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Hello all,
First post here; I believe I am beating a dead horse with this question, but I've been researching this for a while and am constantly ending up with conflicting information.
When amplifying a guitar, what effect does the construction of the guitar itself have on the resulting sound that comes out of the amplifier?
More specifically, the effect of a hollow body, semi-hollow, or solid body.
From what I've gathered, the components that truly dictate your sound when amplified are your pickups and amplifier. I realize that the strings will have an effect (won't make that friction noise if you use flatwound instead of roundwound), and the guitar as well (a string may vibrate for longer due to construction/materials of the guitar), but neither of these seem to have any major impact of the final sound, since that is generated by the magnetic interference of the string and pickup.
Despite this, it seems universal that jazz players of all sorts use hollow bodies of some variation, and if it's a solid body, it's a specific type (such as a Les Paul). I've also read posts (on here included) that there is a specific tone that you get with hollow and semi-hollow bodies that you can't get with solid bodies.
So I'm wondering how much of that has to do with the guitar itself. Do people primarily use hollow bodies because of tradition? Are hollow bodies, and solid bodies like Les Pauls, suggested because they come with specific pickups on them? Can't I take out the pickups from a hollow body, stick them on a shredder, and achieve a very similar tone, assuming the rest of my equipment was the same? Does the acoustics of a hollow body come into play because it can be heard when playing a gig, despite being amplified?
Ultimately, my goal is to obtain something akin to an almost harp-like sound, where there isn't any noticeable attack (such as the tinny, sharp twinge when a string is plucked heavily on an acoustic, or the usual amplified sound of most solid bodies, which seem very bright and heavy on attack). The typical classical jazz sound seems to excel at avoiding this; I believe Wes Montgomery is a good example of this on his mellow songs (please correct me otherwise). I can't help but wonder if there's something about hollow bodies that assist in this, or if it's all in the pickup.
Thanks in advance.
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10-26-2016 01:43 PM
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There's no question in my mind that an amplified hollow body sounds different from a solid body. Here are some things to consider:
1. The influence of the body construction and material on how the strings vibrate. The body vibrates too, and that vibration must necessarily feed back into the strings.
2. The vibration of the body will feed into the pickups themselves as well. The pickups will move. Even a floating pickup has to be attached to *something* and that something will vibrate.
Having said that...
There's a video in one of the Telecaster threads. A blind test of a Telecaster against an archtop. The tones are VERY close. And I don't think it's even close to "universal" that jazz players use hollowbodies. They may be the majority, but there are plenty of solid body players.Despite this, it seems universal that jazz players of all sorts use hollow bodies of some variation, and if it's a solid body, it's a specific type (such as a Les Paul). I've also read posts (on here included) that there is a specific tone that you get with hollow and semi-hollow bodies that you can't get with solid bodies.
What it's hard to get with solid bodied guitars is the "thunk" of an archtop. There's a very strong transient attack that you get with archtops that you don't get so much with other types of guitars. Some people really like that. Myself, I'm not so crazy about it. I prefer the smoother attack of a semi- or solid body.
I do think that, amplified, there is less of a difference between body types than one might think, and that these differences lessen as the overall level of amplification increases as well (you'll hear/feel the "thunk" less in a fully electric setting with a PA, etc, than you will if the guitar is the only amplified instrument). But I don't think too many people would agree either the proposition that there's NO difference at all, or that you can't get a decent jazz tone with nearly any type of guitar.
Now, many of the solid bodied guitars on the market today, are specifically designed for high-gain applications. They have very hot pickups and are constructed with thin strings and a very trebly tone in mind. These are probably more difficult to get a good jazz tone out of than older styles like the Tele, the LP, and the like.
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I have played electric guitar in one form or fashion for 50 years now, since I was a pre-teen. I have played everything from a classical guitar with a DeArmond contact pickup to the usual array of solid-body guitars (Gibsons, Guilds, Ibanezes, Fenders, Danelectros, etc.) In between, I have played acoustic-electric flattop and archtop guitars, made with laminated and solid (carved) bodies. Some had set-in pickups, some had suspended pickups.
THEY ALL SOUND DIFFERENT! To be sure, you can adjust guitars to mimic one another. One trick that I discovered early on (as did Keith Richard): an acoustic guitar recorded into a small cassette recorder--defeating its ALC--can sound like a BIG electric guitar. A Telecaster can sound like an archtop guitar, suitably adjusted. Some archtops can sound "solid-body-ish."
All in all, though, a carved-body archtop with a suspended pickup will sound quite a bit different from a solid-body guitar. The solid-body will principally reproduce the strings/pickup sound, whereas the archtop will get a good bit of interaction with the body/neck/pickup/strings/whatever. My archtop/suspended pickup sounds very close to being an amplified version of the guitar itself--a louder version of the carved-body acoustic guitar. By comparison, my set-pickup, carved-body archtop gets much less interaction between the body/neck/pickups/strings...it is closer to being an electric guitar--though still audibly an archtop electric guitar. My Stratocaster is audibly a Stratocaster. My old Les Paul was exactly that. My ES-335 was audibly a semi-acoustic guitar--pickups and strings on a plank with hollow chambers. It was full sounding, but did not sound much at all like my carved-body archtops.
Look around and try some different guitars. Electrics are definitely not all the same. The definitely ARE all fun.
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This is an interesting question and observation. I am surely not qualified to answer in any technical way. However, I will say that 99.99% of my playing is in my living room. The sound that I like is a combination of the acoustic properties with a slightly amplified tone. That sound is achieved most effectively with an arch top.
On the rare occasion that I play at a volume that would over take any acoustic sound, I'm sure that a semi or solid body would sound just as out of tune and produce the same wrong notes on the wrong beats. I'm sure there would still be a smile on my face though.
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The pickup also has some microphonic properties in addition to detecting string motion. These properties are limited, of course, but you can tap the pickup with your fingernail and hear it through the amp. So it's possible that the pickup catches some of the actual acoustic sound of the hollow body guitar and mixes it with the dominant magnetic pickup sound as well. It might be small, but it likely makes a difference.
Also, the hollow body resonates back with the string through the bridge and nut, and creates a kind of enriching interference with the basic vibration of the string, and that could have an effect on the sound.
All of which is speculative, but I do know I've installed the very same pickup on 3 different guitars, all hollow bodies of various types, and each one sounded very different when amplified.
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For the harp like sound you might try a nylon string acoustic electric. A compressor can also help with the transient attack spike if you don't like that sound.
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Effect on hollow bodies on amplification : FEEDBACK !
Hollow bodies and solid bodies don't sound the same amplified because they don't have the same pick-ups !
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Seriously (!?!), I'm thinking about this kind of experience :
Take an amp (whatever you find/have)
Take two guitars of different construction but WITH THE SAME PICK-UPS
A/B test. You, the player, with same fingers, picks and so and so.
You'll see (hear) the difference.
As I write, I wonder whether this can be easily achieved ? With Classic '57 Gibson, but it's so complicated now with equipment provided by Gibson on their differnet millesime guitars. With P90 ?
Food for thought ?
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I've done this with three guitars: my Soloway plank and a pair of custom Heritage archtops, one with an all maple body and one withe mahogany/spruce. All three had the same pickup (a DiMarzio 36th Anniversary PAF), the same scale length (25.5"), the same strings (TI Swing tries 12's with a 53 for the bottom string) and the same C#/Db tuning. All three guitars sounded different and the plank sounded VERY different.
Originally Posted by 339 in june
Effect on hollow bodies on amplification : FEEDBACK !
Hollow bodies and solid bodies don't sound the same amplified because they don't have the same pick-ups !
²
Seriously (!?!), I'm thinking about this kind of experience :
Take an amp (whatever you find/have)
Take two guitars of different construction but WITH THE SAME PICK-UPS
A/B test. You, the player, with same fingers, picks and so and so.
You'll see (hear) the difference.
As I write, I wonder whether this can be easily achieved ? With Classic '57 Gibson, but it's so complicated now with equipment provided by Gibson on their differnet millesime guitars. With P90 ?
Food for thought ?
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I agree with your conclusion that pickups and amplifier are the best determination of sound, but you could add string gauge and string tension (set up) to the equation.
When I was in the jazz ensemble in college, a bunch of rock guitarist students would come and try to take away my seat. They'd bring in their Teles, Les Pauls, Strats, SG's, 335s and 355s and crank up and drown out the whole band.
I'd play my Barney Kessel Custom and blend in more musically with the band, and keep my seat.
That led me to believe you couldn't play jazz on any of those guitars.
While still in college, I got a heavy gig working in a local theater backing up all the touring pop artists of the time.
No matter who came along; Sister Sledge, Melba Moore, Eddie Fisher, Jerry Vale, Al Martino, etc... My BK could do the gig well enough to satisfy the contractor.
Sometimes, there would be another guitarist on the gig, and they would always bring a Les Paul or Fender guitar, but the sound wasn't appropriate for the older style singers.
When I did the Mitzi Gaynor gig, the other guitarist was a heavy studio player, who toured with some very big folk-rock artists. He brought his black Les Paul, and while it really cut through the large band, it just didn't sound right on the swing oriented numbers.
On one tune, the first guitar was required to play fill ins through the whole tune. Mr. Black Les Paul played his pseudo-jazz licks, but the pianist/conductor embarrassed him, and yelled out "NO!" Then he pointed at me and told me to play the first guitar part. The conductor smiled, and said, "Now that's the way it's supposed to sound!"
Again, I figured it was mostly the BK that sounded more stylistically appropriate.
i bought the BK with a repaired cracked headstock, and it started giving me tuning problems. Then, the top started to sink down, and I had to get rid of it. How I got rid of it is a whole story in itself, but I won't get into that yet.
A Hendrix/Clapton/Garcia type player friend of mine called me up, knowing that I needed a new guitar.
He said, "Man, you gotta check out this Hondo Strat copy at this music store. It's got a magic pickup that sounds just like your jazz guitar. I'm not even gonna tell you which one it is; you'll pick it out." His mind was constantly altered, but like Tag, he knew tone!
So I go to the store, and there's a shitload of Hondo strats, all selling for about $90 new. I brought my new, orange Roland Cube, and started going through each one. About five Hondos in, I found it! The magic pickup!
It had a perfect jazz sound. I threw the guy $90, and took it home in a cardboard case.
This led me to the conclusion that it wasn't the fact that all those other guys were playing rock guitars; it was that they didn't have a good mid-range neck pickup, a good jazz amp, and the right set up on their guitars.
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What they said is all true... dang windbags :-)
Last edited by GNAPPI; 10-26-2016 at 06:39 PM.
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Oh, man, those Hondos were crap! Hondos were big about the time I started playing - 1980-ish. They were affordable and looked like the big name guitars, so a lot of kids bought 'em. About six months in, they would start falling apart. A kid down the street had a Hondo LP, and the first thing that started to go was the tuners. The nuts wouldn't stay on and the pegs would start wobbling around in the holes. Then the cable jack came loose. Then the pickups started shifting around. Originally Posted by sgcim
My first electric was a POS strat copy, but at least it stayed together. Didn't stay in tune, but that's another story.
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One interesting aspect of hollow helping in tone is in high gain distortion settings. The added resonance can help definition. I noticed at Rush concerts that Alex Lifeson's swirling overdriven chord work was always more distinct when playing his old ES-355 or Howard Roberts Fusion.
Allan Holdsworth did a lot of pioneering in solid bodies using light wood like bass wood and routing in resonance chambers to get the desired tone for his legato single note work. It isn't just the clean end of guitar tones that show how construction affects sound.
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Yeah, My Hondo lasted me about five years before the 'magic pickup' died. I kind of laugh about it, because I used it on a record I was a sideman on that got reviewed in Downbeat. Originally Posted by Boston Joe
One guy I knew did a clinic for Hondo, and he said he had to go through about 20 of them before he could find one that had good intonation.
It's rotting away in one of my closets now, the poor thing...
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In my experience what you can't get with a solid body is the attack envelope on the note, the specific attack/decay envelope. You can get kinda close, if you play with a really light touch, but then you have to always play with a really light touch. In my opinion, they don't feel the same--a solid body doesn't react to touch the same way. I have a 1977 Guild Artist Award, a big acoustic archtop with a great sound. So I know what they are supposed to sound like.
It's similar to the difference between electric bass and upright bass. You can never get the initial "thunk" on an electric bass unless you damp the strings (fender used a piece of foam as a mute) and then you lose the nice long decay of an upright bass.
I did a series of experiments with hollow body telecasters--I made three guitars, each with a hollowed out body and a roughly 1/4 inch thick flat wooden top. The tele bridge plate screws into the top, and there's a brace under it to hold the screws. I added two parallel braces like on an archtop. No F holes.
My goal was to get that attack envelope in the form of a tele, and I feel like it was entirely successful. It feels much more like playing the Guild, but with the comfort and convenience of a tele. It looks exactly like a telecaster, but it has a slightly damped quality to the attack, without sacrificing too much of the note's sustain. It works I think because it's a thick top. Even though there's no F holes, it's loud enough so that I don't play it when my family is sleeping upstairs
I did a thread about it at the TDPRI--the final thread is at this link, and it includes links to the earlier experiments and some sound clips. I've since changed the pickups to Bill Lawrence microcoils. later today I'll see if I can post some clips
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This is great. Did you try mixing a piezo signal with a magnetic signal on a solid body electric guitar ? Godin guitars, Parker Fly guitars and some Fender Teles had this combo. Godin LGX-SA can give you three different signals. Originally Posted by PB+J
Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk
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Originally Posted by medblues
I thought about it briefly. It's not trivial--the circuit for blending piezo and magnetic is surprisingly tricky. I'd need an onboard preamp, and a battery, and a different set of piezo bridge saddles, and a different knob arrangement, and then truth be told I've never like the sound of piezo pickups very much. The tele hits the sweet spot for me in terms of simplicity and versatility.
I'm working on a bass built the same way, and I'm thinking about putting a contact mic on the inside of the soundboard, and then having two output jacks, one for the mag pickup and one for the contact mic. I used a schertler dyn-b pickup for years on my upright bass and liked it pretty well
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Thank you all for the replies; one of the things I never considered was what effect the vibration of the guitar itself would have on the pickup. I suppose that the characteristics of a wood (or combination thereof) and how a guitar is constructed really has an effect on how it can resonate with certain frequencies (or just vibrate in general), and cause the pickup to vibrate along with it, shifting the magnetic field it is generating and changing the way the string will interact with that field as a result. Just as well, the effect of how the vibration of the guitar will interact with the strings.
Looking over the posts, I'm led to the conclusion that the effect described above can impart a certain characteristic upon a guitar, even when electrically amplified, and semi-hollow and hollow bodies are likely more susceptible to it (at lower volumes) than a solid body may be, making those characteristics more readily apparent. However, this characteristic (or maybe tone would be the appropriate word here) is not the signature of jazz; it's rather the playing style, the song itself, and the setup used for amplification that plays major roles in achieving this.
That being said, I can see now that going for a hollow or semi-hollow is not something that is done simply out of tradition, but rather because the construction, technique, and materials used to build these types of guitars result in a finished product that is very similar to the shape and materials of the guitars used by older jazz artists, imparting those same characteristics and allowing modern day guitarists to achieve a similar tone.
Does this seem about right? I can't help but feel like I'm missing something else, or that I'm making wrong assumptions somewhere along the line. And the big question, is this tone truly necessary for something like classic jazz?
(I suppose I answered my own question already with, "not really".)
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I think everybody would agree jazz can be played on anything, and a good jazz tone isn't one single thing, and people don't even agree on what constitutes jazz.
For me, the key thing is the "swing" feel. I like that feel. I can get it much more easily with a guitar that has some of that acoustic archtop attack.
I'm mostly a bass player, and when I first switched to upright bass it was a revelation: the swing feel was suddenly easy to pull off! The combination of a strong "thunk" on the front of the note combined with a longer decay makes for that combination of relaxed and urgent that you want in a swing feel. That's what I like about an archtop acoustic guitar. I don't get the feeling from a flatop acoustic as much, although there's a great kind of swing feel to gypsy jazz and some bluegrass, and selmer guitars have a very distinctive snap on the note.
It's necessary for classic jazz, in my opinion, but of course classic jazz isn't the only kind of jazz
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Wes played with his thumb which probably softens the attack. I play with my thumb because I am a terrible player and don't want people to hear me practicing! I really like the sound though so I have no motivation to change. I have an old squire strat with flat wound strings, and when played with the thumb using only the neck pickup I think it sounds great. The tone is typical jazz, as close to Wes' as I can muster. The amp I use seems to have as much influence as anything else too. The big hollowbodies don't half look good though, I love them, but for me they are an indulgence.
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I just want to add that microphonics are definitely a thing with pickups. Older single coil pickups especially. You can actually yell into the pickup and hear your voice amplified. If you would want a more "acoustic" tone out of you amplified archtop a single coil unpotted pickup would be the choice (possibly scatterwound). Magnet type, strength and height from the strings also contribute.
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In the end, the room you're playing in is the final arbiter of how you sound. Recently, I've played in a country club, a catering hall, a band rehearsal room, and a friend's living room. The same amp/guitar sounded completely different in each room.
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In the end it is a matter of physics.
When you pluck a string, some of the energy you applied to the string is transferred to the guitar (and back, that is called a "resonant circuit" or "oscillating circuit" in physics). The more you hear the sound acoustically / in the room, the more energy has been removed from the string / guitar combination. As a result, the vibration has less amplitude (read: the sound gets quieter).
That's why acoustic guitars, including arch tops and most stringed instruments, have this short, loud attack followed by a quick decay in volume, which makes their sound so typical*. Solid body guitars, on the other hand, vibrate much more evenly and the sound decays more slowly and therefore these have more sustain.
The first mentioned is - and this is little more than a habit - associated with the typical "jazz guitar sound", the latter is more liked by guitarists who play also or mainly with distortion.
What you prefer personally is simply a matter of taste.
*To circumvent this problem - being able to play acoustically loud AND with sustain - some clever people have invented the violin bow for stringed instruments a couple of centuries ago :-)Last edited by DonEsteban; 10-29-2016 at 06:20 AM. Reason: typos
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I think that the harp kinda sound is mainly achieved by a plucking technique. Of course weak nylon strings help too, but after that You just have to use Your fingers right. I don't know how, but i recall that I've seen some classic guitar player making this.
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I think there's elements of both in there. I mean if you're going to pay what an L-5 costs, I don't think either tradition or tone would be enough to justify the price. But the combination of the two might be. (For me, nothing justifies that kind of price, but I don't have much money to throw around anyway.) Feel plays a role too. Originally Posted by Enda
Is the tone necessary for "classic jazz?" I guess that depends on what you mean by "classic". It's going to be hard to sound like Charlie Christian on a Telecaster, but I think Ed Bickert's sound is pretty classic. Maybe that's just me. On the other hand, Metheney uses archtops and has a very modern sound. I think it's a lot more than gear that determines how "classic" something sounds.
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If you put on bigger strings and hit them hard, you're going to hear a much clearer difference between hollow and solid. IME.
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