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My goodness, where do we begin?
It seems every week here there’s a thread about somebody who’s looking for a certain sound…and while I’m of the opinion you can probably get a good jazz tone out of almost anything…but there are characteristics inherent to the different flavors of archtop out there, and they can be difficult to “mask” if there’s another specific tone you’re after…
So here’s some of the forms of archtop you might run across, and what they do…
- All acoustic, all-laminate: Not particularly common anymore, here you’re looking at guitars like old Harmonys and Kays and the newer Godin Fifth Avenue. These guitars have a tone many describe as “boxy,” a pronounced, almost nasal midrange. They lack the complexity and richness of their solid wood partners. They’re not as loud either. Generally, they’re not too satisfying as an acoustic guitar, but they have enough volume for unamplified practice, and interestingly enough, when combined with a routed in humbucking pickup, provide the sound many think of right away when they hear “jazz tone.”
- All acoustic, solid wood: There’s nothing quite like it, really. The midrange is there, but a beautiful, tight piano like bass is also possible. Painted by many to be one-trick ponies, a solid wood archtop is often capable of being much more versatile. Different bracing and sizes and lutheir’s tonal aesthetics mak the difference here, and solid wood archtops range from sweet and mellow to loud and barking—the one thing they don’t sound like—a plugged in laminated archtop.
- Laminated, set pickup: Perhaps the quintessential, or at least, the stereotypical “jazz tone,” the set pickup (or even a top mounted pickup like a P90) on a laminated guitar provides one of the true intangibles of the jazz guitar world, the somewhat indescribable but certainly onomonopaeic “thunk.” This tone is virtually unattainable on any other type of guitar.
- Solid Wood, Set Pickup: A different, but equally iconic tone to the laminated set pickup guitar, the solid wood set pickup instrument toes the line between an acoustic instrument and an electric depending on the builder’s aesthetic. Wes Montgomery’s L5 and various other players Super400 tones fit this bill. Generally, the more holes cut in the top plugged with pickups, the less “acoustic” the guitar sounds, but even a two-pickup L5 has a unique characteristic plugged in that distinguishes it from say, an ES-175
- Solid Wood, Floating pickup. The floating pickup, the black licorice (love it or hate it)of the guitar world. Essentially, the floating pickup was invented to amplify acoustic instruments without permanent modification, and they are still used to be able to amplify an acoustic archtop with minimal intrusion to the guitar’s acoustic voice. Perhaps the most common of these is the mini humbucker, which (particularly when suspended above the guitar’s top or “floating”) provides a much brighter tone than a typical set in humbucker. Many artists have used these to create beautiful, articulate sounds (think Johnny Smith) but often players wanting a more “traditional” jazz tone are left wishing they had a set humbucker instead.
These are all just generalizations based on my experience, and overall, it’s the individual maker’s choices that truly craft the sound of an instrument—you may find laminate guitars with routed pickups that are surprisingly vibrant acoustically, for example….so treat these “rules” as a starting point.
My hope is some of the folks with greater guitar experience than I will chime in as well with more information.
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12-12-2014 02:30 PM
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(But seriously, I'll be happy to add thoughts to this thread.)
Archtops; the most confounding creatures they are at times, but nevertheless so very compelling... perhaps even because of it!?
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The archtop guitar is a small battlefield with a war being waged between acoustic and electric vibrations.
[Warning, generalizations below are presented in the spirit of attempting to communicate! Please to be tolerant. Ahem.]
When you place a string between two points - a nut and bridge - and cause it to vibrate, the sound energy has to travel somewhere. The more resonant the medium is, the more the energy is transferred into the medium. The less resonant the medium, the more energy stays with the string. This is perceived as the amount of sustain. It is not at all the same as volume.
A resonant medium is a lightweight, carved and tuned solid wood hollow guitar. A 3 lb flamenco guitar is an extreme example. A not-as-resonant medium is a heavier, laminated wood, semi-hollow guitar. A 12 lb Les Paul is an extreme example.
At the same time, the denser the interface between the string and the medium, the less energy reaches the medium. It stays in the string. A dense interface is a fixed metal Tune-o-matic bridge. A giant Floyd Rose trem bridge is an extreme example. A less dense interface is a floating wooden archtop bridge. A thin rosewood classical guitar bridge is an extreme example.
With me so far? That's the acoustic side of things, more or less.
On the electric side, you have two primary variables: The impedance of the pickup - how "hot" it is - and the manner to which the pickup is coupled to the vibrating medium (the guitar's body).
The higher the impedance, the darker and more powerful the sound. The lower the impedance, the brighter and thinner the sound. The more coupled the pickup is to the body, the more the instrument's acoustic energy impacts the electric sound. The more isolated from the medium, the more the pickup amplifies only the string's energy.
Pause to regroup...
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So now we have to be a bit analytical and deduct conclusions about Jeff's listed archtop categories based on the above sound energy treatise.
Let's take a solid wood archtop, put a wooden bridge on it, and add a medium impedance floating pickup. What you get is a guitar where a lot of the string energy moves into the body, causing it to vibrate acoustically. And the pickup is affixed only to the pickguard, so it is fairly isolated from the body. Therefore it amplifies mainly string vibrations. The string has lost a bunch of energy to the body (we just said that). So the pickup has less to work with. Result - not a lot of electric sustain and not a lot of acoustic character to the amplified sound.
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What about floating laminates?
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Just to pick nits, how about a solid wood top and laminated back. Just because I'm a L-4 kina guy.
Thanks john
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Well you see, it's impossible to list defining characteristics for every single construction permutation that exists. You have to take the fundamentals into account, and accept that every attribute has a continuum, and that the attributes interact with each other. There are nearly infinite possibilities.
However it is also clear that some things are far more important than others. In the "how acoustically resonant is this guitar" variable, the top is more impactful than the back wood.
Floating laminates? Not much acoustic sound, but more energy stays in the string, so the same pickup placed on that guitar vs. a solid top should produce more sustain.Last edited by rpguitar; 12-12-2014 at 03:47 PM.
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Or Hofner New President
Originally Posted by powerwagonjohn
(laminated back and sides)
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Great thread Mr B
I think you did a great job of putting down the basic laws of archtops, well done.
Rp I also think your contribution was excellent. Well done to you both.
A thick carved top can sound 'solid' but perform more like a laminate. This has become my new favourite type of construction. The sound is still nutty and you get the ringing through the wood that you don't with laminates.
Prior to this I would achieve this by choosing solid top with twin routed pups. It just seems to work, or get you there, to bop land. I am of course talking about the amplified tone.
The other contribution to the 'can' is the solid pressed, which still to my ears sounds bright and not overly umm conducive to getting that Wes the tone. If I were to go with Rp I would say a pressed top is like a floating hum bucker.
Well done guys :-)Last edited by Archie; 12-12-2014 at 04:24 PM.
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Love this thread. Thanks Jeff.
In the spirit of Roger's comments, just throwing some ideas out there. Two other factors that IMO affect the acoustic and electric sounds of guitars are internal damping and the shape of the top.
Internal damping refers to the ability of sound to travel through the medium, so a laminate top has a high degree of damping and does not transmit sound energy as well as a solid top (generalizing, don't freak out). All solid tops will have different internal damping characteristics and this is what makes a luthier earn his/her money. I think that the reason a laminate top with set PU is so popular is that the top kills a lot of the overtones that the strings transfer to the top and that keeps the tone clear and focused.
The shape of an archtop and the way it is braced will also greatly effect the sound both acoustically and electrically. The higher the arch, the more punch, but also more mids. The flatter the arch, the more it will sound like a flattop guitar.
I am writing from my own experience as a lifetime guitarist, but really more from my interest and involvement in building instruments (I do it as a hobby). I am interested in what others think about these ideas. I had some great teachers when I was learning to build, and their lessons made sense to me, but everyone has a different take on all this.
Bill
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Mr. B, nicely done but it's essential to note that what we are discussing here are nuances. And there are plenty more nuances we could discuss, and because we're here, we will discuss them and enjoy that thoroughly.
But all of that is secondary to the overall context.
One of the big learning areas for me this year has been to begin to address the way a guitar's sound changes when it leaves the practice room and gets buried by a real band in a real room full of real people. When the drums, bass, piano and horns kick in and somebody is sitting sixty feet away, they can't tell if I have a floating-mini-humbucker-equipped long-scale full-size D'AThing made by a master-craftsman using only an organically grown toothbrush, or if I'm packing a $275 used Epi with a Metallica sticker on the back. It sounds like a guitar. I'd better play it, too, or The Hook comes out!
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Originally Posted by Socalbill
Yeh well done for bringing that up.
I love my Guild Archtops because the arch isn't very pronounced. This for me allows the guitar to sound more mellow (bracing and thickness of top aside). I don't like Mids and contrary to everyone here apparently, I have mine turned all the way down, so the sound I get is more 3d I.e signals boosted at either end. Its always given me a tone I like and has always garnered nice comments.
Secondly I feel it makes for a very nice playing experience in regards to feel and is probably why Guilds are so easy to set up and feel so inviting to play. After all you are that little bit closer to the body with your playing arm.
Anyway this is not entirely germane to the topic.
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Jeff - well stated! I was very pleased to see that THUNK was not overlooked . . . a significant ingredient of a particular jazz sound (think 175).
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I am very sceptical about how satisfactory the electrical pickup signal alone is on archtops. When you play back a recording of the floater on a carved archtop it can be a little underwhelming. My own efforts have tended to produce a very dark amplified tone to mitigate the acoustic volume and brightness from the guitar itself. To record what the floater/carved offers over the routed/laminate I believe that there needs, at least, to be a measure of mic'ed acoustic tone with the pickup signal. The proportion of acoustic signal being related to any or no accompaniment. Acoustic qualities are essential for the soloist but less so the more in the mix the guitar sound is. An example might be seen in the solo playing of Ted Greene. Solo playing with a solid body electric. The Rhodes piano sound isn't to everybody's taste. Many find the acoustic deficit a challenge. Should we be surprised by this? If we considered the electrical component of the guitar signal to be comparable to a bicycle dynamo then would we expect the hue of the lamp to radically depend on the compound of the tyre sidewall? I suspect we wouldn't expect that factor to be the most important. We can't deny that there might be an influence but order of importance? Who knows?
I'm not wholly sure how well we can detect "acoustic tone" flavouring the electric pickup sound too. I feel we might actually confuse attack and decay characteristics of energy transfer to body resonance in a carved top guitar as being indicative of "acoustic" sound. Frequency controlled side chain compression of a telecaster or strat does disguise the solidybody source a little giving an impression of string energy damping by a resonant body. Certainly, taming telecaster high end with compression retains more "naturalness" than taming with the tone knob alone. Add in a contact mic on the tele headstock and it becomes very difficult to gauge what contributions to the sound belong in the electric or acoustic realm.
It's interesting just how difficult it is to evidence which components of the guitar recipe we really perceive. Most players don't have the time, inclination or funding to quantitatively and qualitatively evidence what listeners are responding to. The resources required to fund research like this mainly sits with manufacturers. A request to one high end guitar builder for access to his own research on guitarist perceptions to physical guitar traits yielded a jovial response promising to dig the info out and send it to me. Needless to say, I have never received any further correspondence!! To a large extent this reaction is understandable. Why would a manufacturer want to furnish someone else with a lead on the unfathomable truth that makes their guitars special?
The immense scientific complexity of the electrically amplified acoustic archtop sound is what tips these instruments over the boundary from science into art form. Archtops are certainly uniquely enigmatic.
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is there a significant difference between a floating pickup screwed to the neck and one fixed to the pick guard - rpguitar?
if there is - could you characterize it?
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Jeff-
I can't believe you "went there"! LOL However, imo, you did a magnificent job. You should be writing articles for guitar magazines. That was excellent.
Are floaters really "black licorice"? YOU'RE the only one I've seen openly hate on floaters LOL
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Enigma stuffed with riddles wrapped in mystery. To me, it's magic. Reading this thread helps explain some of the mystery, but it's still magic, and you know when you hear it. Originally Posted by Chimera1to1
Thanks, Mr. B. (and the other contributors to the thread)
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As I understand it, the "hotness" of the pickup is related poorly to impedance and strongly to inductance. Impedance is just easily measured with a multimeter more easily than measuring inductance, so the former is what is usually discussed. Originally Posted by rpguitar
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"Internal damping refers to the ability of sound to travel through the medium, so a laminate top has a high degree of damping and does not transmit sound energy as well as a solid top (generalizing, don't freak out). All solid tops will have different internal damping characteristics and this is what makes a luthier earn his/her money. I think that the reason a laminate top with set PU is so popular is that the top kills a lot of the overtones that the strings transfer to the top and that keeps the tone clear and focused.
The shape of an archtop and the way it is braced will also greatly effect the sound both acoustically and electrically. The higher the arch, the more punch, but also more mids. The flatter the arch, the more it will sound like a flattop guitar."
Socalbill
surely this is on the money - i've not heard such a concise and convincing presentation of the basic facts about these instruments.
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It doesn't matter. This wasn't a technical reference. We discuss pickups in terms of ohms, which measure impedance. We don't refer to henries, which quantify inductance. Originally Posted by Cunamara
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Only shit knockoff Kent Armstrong mini humbucker floaters. Which account for 95% of floaters out there. Originally Posted by ruger9
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Yes, but we discuss it incorrectly. There are bright, nasal 14k pickups out there and fat, warm 8k pickups. Real low impedance pickups (1.5k or so) require a preamp to be useful. Impedance is a poor guide to predicting the sound of a pickup. Henries may not adequately predict tone, either. Originally Posted by rpguitar
As for Jeff's comments, I think the main "problem" with the floating mini humbucker is its narrower aperture compared to a full size humbucker, putting it somewhere between a single coil and a full size humbucker. I also think that mounting method (neck-mount versus fingerrest-mount) has an effect on tone. My theory is that mounting the pickup on the fingerrest isolates it from the vibrations from the top resulting in a brighter and thinner tone. When set in the top the pickup is vibrating with the top under the string's vibrations, causing a more complicated signal and selectively enhancing and canceling some frequencies. Solid versus laminate tops vibrate differently due to internal damping, as previously noted by someone else.
Modifying a Classic 57 into a floater for my carvetop was a huge improvement compared to a Kent Armstrong handwound PAF-0 on the same guitar or the Allparts mini that came originally on the guitar. I should note that Kent did some work on my Classic 57 to balance the coils after I broke one and sent it to him for repair. I think there are several issues there- the guitar itself seems to tend to be bright electrically even though it's not especially bright acoustically. The KA reflected that too much, sounding bright and harsh unless the tone was rolled off about 90%; the mini didn't see enough string to sound fat but was less bright and harsh than the KA; and both were pick-guard mounted while the Classic 57 is neck mounted. I modded that pickup after being inspired by Pete Berstein's tone, who's got the best floater tone I've ever heard- both bright and clear while being fat and rich.
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Originally Posted by Groyniad
Articulation vs. richness/desirability of tone
Let me throw in another observation, or maybe it's just adding another joker to an already peculiar deck. "Articulation" can be the enemy of tonal richness. I have a '54 Fender non-pedal steel guitar---two big chunks of ash bolted together with a trapezoidal, very powerful pickup on it. That sucker makes most guitars sound flimsy and weak tonally. The steel almost sounds like a church organ. Yet, it is not a "layered" sound like we prize in a fine, carved archtop. I think we all know the story of Les Paul experimenting with the railroad metal tie, that sounded better than anything else, acc'd to him. But if Gibson laughed him out of the shop when he showed up with the "log" guitar, what would they have done with a "Wabash Cannonball electro-Spanish special"---probably tied him to it, and found the nearest railroad track and waited for the next train to arrive....
Second, I'm loving this new L4 I just got, but if the truth be told...the quintessential guitar jazz tone I "hear" in my head is mostly the laminate sound, and the reason I love THAT sound is because it is focused and cuts through better than an acoustic-y type sound....if you hooked it up to an oscilloscope, I'm sure the laminate sound would waver less. And that, in a busy band setting may well be preferable....I love the sound of trumpet or clarinet, and these are not so "layered" and even amongst sax players I prefer Bird's or Sonny Stitt's or Coltrane's tone to say...Ben Webster or Gene Ammons whose playing is great, but whose sound is so layered, as to sound tiresome, at least to my ears, after a while.
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Yeah, it's all bloody complicated alright.
The floating pickup is almost a failed experiment in that it doesn't amplify the acoustic guitar; it simply offers an alternate sound. Its success is in the fact that it preserves the acoustic vibrations by not dampening things due to physical contact. But if you treat the acoustic archtop as an acoustic instrument and hone your technique accordingly, it will frustrate you immensely to not hear the same sound when amplified.
For all the fancy pants floaters out there - 1100, KA PAF - I have a low impedance (3 kOhm) Lawrence floater that does the best job at preserving the acoustic tone of its host. I'll have to make a recording and share it.
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While I don't disagree on anything said here what generally is not explored is "tolerance stacking"
Why is it that some PAF's sound amazing in some guitars but not EVERY guitar? Why do some 175D's (all of the same generation and construction) not thrill and others blow you away?
I have found that sometimes some models have very little variability, while others are all over the place. My 150DC and 175 (both HB equipped) come to mind. I haven't played a 150 I wouldn't own (if it was sound) and 175's made in the same year or even month varied a lot!
I believe that sometimes intangibles like wood type / thickness, grain structure or laminate density, pickups, neck / FB material and even pickup setup all align just right and make one better than another.
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