Custom Shop and Squire, or 2 totally different guitars, ie Tele and LP - Then everything comes into play - wood, scale length, bridge, pick-ups

Lewy

bertie said:

wood/construction.   cos despite the "facts"  * cough *   they do play a massive part

Yes indeed. The videos out there that supposedly debunk the influence of wood and reduce everything down to pickups etc always seem to completely ignore the attack sustain decay release (ASDR) envelope and the massive part it plays when it comes to actually making music on an instrument. Instruments feel more dynamic than others because they are.

Sporky

Definitely "construction" (maybe I mean design) plays a part.

A floating trem lends a different feel from a hard tail bridge. Or an oversprung screwed down trem. Fer instance. 

Flanging_Fred

It’s entirely down to species of animal used to make the hide glue used for the neck joint. 

For instance the Dutch Toggenburg goat will produce glue that adds 1.32dB in the 834kHz range whereas American Brown Swiss cow glue reduces your haunting mids by 0.3dB and adds more top end sparkle.

darthed1981

A cynic might argue that given we can manufacture motors with a tolerance measured in atoms, build massive skyscrapers and bridges, land on the moon, perform micro-surgery on the hearts of premature babies etc, the concept that there is some kind of un-measurable quality element that cannot be either measured or accurately reproduced in mass production, but is sensed accurately by humans capable of confirmation bias or whose living is based on selling guitars strains credibility...

Ah fuck it who cares.

You do you chaps.

Whitecat

The interplay between the pickups and the amp is most of it, for me anyway.

bertie

darthed1981 said:

A cynic might argue that given we can manufacture motors with a tolerance measured in atoms, build massive skyscrapers and bridges, land on the moon, perform micro-surgery on the hearts of premature babies etc, the concept that there is some kind of un-measurable quality element that cannot be either measured or accurately reproduced in mass production, but is sensed accurately by humans capable of confirmation bias or whose living is based on selling guitars strains credibility...

Ah fuck it who cares.

You do you chaps.

cos thems made of wood,  and even we, have no control how 1 piece is to another

Cirrus

darthed1981 said:

A cynic might argue that given we can manufacture motors with a tolerance measured in atoms, build massive skyscrapers and bridges, land on the moon, perform micro-surgery on the hearts of premature babies etc, the concept that there is some kind of un-measurable quality element that cannot be either measured or accurately reproduced in mass production, but is sensed accurately by humans capable of confirmation bias or whose living is based on selling guitars strains credibility...

Ah fuck it who cares.

You do you chaps.

If the cynic argued that, they'd be stupid..

Firstly no one is measuring a guitar build to the tolerance of atoms and spending a sizeable chunk of the GDP of an entire nation to build a guitar that's absolutely perfect in its performance, so it's a stupid comparison.

Secondly since human hearing is a psychoacoustic phenomena where our perception of sound level is a confluence of frequency response, weighted average signal levels over short windows of time, and not just a flat measure of peak or RMS signal level, further contextualised by what's going on around it sonically, it's actually not easy at all to analyse a waveform and categorically say that a human will hear it as being slightly louder or quieter.

I'm just asking a simple question about something that anyone can easily check out and experience just from playing a few guitars, and the cynic apparently would respond by shitting inside their own skull.

TTBZ

I only have a small sample of about 5 guitars I've owned to compare with, and it might be totally different for others - but I've found that my most acoustically resonant guitar I've owned is actually the least dynamic and inspiring to play when plugged in. The ones that sounded a bit dead/dull unplugged all had a nice dynamic sound and feel with more sustain when plugged in whilst the acoustically resonant one seems like a bit of a dead plank in comparison. Yet it's more satisfying to play unplugged. Maybe there's some science behind how the energy is being transferred via the pickups rather than externally, who knows. 

darthed1981

Cirrus said:

darthed1981 said:

A cynic might argue that given we can manufacture motors with a tolerance measured in atoms, build massive skyscrapers and bridges, land on the moon, perform micro-surgery on the hearts of premature babies etc, the concept that there is some kind of un-measurable quality element that cannot be either measured or accurately reproduced in mass production, but is sensed accurately by humans capable of confirmation bias or whose living is based on selling guitars strains credibility...

Ah fuck it who cares.

You do you chaps.

If the cynic argued that, they'd be stupid..

Firstly no one is measuring a guitar build to the tolerance of atoms and spending a sizeable chunk of the GDP of an entire nation to build a guitar that's absolutely perfect in its performance, so it's a stupid comparison.

Secondly since human hearing is a psychoacoustic phenomena where our perception of sound level is a confluence of frequency response, weighted average signal levels over short windows of time, and not just a flat measure of peak or RMS signal level, further contextualised by what's going on around it sonically, it's actually not easy at all to analyse a waveform and categorically say that a human will hear it as being slightly louder or quieter.

I'm just asking a simple question about something that anyone can easily check out and experience just from playing a few guitars, and the cynic apparently would respond by shitting inside their own skull.

Touched a nerve there did we?

Your third paragraph there is dangerously close to the sort of pseudoscientific babble you'd find in a review of £10,000 per metre speaker cable.

The idea of this forum is to discuss things, starting to throw insults around if people take the opposite side of the discussion is infantile at best.  If you are only interested in people agreeing with you - just talk into a mirror.

rlw

Flanging_Fred said:

It’s entirely down to species of animal used to make the hide glue used for the neck joint. 

For instance the Dutch Toggenburg goat will produce glue that adds 1.32dB in the 834kHz range whereas American Brown Swiss cow glue reduces your haunting mids by 0.3dB and adds more top end sparkle.

Bollocks

Cirrus

Darthed. You're acting like people who think different guitars can sound and react different are delusional, and you wrote a load of shit to justify this that makes no sense. Yes, you touched a nerve by being deliberately annoying. Forums are indeed about discussing things, but if you want to try to appear smarter by the application of ill thought through cynicism, every now and again someone's going to respond with something other than a pat on the back. 

Cirrus

darthed1981 said:

Your third paragraph there is dangerously close to the sort of pseudoscientific babble you'd find in a review of £10,000 per metre speaker cable.

On this, by the way - Psychoacoustics isn't pseudoscientific babble. It only sounds like it to you because you don't know enough, and presumably don't have the self awareness to realise it.

Offset

Blimey, it was a fairly innocuous OP... 

darthed1981

Cirrus said:

Darthed. You're acting like people who think different guitars can sound and react different are delusional, and you wrote a load of shit to justify this that makes no sense. Yes, you touched a nerve by being deliberately annoying. Forums are indeed about discussing things, but if you want to try to appear smarter by the application of ill thought through cynicism, every now and again someone's going to respond with something other than a pat on the back. 

You what?  You are being very silly and honestly I don't get the vitriol.

This basic discussion happens here every week, people say what you said, people say what I said, life goes on and most people can politely agree to disagree.  I find usually I can agree with people in one thread and disagree in another at the same time without it getting awkward for precisely that reason.

For some reason you have taken personal offense at a general comment, you prerogative I suppose but seems pointless to me.

PhilKing

The Smiths summed it up, some girls are bigger than others.  Everything natural varies.  I have a lot of guitars and have sold a lot more in my time in music retail.  Each one is different and while there are things you can do that will make a difference, if the guitar is inherently not working for you, it will be hard to make it work.  Pickups are probably the biggest difference you can make for changing the overall sound, with strings also being in there.  I'm a big fan of wrap around Gibson bridges, but that doesn't mean that every guitar with a wrap-around will feel good to me.

If I don't bond with a guitar unplugged, then the odds are that it won't work for me.  I have a lot of vintage and custom guitars and do know what I want and am capable of setting them up the way that feels right to me, including wiring and pickups.  

You have to try them to know, which is why buying online has so many potential problems.

Bigsby

darthed1981 said:

A cynic might argue that given we can manufacture motors with a tolerance measured in atoms, build massive skyscrapers and bridges, land on the moon, perform micro-surgery on the hearts of premature babies etc, the concept that there is some kind of un-measurable quality element that cannot be either measured or accurately reproduced in mass production, but is sensed accurately by humans capable of confirmation bias or whose living is based on selling guitars strains credibility...

Ah fuck it who cares.

You do you chaps.

You only have to read the topic title to realise this is irrelevant: Why do some guitars feel more dynamic than others? Even people who can measure atoms can't measure human 'feel' any more accurately than to ask "How would you rate the dynamic feel of that guitar on a scale of 1 to 100?" Increasing the scale won't help; you'll probably get the same level of accuracy from 1 to 10.

That's part of the problem: The experience described in the first post is as real as anything else an individual experiences, and like everything else, the actual experience can't really be 'known' any more than it is 'felt'. You can't get closer to it than the experience of it. 

I can't really help with the 'why'. There must be so many variables, e.g. adjustment to pickup height or even rolling off a little volume can change how a guitar responds to playing dynamics.

bertie

rlw said:

Flanging_Fred said:

It’s entirely down to species of animal used to make the hide glue used for the neck joint. 

For instance the Dutch Toggenburg goat will produce glue that adds 1.32dB in the 834kHz range whereas American Brown Swiss cow glue reduces your haunting mids by 0.3dB and adds more top end sparkle.

Bollocks

Wilfs about to loose his in Nov

BillDL

I don't know how many of you ever saw the hour long 1987 TV documentary named "Twang, Bang, Kerang" (The History of the Electric Guitar), or have happened upon it on YouTube since?  I recorded it to VHS tape when it first aired on TV, and even the adverts that the YouTube uploader has left in the footage brings back a lot of memories.

There are quite a few glaring mistakes and assumptions in the narrator's script in between other people talking, but there is one part that relates directly to this topic.

At the 11:40 mark Jerry Donahue talks about what makes a good guitar for him.

"I don't know if it's by accident that certain woods ended up sounding better, or if that's how they felt originally, but in fact it really makes a big difference to the overall effect - the type of wood that's used and how the pitch of the neck, you know when you tap it, how it relates to the pitch of the body when you tap that.  As it's been explained to me if they're like a 5th apart or an octave apart or unison or something like that, they will be very compatible and it'll allow it to resonate right through the body, whereas others kind of fight each other.  The pickups won't help a guitar that doesn't sound good anyway.  I don't know if you can hear this (strums unamplified Telecaster) but I can tell just by playing this that it rings a lot, there's a lot of sustain there - these two pieces of wood are compatible and, for whatever the reasons yes I can tell when I pick up a guitar whether I want to pursue it.  I'll put it down even before plugging it in the amp if it doesn't sound good initially".

Anybody that has heard Jerry Donahue will realise that even by that stage in his career he would have played more than his fair share of different guitars and come to his own conclusions about what makes one sound better and react to his particular playing style better than others.  Perhaps there may be some benefit from two pieces of deliberately or accidentally pitch-matched wood bolted together that allow more vibrations rather than cancelling out vibrations through dissonant frequencies vibrating through the wood?