Wood affects tone (Anderton's video content)

Jaden · November 2013

out of interest, have any of you played a carbon fibre guitar...
a Rainsong acoustic etc ?

the difference is pretty extreme.. "tonewoods" - a stupid concept when you consider we would have to call carbon or graphite "tonecomposites" definitely sound different.

the one problem I find with many perceptions since the advent of youtube especially (returning to the original post) is that anyone who has ever played live to any extent KNOWS that the live sound VS the recorded sound is different... its missing the vibration that makes your chest move and the hairs on your arms stand up.. "recorded guitar tones" are not truly representative...
This is the reason why i do very little in the way of guitar demo's anymore, because after 5 mins with £100 worth of line 6 stuff and POD farm, I can make a guitar sound like anything I want... its only when you leave the house, go to a shop or a show and play or listen to an instrument that you know really know how it sounds..

I once did some guitar demo's,

but not for years now.

also, as far as materials "fads" go, could someone please start an MDF fad because then I could charge more for working with dangerous dusts and make a ton more money

anyway, im watching England vs Australia 2003 and Jason Leonard has just come on so... enough typing for now

ThePrettyDamned · November 2013

Ooo I'll have a go at guessing the tele when I've remembered my login deets. Love these games, even if I'm terrible at them...

AuldReekie · November 2013

My Eggle Berlin Pro has a SD Custom Custom at the bridge and sounds great. On that basis, when i was looking for a replacement bridge pick up foe my Levinson blade RH4, I decided to have the same pick up fitted to it. Its a sen ash body and sounded very mediocre. The wood does have a bid impact on tone

OilCityPickups · November 2013

Jaden said:

... This is the reason why i do very little in the way of guitar demo's anymore, because after 5 mins with £100 worth of line 6 stuff and POD farm, I can make a guitar sound like anything I want... its only when you leave the house, go to a shop or a show and play or listen to an instrument that you know really know how it sounds..

+1000% !!! this is the reason why I seldom do pickup demo clips. In fact, online compression plus one set of crappy computer speakers can totally put a customer off an otherwise good product.

AuldReekie said:

My Eggle Berlin Pro has a SD Custom Custom at the bridge and sounds great. On that basis, when i was looking for a replacement bridge pick up foe my Levinson blade RH4, I decided to have the same pick up fitted to it. Its a sen ash body and sounded very mediocre. The wood does have a bid impact on tone

Um ... hate to tell you this ... but two examples of the same pickup ... wound in the same factory ... by the same machines can sound different too. Magnet batches vary, wire diameter is actually really quite inconsistent ... and is often stretched by machine winding tensioners.

p90fool · November 2013

randomhandclaps said:

So guys who just spend their time actually playing guitars don't know shit? Surely it's the playing of the instrument which reveals the results? What's bizarre about that angle is most material fads aren't pushed by builders, they are pushed by mega-rich famous players saying 'I wouldn't play anything that wasn't Brazilian Rosewood.' etc.

Yep, that's about right generally. Granted there are a few players who have a worthwhile opinion on why a given guitar sounds the way it does, but for the most part they suffer from delusional fantasies and a belief in magic.

I'd take the word of an experienced builder over that of say, Billy Gibbons or Keith Richards any day.

I have a beaten up partscaster Tele in my studio for use by all and sundry, and was listening to a couple of very good players who'd just been playing it saying how "magical" and "alive" it was, even when you turn the volume down it's like it's "haunted, man".
Er no, it has a treble pass cap in it, which cost 29p. I didn't tell them though, it seemed cruel.

guitarfishbay · November 2013

dindude;87565" said:
I find myself largely agreeing with Drew here, and I don't do that lightly :P

Good musicians, in my estimation, are usually obsessive about their playing and their equipment alike.

If your serious about your music, then plugging into a bottom end line 6 amp is the equivalent of a photographer turning up at a wedding with a 5 megapixel point and shoot. It still takes photos so who the hell cares right?

Not caring deeply about minutiae, and taking the broad strokes "that'll do" attitude, has never led to anything good, ever - be it Architecture, music, art, business, cars, etc etc.

I think I'm the only person who said 'broad strokes'.

'That'll do' is a pretty unfair assesment of what I meant.

To sum up my philosophy as it currently stands -

Once you're lets say 95% of the say there to the right tone, small differences in tone matter much less than

- the tone of each other musician in the band and how it works together
- the ability of all musicians in the band to play their instruments well enough to generate nice sounds (within thel imitations of what equipment they have)
- the performance given by everyone as a whole and individually
- the material itself

I didn't say anything about having unprofessional gear. I also am not deaf and know everything makes a difference. I'm very picky about what I spend my own money on for starters.

The thing is that once you've basically got the right sound other things just matter so much more.

When people hear a piece of music they hear it as a whole. Will it ruin their experience if it sounds crap, yes. Will it ruin their experience if it sounds great (but could in theory be better) I'd say no. Should it stop someone trying to sound better - no. But there comes a point with diminishing returns on investment - both with regards to time and money.

You have to know your priorities at the end of the day. Understanding the small details is one thing, knowing when and how much they really matter in a situation is another.

koneguitarist · November 2013

Too many are still equating price with quality, Clapton with an old std Marshall combo and MIJ strat will sound better than me with a hand wired amp and custom shop strat. Soon as you get to a certain level of gear, the player's ability takes over. And bearing in mind our hearing deteriorates as we get older and that's down to age not having played so many loud gigs or been stuck working in noisy environments. Most are still hearing what their eyes tell them is best.

Jaden · November 2013

the players ability is always the most important factor.
the players style will always suit some guitars more than others, same goes for amps..

but, this discussion is about body wood making a difference to the tone.

koneguitarist · November 2013

Jaden said:

the players ability is always the most important factor.
the players style will always suit some guitars more than others, same goes for amps..

but, this discussion is about body wood making a difference to the tone.

it makes a difference. what the difference is, is not consistent, or even quantifiable.

koneguitarist · November 2013

koneguitarist said:

tele`s
Name the guitar, 3 guitars which is the tele ?
X_X

No one willing to have a go ? or no one got spotify ?

ThePrettyDamned · November 2013

Not got Spotify it seems. Bleh. Can it be sound clouded?

koneguitarist · November 2013

Will try.

Jaden · November 2013

koneguitarist said:

Jaden said:

the players ability is always the most important factor.
the players style will always suit some guitars more than others, same goes for amps..

but, this discussion is about body wood making a difference to the tone.

it makes a difference. what the difference is, is not consistent, or even quantifiable.

yea, true.
especially over the internet.
what is this tele challenge thing ?

koneguitarist · November 2013

just click on the teles link

ChrisMusic · November 2013

Thought I would post this here for your consideration.

Its a couple of responses to the GuitarSite article referenced by georgenadaintl on the previous page.

----------------------------------------

No man-made device can equal the human hearing, and, I remind you, a musically trained ear is an absolute reference.

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As Paul Smith likes to say, "Every affects everything!" Scale length, design, wood density, hardware, pickups, and build quality all factor into the equation. While it is true that the sound produced by an electric guitar is the result of ferromagnetic strings passing through a magnetic field, the signal that is produced in the magnetic field is a collection of frequency components that mirror string vibrations (fundamental and harmonic components); therefore, anything that affects string vibration affects the tone of an electric guitar.

Our friend in the video (Scott Grove) conveniently forgot to discuss the transfer function-related aspects of an electric guitar (i.e., it's response curve). Different guitar designs have different response curves. While it is true that a large part of the response curve of any given electric is bounded by the frequency response and operational characteristics of its pickups (a.k.a. magnetic transducers), a Strat with a rosewood fingerboard does in fact have a different response curve than a Strat with a maple board. The difference can be felt and heard. The difference is due to the fact that a maple fingerboard attenuates high frequencies less than a rosewood board. As the alternating current signal that is produced by a guitar is a reflection of the frequencies at which the strings are vibrating and their associated amplitudes, anything that affects the amplitude of a frequency component affects the tone of an instrument when plugged into an amplification device.

Q.E.D.

----------------------------------------

koneguitarist · November 2013

Good reply, and a lot of generalisation. I think everyone, literally everyone, would agree that every component of a guitar affects its tone, scale length nut, material, bridge, body wood, neck, fretboard etc etc. Also when amplified the pots can be within a range of say 250k for a strat, but may in fact be 220k or 276k Which will affect tone slightly or markedly depending on values. So where exactly are we ? Well the builders will tell us only x wood from x country gives us that tone of x guitar from x year, the player not scientifically will say nope, that feels different. Or no x guitar sounds slightly thinner etc. So after all this discussion over body woods sounding different, do they ? Possibly,,,, possibly not as we may think from videos it could be pickups, pots etc. The only way to tell if x body sounds different to y body is to make them resonate on their own without anything attached and record the findings. Most acoustic builders will tap the sound boards before cutting and fitting it to a guitar body, as you can hear the difference in tone between them. If chapters and co would have played x guitar, stripped all parts off then put y body on then we could possibly have heard more or less of a difference, unfortunately it's a load of bollocks what they have done to get people talking about guitars. Which is not really a bad thing. My background is in the helicopter world, and from experience I know that changing one component on a Lynx helicopter can markedly influence it's vibration characteristics. These are all very precise components machined to the nth degree yet still make quite a difference. From a guitar point of view I have allways played a solid guitar acoustically against next one to see how it resonates, if it's good that's the one I will buy, even if plugged in the other sounds better, as pickups and pots etc can all be changed.

AuldReekie · November 2013

TheGuitarWeasel said:

Jaden said:

... This is the reason why i do very little in the way of guitar demo's anymore, because after 5 mins with £100 worth of line 6 stuff and POD farm, I can make a guitar sound like anything I want... its only when you leave the house, go to a shop or a show and play or listen to an instrument that you know really know how it sounds..

+1000% !!! this is the reason why I seldom do pickup demo clips. In fact, online compression plus one set of crappy computer speakers can totally put a customer off an otherwise good product.

AuldReekie said:

My Eggle Berlin Pro has a SD Custom Custom at the bridge and sounds great. On that basis, when i was looking for a replacement bridge pick up foe my Levinson blade RH4, I decided to have the same pick up fitted to it. Its a sen ash body and sounded very mediocre. The wood does have a bid impact on tone

Um ... hate to tell you this ... but two examples of the same pickup ... wound in the same factory ... by the same machines can sound different too. Magnet batches vary, wire diameter is actually really quite inconsistent ... and is often stretched by machine winding tensioners.

was unaware of this, certainly there was a helluva difference in tone between the bridge setting on the guitars I mentioned despite having the same pick up

DeeTee · November 2013

TheGuitarWeasel;87300" said:
Only guitarists have the ego to think that the whole audience is hanging on their every nuance and note.

Ash, have you met any singers?

imalone · November 2013

georgenadaintl said:

We're straying from the initial question. Unless you're doing some A/B testing changing only the wood and nothing else then it's just a video of two salesmen trying to plug more expensive "tone woods".
Pickups, yes, absolutely. Wood, not really no.

They're not really trying to plug more expensive woods to be fair to them, the guitar they're plugging is the same price as the one it's a special run of, and neither ash nor mahogany is very exotic in guitar manufacture.
Have only just watched the video. It's not that bad, they've tried to control quite a lot of the variables. It'd be better to have the same person doing the strum, because the touch matters. It would be interesting to tear down the guitar, change only the body and try it again, but:
1. Not going to happen in a quick youtube video. And can't A/B on the amp, which introduces other variables.
2. You can then say any difference is due to the assembly being slightly different.
3. Like the experiment in the video it's an N=1 test. Doesn't put the results in context. Does one guitar have a massive crack in it? Probably not.
One thing you could do is get a stack of both types and A/B them (whether you do them all against each other or one-off pair comparisons depends whether you care how the intra-type variability compares to the inter-type variability).

ChrisMusic · November 2013

And again for the sake of *balance* and stimulating the discussion, a short 8 min video from Scott Grove (yes I was surprised too, short and Scott in the same sentence). Maybe Scotts's not very well *balanced* (joke), but at least he has an considered opinion and expresses it, and often he is pretty near the mark IMHO. On YouTube and also the GuitarSite article referenced by georgenadaintl on the previous page.

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Wood affects tone (Anderton's video content)

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