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  1. #26

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    Quote Originally Posted by ArchtopHeaven
    In the last video the rosewood sounded more like maple than his maple one .

    Can you not hear the additional top end on the maple in the 3rd video???


    It's a significant difference.

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  3. #27

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    Quote Originally Posted by mad dog
    I'm no scientist. ...
    [...must resist, must resist, cannot resist...]
    ...but you play one on TV?

  4. #28

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    Quote Originally Posted by vintagelove
    Can you not hear the additional top end on the maple in the 3rd video???


    It's a significant difference.
    Listen very closely to the beginning of the 3rd video. In the first two examples, the rosewood sounds brighter and more metallic than the maple. Two characteristics I usually associate with maple.

    Do you agree or disagree?

  5. #29

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    Quote Originally Posted by ArchtopHeaven
    the rosewood sounds brighter
    It most definitely does not sound brighter.

    I'm going to see if I can easily measure it on my iPad.

  6. #30

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    Archtopheaven: what is the point you're trying to make while indiscriminately discussing how there's variation within species and overlap between species?

  7. #31

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    Living in the land of music is like taking a permanent vacation to the land of hyperbole.

    I have had plenty of contradictory experiences, in regards to guitar and tone. However here is an experience that suggests to me that wood plays an impact to what tone color a particular guitar expresses.

    I owned an american made tele for many years. Played the hell out of that guitar, during my development from really good guitarist to semi-professional (or professional depending on the definition based on income sources).

    At one point I wanted to play a different guitar. I started to frequent many music stores trying out many different guitars. That went on for a few years. If I found a guitar I liked, I would come back with my tele and A/B the two. Finally in the city of Cotatie Ca, I happened upon a guitar that beat out my loved tele. I had limited funds at the point in my life. I traded in my tele for a fixed bridge PRS Swamp Ash Special.

    I would like to say, “I lived happy ever on”, but alas I can not. Maybe a year later, I started to really miss that tele. Guess what: a new search was began. Once again ever time I went to a music store, I would ask to play all the ash telecasters. The ash telecasters always were missing something. They were close but not like the tele I owned. I just thought, I had lost a excellent sounding guitar.

    One day at the local GC here, I was talking to sales person about my experience. I mentioned that my tele was a tobacco bust. He said those are alder not ask. I garb an alder tele and played it. I mentioned that the tone was almost there. (I think it was a little brighter). He said, “oh, I can fix that”. He took the tele adjusted the pick ups hight. There was the tone I had been looking for. I still have that tele.

    I was still on the fence about wood and tone issues, until I started watching the Warmoth vids. They are really well done.

    There is plenty of snake oil floating around out there. With out a doubt, ever new piece of gear will be proclaimed as the best ever. However, I am convinced that wood (even on an solid body guitar) makes a difference.

  8. #32

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    Quote Originally Posted by ArchtopHeaven
    Listen very closely to the beginning of the 3rd video. In the first two examples, the rosewood sounds brighter and more metallic than the maple. Two characteristics I usually associate with maple.

    Do you agree or disagree?

    Here is a screenshot of the two bass tracks run through an analyzer. You can see the difference in the high end here. Maple on the left, RW on the right. Look at the difference in the 1-2k area, and the drop-off above that.

    It has nothing to do with bias or subjective opinions, it's a measurable difference in the high end.



    Edit: See post below for the pic of the most fair measurement i could make
    Last edited by vintagelove; 01-26-2022 at 12:45 AM.

  9. #33

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    This is absolutely as fair as i could make it (slow rms, easier to read, no playing noises effecting the response). I wasted 45 minutes measuring what my ear heard immediately. There is a good couple db difference in the high end. Maple (left) is a brighter sounding fretboard wood than RW.
    Attached Images Attached Images Where Does The Tone Come From In An Electric Guitar?-screen-shot-2022-01-25-11-38-04-pm-png 

  10. #34

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    30+ years playing out, I've never met a single gigging musician, amateur or pro, that agrees with the views of that video, or generally similar views on the internet. If you actually take an instrument and play it with a band, in a room, with people in it and some volume, a oscilloscope's results won't be your first criteria of a guitars quality.

    Literally every musician I know, me included, considers wood to be the basis of what a guitar is. The instrument. Forming the sound of the guitar, the evenness, richness, color and frequency character. Always within the conforms of a particular design, strat, tele, semi, etc. Then come the electronics that pickup and amplify this sound. Like when mixing music, it's extremely frustrating and only partially doable to try to bring out something in the sound that's not already there. Wrong pieces of woods, the guitar will never sound good.

    I've tried cheap guitars with expensive pickups. I'm all in for working without worrying about expensive gear, and even more in for playing without even worrying what gear you're using, just play music. But, unfortunately, once you hear the difference...
    Last edited by Alter; 01-26-2022 at 06:47 AM.

  11. #35

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    Random thoughts on a fascinating topic:

    (1) I have seen all these Warmoth videos before and concluded for myself that they pretty much settle the issue as far as solidbodies are concerned: body wood matters, fretboard wood not so much (which may be different in bass guitars, don’t know), scale length being noticeable in sound but perhaps less than commonly believed. I don’t remember having seen shaft woods addressed in this way, given that with F-style guitars one is easily trapped into equating fretboard wood with (almost invariably maple) neck wood.

    (2) Me currently rotating between three T-style guitars (none of them in their original state and all varying widely in what the individual components would cost you): ash-rosewood, mahogany-maple, and alder-canary. I did not feel that replacing the Fender-scale piece maple neck with a Gibson-scale conversion neck featuring a THICK rosewood board made much of a difference to my ash. I do feel that the ash and mahogany bodies, in particular, are very distinctive just in accordance with the characteristics generally ascribed to them. If this is confirmation bias, both do one hell of a good job fostering it. Anyway, it is an empirically proven fact that venting one’s GAS on sundry Tele parts is much cheaper than buying archtops.

    (3) With regard to necks and fretboards in particular, I find it impossible to dissociate my ear from the haptic and visual experience of playing a neck. (Similarly, if I watch TV with the screen located on the right and the speakers on the left, it takes a minute or so and I’m convinced the voice is coming straight from the horse’s mouth). I also find it very difficult to calibrate my ears from one day to the next, so my preferred settings on guitars and amps will always vary slightly, and to the extent that this ever-present mild groping in the dark may be generalizable (which I cannot know for sure), I mistrust any blindfold tests, although I do suspect that, statistically speaking, a large-enough sample of blindfolded volunteers could probably tell body woods correctly apart.

    (4) As to the original question “Where does tone come from in an electric guitar?”, I remember a guy on Youtube trying to “debunk the myth” of vibrations felt from a guitar translating into electric sound, arguing that any vibration of the body equals energy lost between the nut and the bridge, implying less vibration of the strings. Don’t get me wrong, I do not have _faintest_ idea if this is true, but the point sort of made sense to me. Even though, perhaps, microphonic versus non-microphonic pickups may again enter the equation here, since I find the point brought up here repeatedly about potted versus non-potted pickups to be rather persuasive. Perhaps this could make a difference with regard to body vibrations as a function of energy dissipating beyond the nut and bridge being picked up after all? In solidbodies, that is.

    But I really have NO IDEA.

  12. #36

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    I do not understand the screenshot of the two bass tracks run through an analyzer, but I am sure that, if the timber did not matter, most guitars would be made of Douglas fir – like sixty percent of North American window frames. In New Zealand, some amateur luthiers make guitars with recycled timbers from native conifers like kauri or rimu; it is all well-intentioned but the guitars sound like porridge.

  13. #37

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    Quote Originally Posted by palindrome
    Random thoughts on a fascinating topic:

    (1) I have seen all these Warmoth videos before and concluded for myself that they pretty much settle the issue as far as solidbodies are concerned: body wood matters, fretboard wood not so much (which may be different in bass guitars, don’t know), scale length being noticeable in sound but perhaps less than commonly believed. I don’t remember having seen shaft woods addressed in this way, given that with F-style guitars one is easily trapped into equating fretboard wood with (almost invariably maple) neck wood.

    (2) Me currently rotating between three T-style guitars (none of them in their original state and all varying widely in what the individual components would cost you): ash-rosewood, mahogany-maple, and alder-canary. I did not feel that replacing the Fender-scale piece maple neck with a Gibson-scale conversion neck featuring a THICK rosewood board made much of a difference to my ash. I do feel that the ash and mahogany bodies, in particular, are very distinctive just in accordance with the characteristics generally ascribed to them. If this is confirmation bias, both do one hell of a good job fostering it. Anyway, it is an empirically proven fact that venting one’s GAS on sundry Tele parts is much cheaper than buying archtops.

    (3) With regard to necks and fretboards in particular, I find it impossible to dissociate my ear from the haptic and visual experience of playing a neck. (Similarly, if I watch TV with the screen located on the right and the speakers on the left, it takes a minute or so and I’m convinced the voice is coming straight from the horse’s mouth). I also find it very difficult to calibrate my ears from one day to the next, so my preferred settings on guitars and amps will always vary slightly, and to the extent that this ever-present mild groping in the dark may be generalizable (which I cannot know for sure), I mistrust any blindfold tests, although I do suspect that, statistically speaking, a large-enough sample of blindfolded volunteers could probably tell body woods correctly apart.

    (4) As to the original question “Where does tone come from in an electric guitar?”, I remember a guy on Youtube trying to “debunk the myth” of vibrations felt from a guitar translating into electric sound, arguing that any vibration of the body equals energy lost between the nut and the bridge, implying less vibration of the strings. Don’t get me wrong, I do not have _faintest_ idea if this is true, but the point sort of made sense to me. Even though, perhaps, microphonic versus non-microphonic pickups may again enter the equation here, since I find the point brought up here repeatedly about potted versus non-potted pickups to be rather persuasive. Perhaps this could make a difference with regard to body vibrations as a function of energy dissipating beyond the nut and bridge being picked up after all? In solidbodies, that is.

    But I really have NO IDEA.
    In my 45 years of handling (playing + repairing/building) electric guitars of every type I have experienced this :

    - any piece of wood (even and also from the same type) has a different sonic identity and this , in combination with
    a second or third piece of wood (screwed or glued together) makes any prediction or generalisation very questionable. A crap shoot in many cases....
    - I could never make an acoustically "lame" sounding solid/semihollowbody guitar into a "good/alive" sounding electric guitar. No change in pickups, pots or such made a distinct difference.
    Since I do not play with much gain/distortion I cannot comment on the sound that a "lame" LesPaul/Strat/Tele could put out when plugged into a hot-rodded Marshall ...
    - One very noticeable difference can be heard and felt between a neck shaft of quarter-sawn and one of flat-sawn maple. A flat-sawn piece is less stiff and absorbs more energy.
    - On a long-scale bass neck these aspects are magnified as is the effect of the fingerboard wood and it's size/depth.
    - I've built several T-type guitars out of parts from various sources and while one was darker/brighter sounding than the other but the vibration felt in the body was never congruent with a lack of or an abundance of sustain. It is my impression that when I feel little or no vibration in the body then much energy is being absorbed.
    - I've noticed an increase in sustain and resonance when I swapped out the Fender-branded traditional bridge on my Tele against a Mastery bridge. The mechanical connection of the string onto the body is therefor an important factor. Likewise the response and sustain is affected when a guitar is equipped with a Bigsby tailpiece. Old news , just as : old wood behaves differently than new wood, baked maple/spruce/alder vs. air-dried etc. ......

    To make any really objective statement a double-blind test arrangement would probably be best. But that would spoil any discussion and take away the mystery of it all ....

  14. #38

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    All I know is the SD59 humbucker I installed in my Epiphone Sheraton did not sound great: too much mid scoop (all maple guitar). I installed it in my Ibanez AF55 and in that guitar it sounded nice. Same circuit with 500k pots and .022uf caps. The only difference was the guitar……

  15. #39

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    The sum of the system of parts of the guitar sympathetically affects how the strings vibrate and what frequencies are produced and the pickups read this. There is probably also some slight microphonic influence on the pickups directly from the acoustic sound of the guitar itself imo.

  16. #40

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    This is the never ending thread. It may as well have started in the 1950s. Hell, it could have started in the middle ages or even earlier various instruments.

    Spectral analysis tells an important part of the story. Human perception and pleasure doesn't necessarily correlate. So we could have machines and computers to determine the acoustic features. Those graphs could be posted. We could argue about technical issues as engineers and physicists will. Standards could be agreed on. In a few decades we might have an international policy on acoustic analysis. That would be a step forward.

    That would leave the dissent in the realm of subjectivity about aesthetics.
    Last edited by Marty Grass; 01-26-2022 at 01:45 PM.

  17. #41

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    Of course the wood matters in solid body electric guitar tone.
    Even solid bodies have an acoustic tone which gets transmitted through the pickups. I'll ask a couple questions.

    When the same pickup is installed in a d28 and a d18 acoustic guitar, can you hear a difference in tone when amplified?

    Can you hear the difference in tone between rosewood and mahogany in a Martin dreadnought with the same bracing pattern when played acoustically?

    If yes, why do you think you would only hear it with acoustics and not electrics?

    If you place paf style humbuckers in a strat, will it sound like a Les Paul?

    If you place 3 strat single coils in a Les Paul, do you think it will sound like a strat?

  18. #42

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    In my mind there is no question that body wood influences the electric tone. But that doesn't mean one guitar or type of wood sounds better than the other. There are infinitely many ways a guitar can sound and feel great. They just don't all sound the same when they have the same pickup even if the pickup is adjusted carefully. It amazes me that an experienced musician can think that.

    When it comes to solid body electrics, expensive also doesn't mean better sounding wood. Wood selection for tonal properties might be a factor for luthier made or custom shop guitars (which may or may not suit your tonal expectations), but factory guitars, American or Chinese or Mexican, are all over the place. Again, that doesn't mean they don't sound good. There just isn't a predictable quality about how they sound outside of the broad general characteristics of the wood species. I've had American Fenders but my favorite sounding Fender is a Mexican Tele. There is something that I like very much about it's acoustic sound which directly influences it's electric tone (even after I changed it's neck).

  19. #43

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    I don't know exactly where I come down on this question. My own experience is that one can get remarkably similar sounds out of very dissimilar guitars (if that's your goal), and you can get remarkably dissimilar sounds out of very similar guitars (if that's your goal). All that said, I think the video in the original post fairly convincingly demonstrates that you can get a crunchy bridge pickup tele sound out of just strings and a pickup and that wood might not make a lot of difference with this sort of sound. But I think a big defect in this experiment is that it only tests the bridge pickup sound (and an overdriven one, at that). There's just not that much difference between ANY two SC bridge pickups plugged into a very colored, overdriven amp. Through some signal chains there isn't even much difference between a humbucker and a SC.

  20. #44

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    My take on it is that EVERYTHING on a guitar affects the tone...and they all affect it less than you think.

  21. #45

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    You can make any electric guitar sound "similar" to a Stratocaster with the right pickups in the sense that every dreadnought acoustic guitar sound "similar" and sound like dreadnought guitars. But they are far from sounding the same.

  22. #46
    OP here. Thanks, everyone, for your replies -- they've helped me clarify my thinking, which was muddled and poorly expressed in my original post.

    Jeff's statement, "My take on it is that EVERYTHING on a guitar affects the tone...and they all affect it less than you think," gets at the questions I'm grappling with. Which components of an electric guitar have the most effect on its tone? And how much "bang for the buck" will each component deliver?

    As a thought experiment, let's say you have a choice between two guitars. Both of them look good, feel good, have a reputable logo on the headstock, and have been professionally set up. The price is the same for each. The differences are as follows. Guitar 1: Premium tone woods in body and neck; mediocre electronics. Guitar 2: Mediocre or unknown tone woods; premium electronics.

    Now, two more conditions: You don't get to play the guitar before buying. And after you've bought it, you can't modify it.

    Which one would you buy? (Remember, it's just a thought experiment, so please pretend that the conditions are fixed and there are only two guitars to choose from.)

  23. #47

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    Quote Originally Posted by Marty Grass
    By request:

    Partagas Black Label - mmmm! mmmm! mmm! - mighty fine smokes! I've got some in my humidors that I've had for ten years. They will be ready to smoke soon. If I kept them for another ten, the subject of this thread will still be unresolved. I bet those original Partagas Blue and Gold boxes sound good, too!
    Last edited by citizenk74; 01-26-2022 at 03:53 PM.

  24. #48

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    Quote Originally Posted by raymoan
    OP here. Thanks, everyone, for your replies -- they've helped me clarify my thinking, which was muddled and poorly expressed in my original post.

    Jeff's statement, "My take on it is that EVERYTHING on a guitar affects the tone...and they all affect it less than you think," gets at the questions I'm grappling with. Which components of an electric guitar have the most effect on its tone? And how much "bang for the buck" will each component deliver?

    As a thought experiment, let's say you have a choice between two guitars. Both of them look good, feel good, have a reputable logo on the headstock, and have been professionally set up. The price is the same for each. The differences are as follows. Guitar 1: Premium tone woods in body and neck; mediocre electronics. Guitar 2: Mediocre or unknown tone woods; premium electronics.

    Now, two more conditions: You don't get to play the guitar before buying. And after you've bought it, you can't modify it.

    Which one would you buy? (Remember, it's just a thought experiment, so please pretend that the conditions are fixed and there are only two guitars to choose from.)
    For a solid body, I'd go with the "better" electronics (understanding of course, there's objective better and subjective better)

    I think the things that make the most difference--after the player themselves, are string type and gauge, pick, and pickups. And yes, I think the two most inexpensive things, pick and strings, probably have the most direct impact on sound.

  25. #49

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    Electronics matter more, and if the hardware and setup is good then you're good to go. If it has some standard wood, that's what I would choose.

    Say you take a bullet strat and a upper tier strat and swap pickguards. The bullet strat will probably get a better amplified tone although it will still have shortcomings primarily from its shoddy hardware. The effect of the wood would be behind 1st the electronics, and 2nd the hardware.

  26. #50

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    Quote Originally Posted by raymoan
    OP here. Thanks, everyone, for your replies -- they've helped me clarify my thinking, which was muddled and poorly expressed in my original post.

    Jeff's statement, "My take on it is that EVERYTHING on a guitar affects the tone...and they all affect it less than you think," gets at the questions I'm grappling with. Which components of an electric guitar have the most effect on its tone? And how much "bang for the buck" will each component deliver?

    As a thought experiment, let's say you have a choice between two guitars. Both of them look good, feel good, have a reputable logo on the headstock, and have been professionally set up. The price is the same for each. The differences are as follows. Guitar 1: Premium tone woods in body and neck; mediocre electronics. Guitar 2: Mediocre or unknown tone woods; premium electronics.

    Now, two more conditions: You don't get to play the guitar before buying. And after you've bought it, you can't modify it.

    Which one would you buy? (Remember, it's just a thought experiment, so please pretend that the conditions are fixed and there are only two guitars to choose from.)
    Hello, it's kind of a flawed question though, because for 100 bucks, you can put a great sounding pickup in that premium wood body, and you're all set. Furthermore, it's not really a question of better or worse, just different, and very much depends on the desire of the player. "Premium wood" probably comes down to visual appeal rather that sound,

    The pickups are probably the single biggest factor, scale length is pretty important too.