PDA

View Full Version : Guitar MYTHBUSTING



deeaa
February 24th, 2012, 08:09 AM
Well,

I had some time to kill so I went ahead and did my own 'mythbusting' thingy...I recorded a bunch of guitars, all more or less totally different, first unamplified, and then amplified with a straight cable to amp, low gain, to see if there are differences, which I expected there to be not much...

The truth is...there are differences but they leave me completely perplexed. Everything went totally the other way I would have expected. There were a couple of clear differences, but they were pretty much exactly the opposite what I had expected. The 'dark' guitar I had was pretty much the brightest on recording, etc. And I can't for the life of me detect the pickup type, even whether it is active or passive...but then there were some surprising differences that I had not expected too.

This whole thing really is a quagmire...and it just further reinforces my beliefs, and the most this: easily the greatest differences in the sound are achieved not by changing the guitar type very drastically (and I do mean drastically like from a passive Telecaster to an active SG) but simply moving your picking position 1,5" in either direction. THAT gave wayyyy more difference in how the sound recorded, than the change in guitars.

I regret I can't do a very scientific approach where each guitar would be perfectly portrayed and the changes in picking position effect demonstrated, so this is just a peek to what I myself gained from the experiment...all I can say is whoa. I always did claim the body woods etc. make little differences, but now I'm still left awestruck simply about the fact that what little differences there are, are very much the opposite of what I expected! I need to think about this long and hard.

Here is my video on the tests...15 minutes or so...go ahead and try to make sense of it. The guitars used are a strat, a tele, an sg, and two are my own 'builds' including the recent aluminum-top guitar.
I won't even ask anyone to guess which is which because it is indeed quite impossible...but any guesses welcome. Unamplified ones are in same order always from 1 to 7 and then A to G for amplified sounds, but A is not (necessarily) 1 etc.but the order is different for those two and totally random.


http://youtu.be/Z8jmJmlnWkc

R_of_G
February 24th, 2012, 09:01 AM
... easily the greatest differences in the sound are achieved not by changing the guitar type very drastically (and I do mean drastically like from a passive Telecaster to an active SG) but simply moving your picking position 1,5" in either direction. THAT gave wayyyy more difference in how the sound recorded, than the change in guitars.

It's part of the "tone is in the hands" view. Where you pick, how you pick, all of these affect tone more dramatically than the type of guitar.

Monkus
February 24th, 2012, 08:42 PM
nice test deeaa, now if we can coax the science guys to chime in... :poke

deeaa
February 25th, 2012, 02:50 PM
Not a lot of comments?

I think I've come to some ideas about all this now.

It seems to me a great conflict that while I can detect and feel great differences between guitars when I play them, it seems pretty much that they can sound very very similar when recorded *with a set playing position* and also when playing pretty basic notes and chords.

Now, playing style etc. obviously makes a huge difference...but the playing style *is* greatly influenced by how the guitar sounds and feels, and how it's positioned when you play it, lots of things.

In 'real life', whereas a Gibson and a Strat may sound very similar if both are played strictly with same style...every player knows you can't get the strat sound with a gibson.
You would use neck or several pickups with a strat, and you'd reinforce its innate sound with your playing style, so to say, coax out the properties it lends to well, and it'll sound like only a strat can. A positive cycle that leads to it sounding entirely different.

So it could be deducted that if you took a Gibson and made it sit the same in playing position and gave it strat pickups...you'd play it like a strat and it would largely sound like one too. The differences in structures are so small that if you don't adjust the playing style and *what* you play according to it, they are pretty much lost in the wash. That would also explain why a beginner can sound equally bad with any guitar - he or she has no idea yet how to get the instrument's true sound out.

It's like...you can drive at 90mph just as well in a Toyota or a Ferrari, no problem. It's only when you take the instrument to the zone it works best in that the small details come to play.

Same with all sub-differences, so to speak. I can't tell by these which ones are done with passive, which active pups, but in real life there is a big difference in their performance.
It tells me the sonic differences between pickups can indeed be very small if taken strictly but same applies as above - it's only when taking it to the right zone that those differences become important.

I think that's a good thing to know for sure. It means, you need not worry so much about exactly which is better, a DiMarzio or a Seymour or ash or alder etc...you can concentrate on what is it that makes the thing you want to happen, happen. If you want it to sound more like a Tele, get a tele! If you want Gibson sound, get an LP! It makes no sense trying to make just any guitar sound like something else than it is, because the sound doesn't simply come from woods or pickups, it's the entire experience and combination of the *player* the *amp* and lastly the guitar that makes it all sound like it does.

For me it's kinda...well I never wanted my guitars to sound like a Gibson or Fender - I always immediately modded mine to sound like I wanted them to sound, rather than go for the route of trying to sound like a favorite artist. I have a clear image of what I want, and it's neither gibbo or fender. I just want a sound that rings well i.e. is not dead, has good clarity but not too much brightness, doesn't have excess top or low end, keeps it tight and nice at all times. I always felt a Strat is way too jangly and bright, and standard Les Paul is way too dark and thick, and tele too spanky, and 'metal' axes lacked any real timbre to the sound with them Floyds and thin necks. I wanted more...universally, evenly, good sounding guitars. That's why all my builds mix and match properties from each sides of the fence and don't sound like either.

But that's just what I like.

marnold
February 25th, 2012, 05:59 PM
I could definitely tell some differences in there. If you wanted me to quantify that, that would be a different thing altogether. It is clear that technique is going to play a huge role.

It reminds me of when I installed Area 61 hum-cancelling single coils in a guitar I used to have. It was immediately noticeable that they were hum-cancelling because there was ZERO noise. So little, in fact, that I thought I had messed up when I wired it up. The tone was different than the cheapo high-output single coils that I had in there, but I really needed to listen to recordings to tell the difference. It was relatively subtle. I don't think I could tell the difference between a mahogany, alder, ash, or basswood body by listening to it acoustically if you paid me a million dollars. Even with retubing my amp, I could definitely tell some changes were made it they were positive, but it's not like it suddenly became a Blackface or something.

Which reminds me of how much of my life I spent fretting about this stuff instead of actually playing. It also reminds me of how so many people are surprised to hear that Jimmy Page played a Tele on so many of the classic Zep tunes, not the Les Paul he is known for.

Eric
February 26th, 2012, 07:09 AM
Deeaa, your post is basically what I've concluded too: it's not so much that one guitar can't sound pretty close to another with some knob fiddling or pickup changes, it's that each guitar has a different way it sounds by default and a different way it wants to be played. With some EQ work, you can make most guitars sound pretty similar, I think. Same with most dirt pedals. Yeah, there will be some differences, but rarely will it be enough to really matter. I suppose that's entirely subjective though.

To me, that's the thing that matters most: what a guitar excels at doing, not how it ends up sounding. As you've said before, playing style trumps most other things in terms of tone, or at least perceived tone. So if a guitar does what you want the best out of any guitar you've tried, then you're probably going to wring more out of your playing and your 'tone' will be better, in a manner of speaking.

I may have descended too far into hand-waving territory at this point, but hopefully that made sense.

deeaa
February 26th, 2012, 07:45 AM
Exactly.

R_of_G
February 27th, 2012, 10:25 AM
It also reminds me of how so many people are surprised to hear that Jimmy Page played a Tele on so many of the classic Zep tunes, not the Les Paul he is known for.

I used that fact to win an argument last week. A couple of friends were asking me why I was looking to buy a Telecaster next. Then they contended that you can't really play any kind of hard rock on that guitar. I responded that nobody must have told Jimmy Page. One argued with me that he only played a Les Paul (the other argued he's too young to know anything about Led Zeppelin). I told them both we could return to the conversation when they'd done their history homework.

Hampus
February 27th, 2012, 03:44 PM
I'd say that those theories are confirmed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPD7_hQk7hk&feature=youtube_gdata_player

If you havn't seen it already.

Sent from my cobra phone

deeaa
February 27th, 2012, 11:03 PM
Thanks, great clip...I hadn't seen it although I knew the story well. Such a coincide, I just watched a Queen documentary last night :-)