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I do not own a solid body guitar, and I do work on them, but it leaves me with a question for those of you who switch between them often. My archtops all have fairly low action by acoustic standards. I have them generally around 4/64 and 5/64 s at 12th fret and then just small turn of the bridge wheel to go slight under that but not so measurable. Some guitars can easily do it and others can be a bit testy trying to go too low.
So here is my comparison question. Do your solid body guitars feel much easier to fret and play? Now I know they have thinner strings normally but not always. That is a factor but not always. Sometimes bigger strings allow lower action and things do not really get harder to play. Do you need time to adjust between playing them? I find when I work on a Les Paul with 10's and play the guitar it takes a good bit of time to develop the feel for lighter touch. Going from heavier to lighter is not usually as difficult as the reverse. If I played a guitar that that all the time and then picked up my acoustic L5 with 13-53 I might find that difficult for a while, but I never do it. I really don't know because at heart I play an acoustic and usually don't really plug in to practice. That is just lazy but it is easier to be lazy.
I ask this also because when I work on flattop acoustics like Martin's they sometimes have action quite a bit higher than mine. They can be 5/64 and 6/64's and when I pick these up and play them, I usually am grateful for my archtops. However, some players really like them and seem to have no issues playing them, although granted most are not playing bebop lines in higher positions. What is your take on this?
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12-08-2024 07:34 PM
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There are several factors to consider here, Mark. I go from fat neck 7 string archtops to thinner and narrower neck 7 string solid bodies daily and on many gigs. My default gigging archtop (an Ibanez AF207) has a 24 3/4 scale and a nut that’s a hair over 2” on a relatively shallow neck. My default solid is a Raines Tele 7 with a 25” scale and a nut that’s about 1 3/4” (I haven’t measured it) on a slightly narrower neck that’s about the same depth. My blues beater (used for almost 30 years at every venue to which I wouldn’t take a “good” guitar) is a ‘90s Epi Les Paul 7 with a nut not much wider than a standard LP on a Louisville Slugger. And my carved archtops are Eastmans all of which have the same 25” wide fat neck with a nut that’s about 2 1/8 and a slightly but noticeably shorter radius than the Ibby & Raines.
All but the LP carry fairly heavy flats - GB114s on the Ibanez, JS113s on the Eastmans, JS112s on the Raines, and Chrome 10-52 on the LP. The Ibby and Eastmans have 13 & 17 plains, the Raines 11 & 15, and the LP has 10 & 13. All but the LP have 0.075” Chrome 7ths and the LP has an 0.065” in the 7th slot. My setup on all is a bit lower than yours and I prefer no more than a hair of relief on a straight board. I’ve set up my Ibanez AEL-207 flattop the same as the Raines.
They all fret and play about the same, except that the LP is “softer” because of the shorter scale and the slightly thinner strings. Obviously they all feel somewhat different, but I’ve never noticed any major difference in playability among them and I often switch from arch to solid for specific tunes on a gig. The AF207 and Raines necks are very close and feel the best of all my guitars, but I have no problem with the others.
FWIW, I have long thin fingers and have gigged with guitars from the pencil necks on a ‘60 175 and ‘69 L5C to a 2 1/4” nut. YMMV.
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All my electric guitars have about the same action (between 4 and 5/64” bass and between 3 and 4/64 treble) and relief ~.06”). My semi and my solidbodies (Les Paul and Strat) are strung with roundwound or rollerwound 10s. My archtop (lam top, set pickup, but decent acoustic voice) is strung with flat 13’s.
I’m very used to switching between these, so I don’t need time to adjust. I wouldn’t say one set-up is easier or harder than the other. They’re just different. Playing fast while picking every note is easier on the archtop; vibrato, bending, hammer-on/pull-off/legato is easier on the others. None is more fatiguing than the others.
My flattop has PB 12’s and is at ~6/64 bass and 5/64 treble. I’d say it is harder to play high up on the neck than the others and a bit more fatiguing, at least if I’m in a stretch of playing it significantly less than the others. Been thinking about filing down the saddle a bit and/or finding some softer feeling strings.Last edited by John A.; 12-09-2024 at 09:33 AM.
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Not radically different between my 17" carvetop, GB10, ES-175, Telecasters (one with Gibson scale conversion neck and the other with Fender scale), Stratish-caster or my flattop. I use John Pearse Jazz .011s on all but the carvetop, which wears 0.12s, and the flattop with Martin Monels.
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I have my guitars action set up just over buzz. 13s on the archtop, 11s on the tele. I can switch back and fourth fine, but I almost never play the tele. Honestly, I’ll probably sell it after I sell the Eastman.
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I have three guitars:
Flat top - D18 45 years
Stratocaster - 36 years
Ibanez - AG75 25 years
The flat top is nice, clubby neck and the easiest to play, very easy action
The Strat has the highest action and takes the most level of effort; it's the one I have used for virtually all performance for decades
The archtop is nice with a very light action, not as light as the flat top.
I've been playing since my early teens and my hands are used to performing for three or four hours; the light action tends to irritate me after a while. Most guitarists would consider my Strat unplayable because of its high action, or its weight (well over 9 lbs.), or the state of the finger board (frets worn so low they look like strips of Christmas tinsel, and the rosewood beginning to appear visibly scalloped) but I find it just right for the sound and feel I want for Jazz.
Last edited by pauln; 12-09-2024 at 09:36 PM.
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Easier? Yes. Much easier? Not necessarily. Let me say up front that I’m hyper sensitive to string height, neck bow and buzz. I have some issues with my hands and require a ruler-straight neck and low action. My ears, on the other hand, are fine and require a musical sounding guitar without buzzing or choking. My guitars need to play with no action at all but they need to sound as if they do. Thankfully, this is possible either by buying really good guitars or by having a luthier making the frets dead-level and doing a stellar set-up.Do your solid body guitars feel much easier to fret and play?
Archtops are of course hollow and the inside of the body is bare wood. Archtops will therefore respond to weather changes more than solidbodies. They need more attention to keep them at peak performance. Another factor is their size. An L5 is not like a 335, which is not like an SG. Even with the same strings and the same action, switching from an L5 to an SG will be like stepping in a Porsche.
Also there is string length. Compared to a lot of solidbodies, archtops can have a lot of excess string length beyond the nut and behind the bridge. A longer string requires more force to attain pitch than a shorter string. A thicker string also requires more force. Archtops tend to have strings that are both longer and thicker (a set of 10s won’t drive the top and will sound like a toy).
Adding it all up, on average an archtop will not be as easy to play as a solidbody. Whether or not that matters is personal. For me, it matters. I’ve had to sell my archtops except for my GB10, which is like the Porsche of the jazz guitar world. But even that guitar I cannot play for long periods of time so my semi-hollows and solidbodies get a lot of playing time. You can play jazz on anything. Last night I went to see Julian Lage again and he sounded like a million bucks on a Tele copy with a P90 and a set of flatwounds that sounded like they’d been on there for a year.
Going from archtop to semi or solidbody, no. When my hands get fatigued on the GB10, that’s what I do. The other way around is harder and takes a little bit of adjustment, but not that much.Do you need time to adjust between playing them?
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Mark, I go back and forth between archtops and solid bodies. I keep light strings on the solids (9's and 10's) and slightly heavier strings on the archtops (10's and 11's). Action is LAPWOB (low as possible without buzzing) on all guitars. It takes me less than a minute to adjust to whatever archtop or solid body guitar I choose. I use the same technique to play jazz on all of them.
In addition to my 11 archtops and 7 solid body guitars, I have 2 Gypsy guitars and a classical. The action is higher on those guitars and I use a different technique to play them.
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I play fingerstyle most often without picks. Occasionally, I use fingerpicks with a thumbpick. I have never been able, in 57 years of playing guitar, to make sense of flatpicking. Music is in my fingers and thumb -- at least so far, at 70+ years old -- instead of in my wrist. I mention this because it is environmental to my answer. I have five types of guitars: Acoustic archtops (with floater pickups), electric archtops (carved, laminated and center-block types) with top-mounted pickups, acoustic flattops (no electronics whatsoever), solid body electrics, lap steel.
The archtops require the most picking energy to drive the tops, at least in the context of the acoustic flattops I have. and on the rest what electrification does. That's not in any way a complaint -- just an observation, and it's in fact one of the reasons I prefer to play any genre of music on an archtop most of the time I play. I couldn't have imagined that'd be the case, say, 45 years ago. My solid bodies are all Telecasters, and yes, they are "easier" to fret, wrangle, manipulate, than any of my hollow bodies, though my Gibson center-blocks -- ES 335 and 137 -- feel a silkier than my various hollow-bodies. For strings, I use 12s & 13s on hollow body archtops and flattops. On electrics, I use 11s or 12s. When you have a solid body electric in your hands, you just know you are supposed to feel a malleable guitar. When you have a hollow body archtop or flattop in your hands, you know intuitively you are driving the soundbox, pickups or not. The entire feel is different, to the point where I'd say if you were playing Stairway to Heaven on a Les Paul and then doing same on an L5-CES, your technique would change to adapt to (or take advantage of) the guitar, even though both are electrified.
I played flattop acoustics exclusively from 1968 to 1990, when I decided to put electric guitars in the mix. That had a large impact on my interest in guitar, as opposed to music in general independent of guitar. I learned guitar as a fingerstyle player, and aside from the hand strength needed for barre chords, and the digital articulation needed for pull-offs, hammer-ons, thumb-overs, etc. going to a solid body electric took some time to learn to back off on hand energy I was putting into the neck/fingerboard. Pickups! What a thing! They "pickup" everything. 11s on a Telecaster are not significantly different from 12s on an L-5 or ES-165 (let's not rabbit hole the scale lengths right now). But the feel playing the two is a gulf which you should embrace rather than try to equalize.
Everything is a dial, not a switch. WE are the ones intrinsically equipped to adapt and exploit. The guitars don't adapt to us. Don't expect to ever be able to make a solid body electric to feel same as an archtop., acoustic or otherwise The operating principles as guitars are too far apart. View the solid body electric as your spa day for playing, if you're at heart an acoustic player. Relax, let the light touch find you and prevail. When you go back to having to drive the top of a box, you revert to acoustic form. Even if you put 14s on a solid body electric, it's still not going to feel the same as playing 13s or 14s on a top-driven guitar. Your body doesn't get the same contextual information, nor do your fingers, ears nor bones. They are different venues for what's in your hands. Appreciate them both and don't try to make one the same as the other.
Phil
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That's a common fallacy. But if you look at it from a slightly different angle you could say:
Originally Posted by deacon Mark
Light gauge allows higher action, heavy gauge requires lower action.
It's an important distinction, because a guitar with high action gets away with sloppy fret work and a poorly adjusted neck.
Heavy gauge requires a lower bridge in order to reduce bridge pressure, thereby not deviating too much from your desired level of "perceived tension", i.e the force required to deflect a string when picking/plucking, fretting (and bending when applicable). Also heavy gauge requires a well adjusted truss rod and a reasonably flat neck in order to reduce the distance a string is depressed when fretted, thereby maintaining intonation. Heavy gauge requires nut slots low enough not to make fingers hurt and strings not to pitch sharp when fretted near the nut.
It's important to separate acoustic guitars from electric guitars, because acoustic volume depends on the players ability to hit the strings hard enough, so that they oscillate with high enough amplitude. Low action restricts string movement and you'll get fret buzz. Originally Posted by deacon Mark
An archtop could be seen as either an acoustic guitar, or an electric guitar or both...it depends on your application. For example, most people opt for low action flatwounds because of their qualities when amplified (not because we want louder acoustics).
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ALL the guitars I use on stage have the action set higher than on those I only use at home- in a band situation the strings need more "headroom" especially for comping, regardless whether it's swing feel or funk or whatever. I automatically pick a little harder when there is a bass and/or drums involved. When I play a rock/funk tune with the big band I NEED to play harder since the song and style work that way - strumming lightly does not sound right. Same thinking applies when playing Freddy-Greene-style in a swing band : you have to drive the guitar a bit harder in order to get the sound. So a low action does not work for me in pretty much all situations. The only exception is my down-tuned Tele on which I play mostly fingerstyle , working on my Ted Greene/Ed Bickert arrangements.
I had the chance to play Larry Carlton's original ES-335 (strung with 010's) when I met him ages ago and was very impressed at the high action he used : he said his hands are up to it and the tone justifies the increased effort. One thing to consider when using a high action is the tuning : it gets off higher up the neck and is noticeable when playing chords up on the neck. Larry normally didn't play complex chordal stuff so it wasn't an issue but I'm also sure he used different guitars for the individual tracks on a recording date.
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If you have a wooden bridge it locks in a wound third normally, because the slots are normally cut for that and the intonation will be way off with a plain G.
So my jazz box is set up heavier than my tele and 335, but tbh I think I’d do that anyway.
OTOH if you have a tunomatic bridge or similar you can use whatever you like.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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Good point, when playing in a band context or whenever we want to "dig in", we're punished if the action is too low relative to the gauge. Originally Posted by gitman
Larry plays 10s afaik, that's light gauge (meaning he gets away with high action).
I've been using regular rounds 10-46 on my stop tail 335 forever, but I'm seriously considering 11s with a wound 3rd in order to keep action nice and low and to be able to hit it a little harder.
My archtop can easily take 12-50+, because of the elasticity (trapeze tailpiece, flexible top). I think a 335 with a Trapeze tailpiece is better suited for heavy gauge.
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I love this! It’s so right for so many things. Originally Posted by 213Cobra
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My experience is that you can setup the action on an archtop to be as low or the same as a solid body guitar. (After fret levelling and polish.)
But, an archtop sounds better acoustically with a higher action.
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I have a Yamaha Pacifica that I use for a lot of gig work, in addition to two hollow-body archtops and two semi-hollow archtops. I play all my archtops amplified, so I don't see the need to raise the action to give the instruments greater acoustic punch. I try to get the action as low as I can on all of my instruments without causing excessive buzzing.
If the Yamaha is "much easier to fret and play," it comes down more to string gauge (.11 on the Yamaha, .13 on the archtops). I'm more accustomed to the feel of a large archtop instrument, but I have hardly any difficulty switching between my instruments.
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The way to maximize intonation for a high action that you play all over the neck is to Originally Posted by gitman
tune your 1st string to E*, independently checking the 1st's tuning throughout...
then your 2nd string at the 5th fret to match the open 1st,
then your 3rd string at the 9th to match the 1st
then your 4th string at the 14th to the 1st
then 5th at the 19th (not the harmonic there or at the 7th, they're not equal temperament)
then 6th at the 5th fret harmonic (this one is equal temperament)
So it's all Es... This method takes into account (balances somewhat) the anomalous variation with respect to the different string gauges and their characteristic misbehavior as you play up the neck. This is also one of the few methods of tuning by ear that most likely results in approaching equal temperament rather than what your ear wants to hear.
It is nice in the performance environment because it's easy to hear a single pitch in a noisy place that has piped music or other musicians warming up.
*The band's E, if the piano's a little off from standard, it happens!
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YMMV but once I learned edge picking, the difference between .009s on my LP and .013s on my Byrd became a non-issue. Before that, I had the same experience of struggling to pick lightly enough on the lighter-gauge strings.
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pauln, that is the way I check tuning, too. I also use the Johnny Smith method, which starts with the low E fretted at the 10th fret to tune the D, the 5th string at the 10th fret to tune the G, the 4th string at the 9th fret to tune the B, the 3rd string at the 9th fret to tune the high E.
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I haven't heard of that one. I've just finished a couple of hours of Originally Posted by Cunamara
practice, looking forward to tomorrow to investigate JS's method!
Thanks
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Always looking for better ways to tune so thanks for this! So far my best results come from checking the intonation at the 5th, 10th and 12th frets and then adjusting the saddle so that it is the most in-tune on these three frets. I tune up the guitar using the fretted notes at the 5th fret, with an extra check for the G (2nd fret and open string) and low E (3rd fret). My ears tell me that the guitar sounds way more in tune compared to the usual method of intonating at the octave and turning the open strings. Originally Posted by Cunamara
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You introduced two additional parameters; scale length and playing technique. Originally Posted by starjasmine
Scale length
The Gibson Byrdland is a short scale guitar (23.5"). It requires heavier gauge to get the same physical tension as a regular Gibson (24.75"). I've got a 22.5" mini Strat that plays super slinky with 11-49, medium low action. Note that tension charts provided by D'Addario refer to long scale guitars (25.5") and physical (axial) tension of strings tuned to pitch in standard tuning.
Perceived tension (arguably perceived action) is a function of gauge, scale and physical tension, string height, bridge pressure, friction and flex.
String height is a function of bridge height, nut height, neck relief and compression.
"Action" refers to the way a guitar plays. Action is often approximated by "string height", which in turn is often approximated by "bridge height". Such approximations are crude and crass and obviously not sufficient to explain why guitars are different.
Playing technique
One could argue that it doesn't matter what a guitar plays like and that the player would have to bend himself ("build up hand strength", "play your acoustic flat top for a while and all your other guitars will play like butter", "use your nails", "use your thumb", "use a strange pick", "hold your pick in an akward way" etc, etc). Or one could argue that it's beneficial if all your guitars are setup to play with the same perceived action, so that you don't have to bend yourself and can focus on the music.
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I have several archtops, and one solidbody, which is a G&L tele clone, and all are set up as identically as I can manage. Straight necks, action at the 12th fret near .040", and .012" string sets. The archtops have a softer feel than the tele, which I attribute mostly to the string-through-body construction. The archtops range from nominal 24.75" scale length to 25.5" scale length. I don't notice much difference in feel with different scale lengths, but the tele just feels slightly stiffer. It's not a huge difference, but every time I play it I check the string height because it feels higher than it should be. It's always the same, though. The archtops I play regularly have 25" scale length, so an additional half inch shouldn't be huge, especially since the 25.5" archtops feel about the same. I think the shorter overall string length that results from having the strings through the body immediately behind the saddles may be the biggest influence on feel. It's not unplayable, but it is noticeable to me. The weight of that boat anchor also is a factor in how often I play it. I will only play it sitting down.
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I have the action set @ 4/64th" on high E and 5/64th" low E on all my guitars including the archtop, electric, acoustic, and nylon string, with no buzzing on any of them. I believe if you have a good setup on your guitar, there's no need setup the action differently on all the guitars. This works for ME, although it may not work for some players who have a strong attack, or players who like minimum effort in playing and like a low action.
Cheers,
Arnie...
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All my guitars, archtop and solid body, are equally easy to play for me.
That's because I use each for what it's best at. I'm not trying to bend notes or rock out at high volume on an archtop, or play acoustically on a solid body.
Of course I make sure that the frets and setup are as good as possible on everything I play.
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