Does wood matter...

Whitecat

scrumhalf said:

If wood doesn't matter why aren't guitars made out of MDF?

Bob Taylor once made a perfectly excellent guitar out of plywood from old shipping pallets, just to prove that the wood was not a super important factor overall. 

ICBM

scrumhalf said:

If wood doesn't matter why aren't guitars made out of MDF?

A few are. Unsurprisingly, they still sound like electric guitars.

Even an MDF body will have a resonance - and more importantly, it will affect the resonance of the neck, which is the larger part of the 'tone' of an electric guitar.

Sporky

scrumhalf said:

If wood doesn't matter why aren't guitars made out of MDF?

It's really heavy and it's nasty to work with. 

That said, some are. My Talman is "resoncast" which isn't far off MDF. 

WezV

Whitecat said:

scrumhalf said:

If wood doesn't matter why aren't guitars made out of MDF?

Bob Taylor once made a perfectly excellent guitar out of plywood from old shipping pallets, just to prove that the wood was not a super important factor overall. 

Not quite   it's  a misused example in these discussions because they were actually proving something totally different.


He built a guitar our of pallet wood, solid pallet wood, not ply.  Although Taylor do use ply style construction in some things  they call it layered wood, but that isn't the Taylor pallet guitar

Benedetto did the same thing with pallet wood.


Neither was trying to show wood  choice didnt influence the tone of an acoustic guitar.  Both were trying to show how the builder is a primary influence on that final tone.

You could give either top grade lumber or pallet wood to build from, they will make a guitar with their signiture tone from it.  That is because they have spent decades learning how to shape the tone the wood naturally produces to get the response they what they want from it.

Philly_Q

scrumhalf said:

If wood doesn't matter why aren't guitars made out of MDF?

Because it wouldn't be heathy inhaling the dust when you routed it out for humbuckers and a Floyd Rose.

VimFuego

Philly_Q said:

scrumhalf said:

If wood doesn't matter why aren't guitars made out of MDF?

Because it wouldn't be heathy inhaling the dust when you routed it out for humbuckers and a Floyd Rose.

TBF, anyone putting a floyd rose on a guitar gets everything they deserve! 

Dan_Halen

If you say tonewood 3 times whilst looking into the mirror Jim Lill appears.

thumpingrug

I find that by the time I've turned everything up to 11 and put the signal chain through 3 or 4 boost and distortion effects, I could be playing a flute or a glockenspiel and no one would notice.   The wood isn't going to impact on that sound.

Alex2678

I once had an SG that had an issue where if you played an E anywhere on the neck the note quickly died and was replaced by a fairly quiet harmonic. I do believe it was the way the wood resonated because if you touched the headstock against something solid it wouldn’t do it. It was an extreme example but that wood had a resonance and it impacted how it sounded plugged in, distorted, whatever 

crunchman

It might not be easy to do, as there is no Standard in the current PRS range, but if you get a chance, play a PRS Standard alongside a PRS Custom.  They are the ame guitar apart from the body wood.  The body of the Standard is all mahogany, while the Custom has a very thick maple cap on it.  There is a noticeable difference in sound between the two.

Plectrum

Power_Freak said:

Usually accompanied by a "blind test" recording - guitarists still argue whether classic recordings use a strat/lp/tele/etc. 

There used to be an argument about what guitar Peter Green played on Albatross with some saying it was a Les Paul and others saying it was a Strat. Gary Moore was convinced that it was a Les Paul. When Peter came out of retirement he confirmed that it was in fact a Strat. If an artist of Gary's stature can get it so wrong then what hope is there for the rest of us?

MikeP

Sadly Peter Green didn't know the days of the week by that point. Of course would makes a difference, everything on the guitar makes a difference, only question is how much and who cares?

Power_Freak

Plectrum said:

Power_Freak said:

Usually accompanied by a "blind test" recording - guitarists still argue whether classic recordings use a strat/lp/tele/etc. 

There used to be an argument about what guitar Peter Green played on Albatross with some saying it was a Les Paul and others saying it was a Strat. Gary Moore was convinced that it was a Les Paul. When Peter came out of retirement he confirmed that it was in fact a Strat. If an artist of Gary's stature can get it so wrong then what hope is there for the rest of us?

Don't worry, somebody on a forum says they can hear the difference between colours of heatshrink on a patch cable

Sporky

Power_Freak said:

Don't worry, somebody on a forum says they can hear the difference between colours of heatshrink on a patch cable

The difference, of course, is that there are good physics-based reasons why wood might make a difference.

Danny1969

MikeP said:

Sadly Peter Green didn't know the days of the week by that point. Of course would makes a difference, everything on the guitar makes a difference, only question is how much and who cares?

I've said this before but people should take recollections about studio recordings with a pinch of salt. All kinds of gear gets used and sometimes people remember playing a song with a particular guitar or amp and they did. But they also used another kind of guitar or amp as well on another take and that may well have been the take that got used. 

Since the late nineties when Protools come along all bets are off because then and ever since, it's perfectly easy, with the addition of a click track  possible to use the intro from one take, a verse from another take and the best solo from another take etc. Guitars are sweetened tuning wise for the key the song is in and the main chords and parts that are used. If the verse is in C mainly but the chorus is in E for example, then it could be a different guitar for the verse and chorus. 

The way I see it, if one piece makes a note sound louder for longer than another piece of wood then that's a useful difference when it comes to being expressive. And being the output of an electric guitar is just a AC current of varying frequency and amplitude it's also easy to measure. But here's the thing, onstage the guitar and amp is in a positive feedback loop. The wood is part of that loop. That's where you need to make measurements. But no one who regularly plays on decent stages at high volume is going to bother as we know the wood makes a difference already. 

crunchman

Even at lower volumes it makes some difference.

There was one of these threads previously where I think someone had experimented with different pickups.  Most pickups are microphonic to some extent.  If I remember correctly, they had a noticeable difference between different guitars with more vintage style pickups that were unpotted or lightly potted, where heavily potted pickups did not show the same difference.

We can all hear that different electric guitars sound different unplugged.  If the pickups are slightly microphonic, that does come through in the amplified tone.  The effect might be greater at higher volumes, but it's there at all volumes.

Tex_Mexico

ICBM said:

Anyone who thinks wood doesn't matter in a solid electric guitar is just wrong*. There are *obvious* differences between different examples of the same models, often - easily blind-testable.

Which doesn't mean they don't all sound like the same model - in fact pretty much all electric guitars just sound like electric guitars - but it makes a difference. Both things are true at the same time.

(*This is not opinion, it's provable by proper scientific measurement.)

Well exactly, but this is like when in adverts they say that such and such a cream "helps" reduce the signs of ageing. And then don't show what data that claim is based on. Because if they did, it would show that use of this expensive cream in fact "helps" considerably less than drinking an extra glass of tap water every day would.

It's clear that different woods vibrate in different ways - all you have to do is tap a bit of pine, then a bit of mahogany, to know that - so because guitars produce their sound through vibration it stands to reason that the wood used in the manufacture of the guitar would have an effect on how the guitar vibrates. As ICBM says this has been scientifically proven, but basic logic would get you to the same conclusion.

However the question, insofar as the utility of this fact, is "how much of the difference in vibration between for example ash and alder is actually audible to the average musician or to the average listener?"

This is an important question in a marketing sense, among other things, because it is a fact that some guitarists will routinely base their guitar purchase decisions on what woods an instrument is made from. Clearly guitar manufacturers and other people with a commercial interest in this subject habitually talk about certain woods as having superior tonal qualities to others, and clearly many guitarists take this on board and form preferences. But are those preferences formed based on the things people say about woods, or are they based on the guitarists' preferences for extant instruments which happen to be made from their preferred woods (or conversely, their dislike for a certain wood because a disliked guitar was made from that wood), or are they based on some other factor that has in some meaningful way shown them that wood selection actually influences the sound of a guitar in a desirable way?

This debate always reminds me of the story of a guy who was in a Cream tribute act, and had methodically assembled what he interpreted to be Clapton's core rig during that era. Gibson SGs, Les Pauls, 335s. Marshall Super 100 on a Greenback-loaded 4x12. Took him a few years, cost him a fortune, but it was all to nail that perfect Cream tone. Then one day he goes to see Clapton in concert. Clapton comes out, with his Strats and his Fender combos, and during the set he happens to throw out a medley of some Cream tunes. And coming out of his rig is that perfect Cream tone.

Gear can be anything and it can be made out of anything. My belief is that the overwhelming majority of what a listener hears happens inside their head. All this minutiae that we constantly turn over and over and over on forums like this matters to us, but to basically nobody else. And sometimes not even to us. On half my favourite records the guitars sound like absolute shit. Somehow, when I listen to them, it doesn't seem to matter.

ICBM

Tex_Mexico said:

My belief is that the overwhelming majority of what a listener hears happens inside their head. 

The final extension of this is that “tone is all in the fingers” and that “X still sounded exactly like himself playing through this totally different set-up” - we’ve all seen it, Brian May with a Strat and a little Squier amp or whatever. Actually, this is not really true - if you listen to *just the sound alone*, the tone is often quite different. What is the same is the player’s touch and phrasing, and this makes your brain interpret it as *sounding* the same, when it doesn’t.

The most extreme example I’ve seen of this was Joe Walsh playing the Life In The Fast Lane riff on an acoustic 12-string - you instantly recognise the song and the player, and it’s incredible how similar it sounds to the record. Except that, of course, it doesn’t - because an acoustic 12-string doesn’t sound like an overdriven Les Paul at all. It’s just that Joe Walsh *plays* like himself.

Jeremiah

At low/bedroom volume, you will also hear the unamplified acoustic sound of the strings in addition to  the sound from your amp. And, unless your amp is very close to your head,  the unamplified sound will reach your ears before the amplified sound, which can increase its contribution to the overall perceived tone.

I guess this is one reason why playing through headphones never sounds like the amp in the room, even when using IRs, as the headphones will block most of the direct unamplified sound.

topdog91

ICBM said:

Anyone who thinks wood doesn't matter in a solid electric guitar is just wrong*. There are *obvious* differences between different examples of the same models, often - easily blind-testable.

Which doesn't mean they don't all sound like the same model - in fact pretty much all electric guitars just sound like electric guitars - but it makes a difference. Both things are true at the same time.

(*This is not opinion, it's provable by proper scientific measurement.)

Thanks for clearing this up, one wonders why anybody ever had another opinion. Got any links to studies that show that people can reliably tell the difference between different woods in a solid-body electric guitar, all other variables controlled? Moreso, in a mix or in a live performance?