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TBH, that was feedback anyway - much like the stuff Santana does (the stuff he does other than noodle inanely over the vocalist). You can push any guitar into harmonic feedback given enough gain/volume and pointing the guitar in the right place.
My experience is that heavy/inert guitars (e.g. 70s LPs, Yamaha SGs, etc) give strong sustain - but aren't particularly dynamic. Lighter, more resonant guitars seem to have greater dynamics - and can be 'coaxed' into sustain with vibrato. As ever, these are generalisations - there are exceptions.
I never really worried about sustain, but after having a particular firebird - which sounded very resonant unplugged, but was lacking sustain once plugged in, it changed my mind. It was very noticeable and I ended up sitting there playing each of my guitars and counting the sustaining note ( like a madman) for hours, particular riffs just died when I held the note with a few bends (it was NOT frets etc) - I probably would have agreed with most of the comments about 'not needing all that sustain' but as soon as I played that guitar with crap sustain I realized I definitely do NEED a reasonable amount of sustain for the style I play. Interestingly, My LP Jr, is very resonant acoustically, sustains for an age, and is quite heavy - so breaks a whole bunch of myths... so I reckon its just down to the guitar, some do sustain, some do resonance, some do both (regardless of weight) etc
forget sustain, focus on string vibration and where that energy goes - the whole lifecycle of the note and the whole system.
With heavy guitars, only a little string energy is lost to the body so the string keeps vibrating longer. You get a fast attack and a consistent note.
Take a lighter and more resonant guitar, more string energy is given to the body right from the start... but that energy isn't lost, some of it is fed back into the string, almost filtered by the body. this note may last just as long as the one on the heavy 80's Yamaha, but it will be a very different lifecycle
That is obviously massively simplified, but if you just measured the length of note you miss the complexity of the whole system. "Sustain" matters for short notes just as much as the long ones as its directly related to the rest of the notes lifecycle
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http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/112703/body-wood-affects-tone/p1
some guitars just have a mojo we like and others don't - how to define that mojo I don't know
Otherwise, they're the same - scale length, hardware, pickups, wood types, construction methods, frets, etc etc.
All the 5420s had a particular pillowy, soft low end, and all the 5422s were punchier and meaner sounding through an amp. I tried both kinds through two different AC30s, two different AC15s and a fender something or other over a few weeks in different guitar shops.
So the resonances in the body, in this case in the air inside the guitar I guess, definitely impacted the amplifier tone.
Specifically re; sustain, I've no idea. I've got a Gibson Explorer which is quite resonant - you feel it through your belly when you strum a chord - and has fine sustain. But then, "sustain" as a property is never something I've been that focused on - I think it only matters really if you're playing loud high gain and want single notes to feed back musically, rather than dying and being replaced by screaming feedback. To a certain extent, the longer and louder the sustain, the less the note attack is going to reach out and grab you - and I like attacky guitars.
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There are different approaches to achieving sustain that also work, erm, differently.
edit: you get someone with a 6lb strat that sustains just as long. They exist. The audible note may last as long, but the attack, bloom, decay etc will be very different
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I believe really light and resonant wood will feed vibration back into the string as the strings natural and direct sustain dies down.
volume always helps though
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That does seem to make sense as, in this case, something other than the small amount of energy in the strings is driving the resonant body. I guess that this turns the whole argument around, as whilst it might be true that a resonant body will suck energy from the vibrating strings and so reduce sustain, if you play loudly enough to make the body resonate you can add far more energy to the system, especially at those resonant frequencies.
I guess the only issue is just how consistent that resonance might be and whether it will tend to produce 'wolf tones', as can happen with a bowed acoustic instrument - where once again one can continue to add energy to the system, this time via the bow.
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