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"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Oh wait no actually its zero. Zero times.
(Brace for impact)
It's not like acoustics where a "tonewood" is everything to do with the grade of the wood, not the species. I.e. not all sitka spruce is a tonewood, it needs to be straight grained and sawn right to meet that grade.
There are materials that you can build electric guitars with, and materials you can't. Some work better than others, but as long as that material can hold a neck, bridge and some way to sense the string vibration it will work to some degree, and you can probably make music with it.
None of the woods commonly used in electric guitars have a tonewood grading system. Take mahogany sold for guitar bodies, it can be light, heavy, flatsawn, quartersawn, stiff, flexible, knotty, etc.... just needs to be the right size. Any expectations anyone has of a mahogany body sound will depend as much on individual piece as any species generalisation, it varies massively.
It's important to seperate out the term "tonewood" from the "does body material make a difference to the final amplified tone of the electric guitar?" discussion.
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If a given assemblage satisfies your requirements, buy it. Don't by the one, in a cooler colour, displayed next to it. Buy the one that suits you.
As soon as I first tried a friend's LP P90 Goldtop, I knew that it was the one for me. Took me five or six years to get him to part with it. In that time, I chanced upon a pre-owned LP Junior Special that proved to be great fun once the stock P100 pickups were surgically removed.
Win, win.
We all play guitar here, so I assume we all understand everything has a consequence?
I have now built enough versions of the same basic guitar, to appreciate that there are tonal effects from the type of wood used for a body, neck or fretboard, so the people that claim it doesn't matter, just sound ignorant to me.
I play electric guitar, but at least 90 per cent of the time, I am playing it un amplified, so it is also behaving as an acoustic instrument.
I have teles built from light ash, walnut and mahogany, they all sound very different acoustically, and they all have different pickup specs, so they obviously sound different at 85-90 db.
A factory building solid colour painted guitars will have very different criteria to a home builder using stains and oil finishes, for obvious reasons related to profit and cost benefits, so 'tone' comes quite far down the list of importance.
We don't yet have genetically modified, cloned trees to be able to do accurate comparisons, but I guess we will get there one day.
I'm sure the guy that made a body out of pencils is one of the people that claim it is just as good 'tonally'.
Some arguments just seem to go round and round, tonewood has been done to death, and still nothing has been 'proven'.
1. All electric guitars sound the same, especially to non-guitarists, to a very close degree. Even experienced guitarists can't always identify them or tell very different ones apart in a recording.
2. All electric guitars sound different, to a sometimes microscopically subtle degree which depends on almost every aspect of the construction, *to the person actually playing them*.
This is because the player is inside the 'feedback loop' from ear to brain to hands to guitar to whatever is being used to amplify it, and tiny differences that are inaudible to anyone else, change how what reaches your ears varies according to what your hands do. Body wood is one of these things - although not always dependent on the wood species, individual pieces can vary at least as much, but when you've played hundreds of them you start to notice patterns.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Same as I don't get the 'thrill' of losing £100 at the horses.
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