More on Tone Search - what affects an electric's sound

[deeaa*]

In my experience body wood matters very little except with very microphonic pickups. Sure there are differences therein too, but, you can make a body out of metal, wood, plastic, anything works rather fine. Neck however accounts for about 70% of the guitar's vibrating mass plus it vibrates way more than body does because it is so thin. Many luthiers also will claim the same. I go one step further than most in claiming the body wood isn't even key at all - only mass and density distribution matters. Some manmade materials sound way better in guitars than wood does...and if you do want a body to have sound qualities, spruce would be my choice.

I have tested it too..if I put a mahogany body on my strat it sounds exactly the same amplified and just slightly different acoustically...but swap necks around with them stats and that makes quite a clear difference even amplified. I currently have two identical bodies with different necks and there is a clear difference indeed.

But, there are many aspects at work with these...my ideas are me ant as generalized averages. I don't doubt that some combinations may yield more differences than they generally do...some guitar could have a neck and pickups that exaggerate the body properties etc...it does happpen. But in most cases, I am sure swapping neck type on most any strat will make a lot more difference than swapping body material would.

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[Hampus]

What about "mechanics", i.e. the way the guitar is assembled? You've talked about hollow our solid bodies, but what about the neck and bridge and the way they are attached to the body? Like set neck, trapeze bridge, tremolo our no tremolo, bridge screwed into the center block our just into the body etc.

/Hampus

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[deeaa*]

Good q.

These percentages are meant as a general idea about how much change I would expect if I *changed* a feature on an existing guitar, not building one, that would be impossible because all the factors vary so much according to how the next choice reinforces or undermines the previous.

What I have found is all those you mentioned have more or less obvious effects, like most anything else, but by and large they are quite small too, and I have included it in the others mostly, like neck type including also joint type.

The neck joint seems the least important to me; as long as the attachment is solid, seems to me the type is insignificant. If a set neck is badly done with lots of glue or such, it can be worse by all standards as a nice bolt-on. Don't really find much differences w/neck thrus either. What differences there are they seem to be less about tone, but more about volume and acoustic sound and don't usually carry that much to amped sound.

Same with bridges - the more mass in bridge system, the more powerful the acoustic sound and this also carries thru by means of sustain changes, but doesn't seem to change the tone color much. But bad, soft bridges can however kill the sound pretty effectively.

Many times the bridge on a Lp can be much more loosely attached to the body than a tight Floyd and all this affects the sound, but then it seems to be more of a setup question. If I go there...well stuff like intonation would be absolutely crucial to how a guitar sounds like for instance.

All that said, I do think that when one is chasing the last promilles of what makes up the sound, well, I do think those term springs for instance are important for getting a true strat sound. A true hardtail strat doesn't sound like a normal one not because it's hardtail but because it misses the springs. At least acoustically they make a huge difference. I have term springs screwed to the back of two hardtails and you clearly hear their presence unamplified although they aren't attached to bridge at all, just tensioned accross the body.

I must stress again that I do think that everything affects the sounds...and sometimes eliminating a small aspect makes a huge difference on overall sound, but it is indeed the cooperation of things that makes the differences...for instance, what I try to say is by and large much more sonical changes can almost always be achieved by simply tightening a few screws and setting the intonation etc. Rather than changing or selecting body woods, which is entirely crapshoot IMO - anything may or may not work.


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[msteeln]

There are a million variables available to differing tones just amongst identical guitars that it's almost a pointless quest to itemize them, but it's fun and one reason why too often we want more than one guitar. It's both a blessing and a curse, and I wouldn't have it any other way, even tho it's endless.
To the thot that body wood makes little difference, my recent homeworking towards purchasing a PRS Santana SE included the statement that their constuction integrity lends them the uniquely positive sonic differences above other PRS guitars, many MUCH more expensive due to a woody airyness that compliments to the degree that a PU change to the classic Gretsch styles can illicit a nice comparison to their semi and hollow bodies. I now want a second SE to experiment on.
Also, in another forum discussion about body wood minutiae per Les Pauls, it's said just the change in regional mahogany can make a noticeable sound difference.
It all reminds me of why Jimi used the reviled coiled cord to reduce irritating highs to his preference, noting that using crappy componants/materials can benefit the overall effort in finding THE sound. We can talk forever and too much about a subject that has no definitive end, but interesting non-the-less, it's part of the guitar's intrigue and mystique. And then there's the human componant!

[Tig***]

I was going to write a few paragraphs on scale length, the resulting tension differences which affect tone brightness, etc., but this article does a much better job:

http://www.12fret.com/content/2011/07/11/scale-lengths/

[deeaa*]

To the thot that body wood makes little difference, my recent homeworking towards purchasing a PRS Santana SE included the statement that their constuction integrity lends them the uniquely positive sonic differences above other PRS guitars, many MUCH more expensive due to a woody airyness that compliments to the degree that a PU change to the classic Gretsch styles can illicit a nice comparison to their semi and hollow bodies. I now want a second SE to experiment on.
Also, in another forum discussion about body wood minutiae per Les Pauls, it's said just the change in regional mahogany can make a noticeable sound difference.

Body woods make little difference in comparison to, say, a twist of a tone knob, or pickup change, but, yeah, certainly they do have an impact. No question about it. However that impact is rather tiny in the overall picture. That said, there are people who can tell on which bank of the river and what year did the grapes grow on the wine they taste; same goes for guitars. Somebody might well detect and sense how differently some note rings on one guitar and prefer that, no question about that either. The thing is, that's something 99.9999 people don't hear *when they hear it*. And I doubt the same person who hears the body wood difference on his guitars (I do too when I play it!) will hear any difference between that preferred guitar and some similar one in a blind test at least if someone else does the playing (I don't no matter how I try). It's so subtle.

So, again - yes they do have an effect, often obvious to the player, but still it's fractions at best of the overall sound, and it's not something one can even attempt to change or select in hopes of getting it right. Only select the kind of guitars that have a combo that seems to work, like your PRS's. So yeah, I wholly agree that some guitars happen to have just the right wood combos for just that pickup etc. It happens often. But even then, it might be the next guy gets an even better sound from a cardboard bodied guitar, and to most listeners the two could sound identical...so it's not something you could try to achieve in any way.

As for regional mahogany...well, maybe there is a minute change, maybe there isn't; I'd love to hear from someone who went thru the trouble of ripping a les paul apart and test different mahogany species bodies on the same guitar and not change the bridge height a fraction of a millimetre in the process... :-) I mean, when we're considering THAT slight differences, it could be any number of things besides the body material. I don't think you can pick up a dozen identical Les Pauls and have them all sound exactly the same. They all sound and feel a wee bit different *to the player*. However to any listener listening thru them played thru an amp...no discernible differences I'm quite sure.

It all reminds me of why Jimi used the reviled coiled cord to reduce irritating highs to his preference, noting that using crappy componants/materials can benefit the overall effort in finding THE sound. We can talk forever and too much about a subject that has no definitive end, but interesting non-the-less, it's part of the guitar's intrigue and mystique. And then there's the human componant!

Yep indeed. Sometimes bad hardware is actually better!