You learn something every day.. Strings, action, buzzing, playing style, bridges and woods...

Bridgehouse

Well I feel like I've been on a journey of enlightenment over the last few days. 

I recently had my LP Special DC refretted by the delightful @SteveRobinson. It's masterful what he can do with bound boards and refrets.. Anyway, got home and I thought I noticed a lot of buzzing on the A string. 

Checked the action - spot on how I like it. Relief? Spot on, just as Mr Robinson had set it up. To cut a long story short, the A string was duff. It had lost it's tension a bit and was flapping around like a flag on a ship. Swapped out all the strings for higher tension ones (I had Pyramid Nickel Classics on before and they are pretty low tension). 

Well, my ear had become adjusted to listening out for buzzing now, and as they were new strings I picked up quite a bit. Cutting another long story short I moved on to some D'Addario 11's and let them settle in and play in. 

Now, I've come back to it today, and specifically listening out for buzzing acoustically I've discovered something for the first time - just how different electric guitars can sound acoustically. Massively. Like, strikingly so. I reckon with the combination of wraptail bridge, 55 year old mahogany, brazilian rosewood, new frets and so forth I'm hearing a very specific character to the LP Special. It's springy, resonant, alive even in it's sound acoustically. It picks up the slightest buzz and zing in any string on any fret and seems to have bags of sustain. 

It got me thinking, so I started listening really hard acoustically to some of the other guitars in the collection. Wow, are they different. When you listen really closely, you can hear the same little buzzes and zings when I dig in hard - the same little nuances to my playing style. But some guitars hide it, others reveal it, revel in it and amplify it. I've finally realised that each guitar I own has a massively different character of its own before I plug it in. Yeah, ok, I knew they were different. But not this different.

I've uploaded 4 potato quality recordings of 4 guitars - acoustically. They are recorded using an iPhone voice recorder and fiddled with in Audacity. Main reason I did this was to keep the sound as flat as possible so that the natural character comes through. I'm not going to say which one is which - I'll let you decide. (But I will reveal all later). There are 4 samples. 2 are Les Pauls (One is a 1962 LP Special DC, One is a R6 Goldtop. One is a 1965 Epiphone Olympic, and one semi for good measure - a Rickenbacker 380L.

Maybe it's just me that's amazed by the tonal range, character differences and all that. Maybe it's late, I've drunk beer and I'm rambling. Either way - have a guess and tell me which one is which.. (oh, and sorry for the potato playing quality as well..)

Sample 1

Sample 2

Sample 3

Sample 4

skunkwerx

1 - Epi

2 - semi hollow. 

3 - Les Paul Gold Top

4 - Les Paul

complete guess really!

Voxman

1 -Les Paul Gold Top

2 - Epi

3 - Les Paul

4 -semi hollow R'backer  

monoamine

Not to piss in your cornflakes here, but I have honestly never really understood why we get excited by and describe the acoustic tone/character of instruments that are, by virtue of their inherent design, best appreciated when amplified.

I reckon that the difference in tone between my DC junior and my tele is marginal at best when tested acoustically, but I know for a fact it is huge when amplified properly. Sure, EMGs and a load of distortion can dissolve such differences but so too can old strings or bad fret buzz when tested acoudtically.

Food for thought, good idea for a discussion and sorry to derail!

richardhomer

monoamine said:

Not to piss in your cornflakes here, but I have honestly never really understood why we get excited by and describe the acoustic tone/character of instruments that are, by virtue of their inherent design, best appreciated when amplified.

Because it does have a bearing on the amplified sound in my experience; a Strat and a Les Paul sound massively different from each other acoustically. It's easily proved that this translates into how they sound plugged in; put a humbucker in a Strat and it sounds fatter than before - but not the same as a Les Paul. Put a Strat single coil into a Les Paul and it sounds thinner than before - but not like a Strat.

One thing which seems to vary a lot is the depth of tone when playing without an amp. A lot of Strats sound thin and 'plinky', with little low end. Plugged in they tend to sound strident and lacking in body. If you find one with a deep, extended low end when played unplugged, they sound really balanced and musical when plugged in.

I agree just plugging one in tells you the same thing - but I find the correlation interesting.

Sassafras

1- Telecaster 2- Ibanez Jem 3- Stratocaster 4- Gretsch Tennessean

WezV

Yeah, my epi is a great guitar,  but i rarely pick it up these days.  Sounds good through an amp and it does play great, but it doesn't excite me.

wheras the super thin 6lb neck through junior I recently built is super resonant and quite loud when played acoustically.  It does translate to amplified sound, more so on simple guitars like this. 

 i accept that 100% of an electrics guitar tone comes from the interaction between string and pickup. Both those things are attached to wood

in simple terms the electric guitar sound can be described as "a vibrating string causing fluctuations in a pickups magnetic field".

Tiny differences in that string vibration give big changes in the sound.


but we can add one variable that changes the game for me, but is often overlooked. I think of it as "a vibrating string causing fluctuations in a vibrating pickups vibrating magnetic field".


think back to the junior  with its pickup bolted directly to the body.... that pickup will be moving quite differently to one on a Non direct mount guitar

Bridgehouse

monoamine said:

Not to piss in your cornflakes here, but I have honestly never really understood why we get excited by and describe the acoustic tone/character of instruments that are, by virtue of their inherent design, best appreciated when amplified.

I reckon that the difference in tone between my DC junior and my tele is marginal at best when tested acoustically, but I know for a fact it is huge when amplified properly. Sure, EMGs and a load of distortion can dissolve such differences but so too can old strings or bad fret buzz when tested acoudtically.

Food for thought, good idea for a discussion and sorry to derail!

Not really a cornflakes kind of guy TBH  

I felt exactly the same as you - not really any appreciable difference between one solid body electric and the next, to the extent that surely it's about the pups and the signal path once the sound is generated. 

In trying to get the LP Special set up (just enough relief but as flat as I could get it) it struck me just how subtle the acoustic sound can be - I'm not talking about major differences here but really subtle ones. To me, it felt like these subtleties translated into part of the massive difference in sound at the other end through the amp.

I posted those clips out of interest to see what people felt - I expected 'not much difference' through to 'lots of difference' - there's no right or wrong answer of course it's all subjective 

Bridgehouse

Sassafras said:

1- Telecaster 2- Ibanez Jem 3- Stratocaster 4- Gretsch Tennessean

You been looking at my Christmas list?

Bridgehouse

WezV said:

but we can add one variable that changes the game for me, but is often overlooked. I think of it as "a vibrating string causing fluctuations in a vibrating pickups vibrating magnetic field".


think back to the junior  with its pickup bolted directly to the body.... that pickup will be moving quite differently to one on a Non direct mount guitar

There's a couple of things I've been musing on.. Presumably most pickups are to some extent or other microphonic and thus translate some of their own vibration into the sound.. Similarly the guitar as a whole will affect each strings harmonic content, which will be in some part due to wood, construction etc..

Combined, I suspect they contribute to the sound exactly as you describe - affecting the vibration of the string in a vibrating pickups vibrating magnetic field.

Interesting.

I really need to get out more.