Maple neck VS. mahogony neck?

[Archie]

Continuing on unscientific opinions...

Anybody else think a mahogany neck "warms up" faster and retains body heat longer than maple?

Just leave it resting against a radiator.

Wont play very well but will be nice an toasty :-)

[Para]

What about a fretless guitar?

[jzucker]

I totally disagree. If you can compensate with other parts of your signal chain than you could make a les paul or 335 sound like a 175 or an L5. The only way to really measure it is with a scope and even then the difference is meaningless because we're talking about an organic material. No two guitars will sound the same even if they are made from the same woods. Unless you made 2 guitars from the exact same billet and using the exact same pickups from the same batch , etc, etc.

And frankly, if you need to eq them to make them sound similar...Well then they obvious don't sound the same!

But a) you actually don't know for sure that you do hear the difference; knowing that you're playing two different instruments causes your mind to superimpose differences in sound whether or not they're really there. That's the point of well-controlled double-blind experiments. They test the question "if someone doesn't know instruments with different attributes are being played, does he or does he not hear differences in the instruments' sounds?" Handing a person two different guitars and telling him "Ok play these, and tell us what differences you perceive" does not test the hypothesis that changing an attribute changes the tone. You simply can't remove the psycho-acoustic and cognitive biases from the test, no matter how golden your ears are. This is something that has been validated countless times in peer-reviewed research.

b) even if there ARE differences, you can generally compensate for those difference (at least with an electric guitar) via the signal chain. So, while there may be differences between, say, a maple and a mahogany neck, ceteris parabus, you can make some of those cetera non-parabus to make either sound the way you want it to sound. That seems to work for an awful lot of people.

John

[339 in june]

What about a fretless guitar?

Like this one ?
Details of Excalibur Surfreter Special - Vigier

[John A.]

I totally disagree. If you can compensate with other parts of your signal chain than you could make a les paul or 335 sound like a 175 or an L5. The only way to really measure it is with a scope and even then the difference is meaningless because we're talking about an organic material. No two guitars will sound the same even if they are made from the same woods. Unless you made 2 guitars from the exact same billet and using the exact same pickups from the same batch , etc, etc.

And frankly, if you need to eq them to make them sound similar...Well then they obvious don't sound the same!

So you're agreeing with the first part about how it's impossible to be really sure you hear the difference between two neck materials without controlled, blind tests

Ok, to the second part, my premise is that we're talking about guitars that are identical except for, say, the fingerboard or neck material. If all else truly is equal, that's a really subtle difference, and many people will be able to get "their" sound out of either. 175's are kind of special case because of the pick-up position, so it's hard to get a LP or a 335 to sound like one. But certainly you can get a Les Paul Standard, Les Paul Custom, 335, or 355 all to sound like each other. Lots of people do.

John

[pingu]

mahog feels and sounds nice and warm to me

subjectively anyway !