I had noted but never considered air guitars never need to be tuned and are always in tune. Facial expressions, no beard or beard, and now mask and it’s types 😷 are in need of consideration.
Dude, you have literally destroyed a whole lot of money-grubbing marketing that we've been fed for many decades! In the musical world, this is one huge achievement, and a fantastic service to the global music world!!!
My list of most important tone factors: 1. The player 2. Pickups 3. How cool the guitar looks 4. The audience's blood alcohol content 5. How your preferred deity is feeling on that particular day
Number 5 seems particularly important. I swear I can plug into the same amp, same settings, same guitar, on two different days and get completely different sounds sometimes.
I think air from the equator brought north by the gulf stream would make that air guitar sound more organic and giving it that ethereal tone that you just can't get anyway else.
Brazilian students of luthiery produced a paper in 2010, where they tested 9 guitar bodies, with 9 very different woods. They even had a mechanized strumming machine, that achieved the same strumming every time, and they concluded that same as this video. The paper is called "Sobre o acoplamento corda-corpo em guitarras elétricas e sua relação com o timbre do instrumento", and can easily be found via Google. It's in Portuguese though.
I read it. Translation to English--they used the same necks and pickups on 9 different Telecaster bodies of different woods. No one could hear a difference nor could they measure a difference. They also measured the vibration of the wood and calculated how much that changed the string vibration and the amount was so neglible that they discounted it as possibly changing tone.
The message I get from this is: buy yourself a cheap guitar with a neck that feels comfortable to you, replace the cheap pickups with decent ones, have the guitar properly set up by a pro, and you're in business. Great video !
Then once you practice a lot, maybe get better pots if needed so you can have a more linear volume change for the volume knob and EQ change for the tone knob. Also tuners if the OG tuners are crappy and can't stay in tune.
@@MikeSW If that's your experience i'm sorry to say that you've been scammed, me and my friends have built ridicilously specced partscasters and mod rods in the 500e ballpark
@@MikeSW One (potential) benefit of buying a 'project' guitar and upgrading it as you go along is that you don't have to pay the full price upfront, you can upgrade stuff here and there as your skill/commitment increases. The only downside to that is that you can't compare your progress on a like-for-like setup. And hey, most folks looking to mod their car/bike/computer/guitar probably enjoy tinkering and 'making it their own' instead of just buying something off the shelf. I have nothing against buying something off the shelf, but a beginner isn't likely to know what they want/need at the outset.
100% accurate. I used to believe neck wood mattered the most until a pro luthier and builder did a deep dive with me into how pickups work. By FAR the biggest factor.
When I was a young man, ands full of unwarranted opinions, I swore that only maple fretboards could give me the "tone" I had developed. I played religiously, tweaking every aspect of my tone until it was perfect, but always swearing by the maple fretboard. Then, one day, I was travelling, and didn't have my beloved Candy Apple Red Strat (I still believe that Candy Apple Red produces the best tone) and was invited to sit in on a jam by my uncle. I told him that I didn't have my Strat, but he promised to loan me his. When I got to the jam, I was appalled to learn that his Strat had a rosewood fretboard. I resigned myself to sounding like shit. I didn't have my amp. I didn't have my guitar. The fretboard was god damned rosewood. I sat down to play. A couple of hours into the session, I realized that not only was my tone good, but it sounded like my tone. That's when I realized that it wasn't the tweaking of knobs that had polished my tone. It was the hours of relentless playing. Since then, I've owned and played some beautiful guitars, and some real pieces of shit. If I can get them to stay in tune for a little while, they all sound good.
@earhornjones You got an audible laugh out of your Cany Apple tone remark 🤣 Ya I'm not sure sure if it's my age, or the trends of the time, but I'm observing more of a demand for critical thinking and proof in recent years.
@@theuserthatishereYou’re completely wrong here. Pickups DO NOT work like a microphone. It doesn’t pick up sound, it picks up the string vibration through an electro magnetic field. Thus, the pickup matters more than anything else on the guitar.
Good job! I work as a postpro audio engineer. What regularly happens is this. A client sitting next to me demands a certain change whilst I'm changing something else. I go back to the part that he wants to have changed to have a listen first. Client says: "thanks that's better" Also the amount of times I heard stuff change whilst working on a bypassed plugin... Expectation plays such a big role in perception it's insane.
I had a job for several years selling men clothes, One day someone walked in saw a nice sweater and said I want that...I looked up the right size for him and it fitted perfectly. He said its too small... Well give me your sweater and I will look for you in the basement if we have another one in the good size... I folded the same sweater nicely in shape again, put it in a plastic bag, went upstairs in the store again and handed the sweater over to the guy, he put it on ( again...:-) ) and said, : "Yeah much better !!, Thank you......
Producer: "Can we make that more 'orange'?" Me: "Sure, you dial it in. Use that EQ. Roll off a bit of 5K to start..." Producer: "yeah, much better." Me knowing: (that EQ is bypassed)
You deserve a medal for this. I am not surprised in the slightest by the result so far. Tonewood? The wood is selected for cost. Shape? How well does Bo Diddley's square guitar play quarter notes? neck material, because somehow maple has "more snap". Please. You have shown the emperor has no clothes. Well done!
@Mario Reyes I can PROMISE you, In a double blind study... you would not be able to significantly differentiate the difference. Data does not lie, Science does not lie bro. I don't care if you have been playing for 90 years. That means nothing. Take a double blind study, and you will see how laughably wrong you are
@Mario Reyes tone wood only matters on acoustics not plugged in. PERIOD. Acoustics are actually getting their sound from bouncing off the body wood. It doesn’t matter at all on electrics because none of that is happening.
@Mario Reyes I wonder if someone with a good quality spectrum analyzer and speakers measured the sound what it would show. That would be more definitive then an untrained ear. Of course a person would have to be technically proficient at analyzing sound in the frequency domain.
Best few minutes I have spent on a vid like this in years. Thank you for the clarity. I will bet the make of strings will also be the other significant factor
In recent years I already had heavy suspicions that 90% of the value in an expensive guitar comes from how comfortable/enjoyable it is to play, as well as how well it stays in tune (that's where things like the construction, hardware and especially the neck come in place), because the other 10% value could at the very least be satisfyingly obtained through the electronics, setting and amp combination. On your final test, I couldn't help but have a smile of my face.
Yep And with a little research, some basic tools, and a cheap guitar to practice on, you can do the comfort work yourself. My $250 Ibanez plays as well as any $1000+ off the shelf model, simply because I went through the trouble of doing the fretboard work myself.
I've got s pretty extensive collection and have to say, my PRS CE tops any of my other more expensive guitars. Why? The fit, weight,small attention to detail
I used to work on guitars in a busy well renowned London workshop and 70 % of our work was properly setting up new and old guitars and it always gave me a sense of pride when you took a loved (new or old) instrument that felt s**t under the fingers set it up and then seeing the delight on the owners face when they started playing it. Some manufacturers were better than overs but still for the money of some new instruments out there you'd have thought theyd set them up better to sell more! Then again it gave me an income.
@@TheBanana93 So many guitars seem to arrive at the music shops with horrible setup. I have changed many people's idea of what a basic guitar setup is, how a guitar can feel, with a truss rod adjustment and lowered nut height. Tools required - a single allen key and a piece of sandpaper on a flat bench. Rarely have I come across a guitar that I could not improve in this way. It seems to me most of us are afraid to attempt any adjustment. I was terrified for years until I tried. My understanding of the instrument and ability to play the instrument skyrocketed once I took the leap.
I spent about two years switching out every part there was on my guitars and came to the conclusion that I should just play more. This video proves that.
This. And the fact that there are some guitars more suitable for specific genres than others. I‘ve blown a shit load of money to transform my Les Paul into a modern metal mashine when all I had to do was go out and buy a freaking Ormsby.
@@flowryan5829 After being totally obsessed with gear and even being a complete freak with small things like capacitor values I found that almost none of it really matters. Just play. You can play metal on a Telecaster and you can play jazz on a Jem. A versatile amp seems to be the one thing I needed to get every sound I wanted.
@@timbervandenhul9383 you are completely right. The guitar doesn‘t matter for the most part. BUT: You can‘t tune down with a 24.75 inch guitar down the same way you could with a 25.5-27.5 inch multiscale guitar. That‘s what I meant.
I was always very skeptical of the whole “mahogany body gives warmth and the flame maple top adds a shimmering top end” and I’m like nah pretty sure you mostly hear your pickups and amp. This confirms that very cool
Years ago William Gelvin from Gelvin Custom Guitars, throughout many others, made videos debunking tonewood, the backlash was hard for him he ended up just stop talking about it. He was kind enough to pull up videos, while he was trying to impose facts and science over the discussion table, which breakdown the physics on this subject and the videos are still up on his channel. He deserve some recognition, i'm pretty sure this video and it's impact was possible thanks to all the prior attempts to debunk the myths on this tonewood bs.
This great experiment confirms some notions I’ve had based on my background in physics and electrical engineering. The heavy and stiff body and neck of a solid body guitar just doesn’t absorb a lot of the energy from the waves that propagate between the nut and bridge. That’s why you don’t hear much sound when a solid body guitar is being played without an amp. Since a solid body doesn’t interact much with the strings, it has little effect on the sound. That leaves the pickups and pots and capacitors, along with the strings themselves. So: with same strings, pickups, spacings and lengths, pots and caps, the sound is gonna be much the same. Other effects are subtle. I’m not saying they don’t exist or that they can’t be heard or that they don’t matter. Just that strings, pickups, spacings and lengths, pots and caps dominate. Then there’s the effect of the amp, which can be anything but subtle! Thanks!!!!
Wait a sec. So when you have a hollow body guitar and a solid body, they sound drastically different - is that just pickups too, then? Are we agreeing to that? Because this guy has a no-body guitar, comparing to a solid body and it sounds exactly the same. What say you Physics-man?
@@Sparksnorthern The so-called air guitar is still connected to two large, stiff masses and couples into them as well as the air and the pickups. When a string oscillates, it causes tension on the string. This pulls against the supports on both ends of the string at the frequency of oscillation. People who own double neck guitars can demonstrate that you can play one neck and pick up the sound using the pickups on the other neck, since the energy is conducted through the body into the other set of strings.
@@Sparksnorthern The air guitar in this video is a lot closer to a solid body than to a hollow body. What makes the hollow body sound different is that it has a resonating cavity -- the air guitar does not (well, it kinda does, but it's as big as the whole room and it would need to be empty to really work).
I think the biggest determining factor in guitar tone is what size Honda engines you are using to hold down the shelf! Thank you for an excellent video that proves the most important parts of electric guitar tone have nothing to do with wood
You say that in jest but as a scientist who has designed studies, this must be taken into account. This is a very valid "Feasibility study" (in science words) but I can see some issues. As mentioned above, one must take into consideration the possiblity that the 4 different guitars were actually all made of very resonant wood. Easy to think "well a 2x4 could not be resonant" but how do we know that. Perhaps mount the exact same experiment to a piece of Trex decking (plastic 2x4). Also try it with a metal bar (much harder to do). Same with the air guitar. I would like to see a further comparison using plastic or dense foam in the shape of a guitar and a metal shelf and bar mimicing the other 2. Again, scientifically speaking, it is entirely possible that 4 very resonant woods were chosen here. This is not to detract from the excellent experiment that was done. This is outstanding and needs to be continued. I would be willing to chip in on some materials to see more!
@@drjsmajor if we were doing an academic study of this topic then yes I’m with you and we it would be cool to take this even further, but I think this video was clear enough and pretty much proved the only thing that matters is the electronics.
Yeah also have a background in electronics and similarly my first thought was anything affecting the electronic line is going to be the most important next to the player.
@@larryboles5064 the sound in an electric comes from the pick up configuration and the way the strings are setup, so scale and tension & bridge/trem setup. Body type does has an effect as why an archtop has a different sound, but for solids not as much, there's a slight influence in timbre and sustain but it's trumped by the pick up config and bridge setup.
I've always suspected it made little to no difference. I used to paint guitars occasionally for a music shop and always used to receive the instruments in parts, not being a musician myself I did ask the shop owner if the sound might change if I was doing a paint job that needed a lot of layers and clear coat and he waved a little notebook at me and said "As long as I don't lose this it'll sound the same when it leaves as it did when it arrived". He was of the opinion that as long as the electronics were exactly right then the rest was irrelevant.
@@Art-zs6sl He wasn't a greedy man as far as I could work out, it was a little local shop where he sold and repaired used instruments. He never charged me any commission for supplying me with work when he was entitled to it (not sure on the legality but I offered him 10% and he refused), he just took an hours labour for taking the guitar apart and putting it back together when I was done
The pickup height adjusted was groundbreaking to me. Unbelievably clear. I love the way you handled and navigated your way through this experience. It really reminded me of conducting statistical experiments.
Pickup height is such a massive factor with tone. For high gain it lends or reduces clarity, but with cleaner sounds you really hear dynamic ranges like crazy. Along with that, adjusting the pole pieces changes things (being careful not to unscrew a pole completely!).
Hi Jim. Commenting again here to let you know this video has changed my life as a recording engineer and producer of artists. This video, and the others youve made, have changed everything for me. I really do owe you. Thanks man.
@@joea9608 there was still no difference in tone though. if the wood was that important then 70 extra pounds of wood would make a huge difference, right?
@ u hear what u want to hear. tonewood is just marketing jargon from the times when they tried to market electric guitars like luxury furniture items. u say the name of a high quality wood and u instruct all the salesmen to inform the consumers that the wood is smth that they need in order to sound good. the limited resonance of a solid chunk of of wood is not what is being picked up and amplified by the magnets in the pickups. its all the strings, and whatever u put in the chain after it. the wood in guitars does not breathe it, it does not resonate and it is not alive. if it did matter then alternate materials like aluminum, carbon fiber, resin, fiberglass etc etc would not be viable but they are and have been in use by many notable professional musicians for decades.
Nice demonstration of the importance of "tone air" in the guitar's sound. You didn't mention where you got the air from, though. Next we can see a comparison of air from different workplaces, public parks, and sports stadiums to see the impact each has on overall tone.
Gotta love that stadium rock tone. It must be from all the sweat left hanging in the air by the sports-ball athletes. I'm pretty sure American football sounds the best with basketball being a close second.
Awesome. I was just going to link you to this video! Although wood is useless for changing the actual tone, a guitar made of better quality wood will stay in tune more consistently through temperature and humidity changes in the environment. And what good is a guitar with a great tone if it doesn't stay in tune for a whole song? (ask Gibson LOL). If you're gigging indoors, outdoors, summer, winter, etc you need something that will be reliable. Maybe we should shift fully into making guitars out of synthetic materials, since it doesn't affect the tone anyway, and they won't be affected by the environment.
This could have been a Mythbusters episode. I love how such a scientific approach has been taken in this analysis. Absolute genius. The best analysis of its kind in the history of electric guitar I would say.
Still a purely subjective test. He should have recorded the audio signals, and shown how much the audio signal matched or didn’t with each change. That would have been far more definitive
@@eurly93 would the difference matter though if you can hardly hear it at all? let's say he did that and they didn't perfectly align, what would it matter? your ears are not hearing a graph that shows slight inconsistency. what you are _hearing_ is nearly indistinguishable.
Awesome to see someone finally crush the nonsense theory of “tone wood” as pertains to electric guitars. I’ve owned Strats and Teles with both maple and rosewood necks, ash and alder bodies (as well as Les Pauls with chambered and solid bodies) and always found there to be a bigger difference in tone between two IDENTICAL guitars than two versions of the same guitar. It always came down to pickup / string height, tolerances of the tone caps, and even slight differences amongst pickups from the same manufacturer. Excellent and entertaining video !
Well, maybe the wood doesnt affect the sound that much, but, they do play a very important role in tune stability, how it gets old, comfort, the looks, i mean, as seen on this video, the tone is the least important thing if were talking about wood, but it is important in some other aspects as an instrument.
They forget the reason gibson and fender sounds very different unplugged is Because of the construction. Scale length and neck joint. Also fender telecaster/strat has cavity under the pickguard unlike the les paul/sg which is completely solid which is why they sound more resonant.
@@franciscobravoortiz566 sure but the discussion here is only about tone, the whole theory about how much wood affects tone. Aesthetics and stability are not so controversial as the tone.
How the guitar sounds acoustically is how the guitar sounds, the pickup is just a microphone and some have characteristics that also change the sound but electrically instead of how the strings sound
I was really indecisive the other day pondering if I should buy a 50yo wooden table and a vintage honda motor to set-up some strings and play live, and after watching this video I've never been so sure of anything in my entire life
This is a FANTASTIC video. The "air guitar" alone is a piece of art I don't have a guitar yet and as a habitual overthinker, this helps take the pressure off of choosing
Just get a guitar that looks fockin sick mate, and when you feel like it, look into guitars you like the sound of and stick the pickups from that guitar in your guitar.
Dont listen to the epiphone guy. Buy a guitar you like with pickups that suits your genre if you have the financial ability to choose. However focus on tuning stability and playability if you're on a budget.
Find one that feels good in your hands and is striking enough that you can't help but pick it up every time you walk by it. This is good advice in choosing a wife, too!
I’m a physicist so this is exactly my kind of thing. The only thing I’d like to add is some more objective measurements. Compare EQ curves, time how long a note rings out, etc. I appreciate your approach of using amped sound as the true test, but it would be interesting to see if there’s objective differences, especially given that they might become more apparent in different contexts.
total time of a string vibration of course will be different between materials because of damping but in practical application (material being rigid enough to hold tuning) any difference will be well below noise floor of a pickup )
someone did a study like this (can't find the link at the moment). They made "guitars" out of planks of wood, mounted a pickup/hardware, and measured the signal straight into the DAW. The researchers found minor spectral differences between guitars of different woods. They also claim most listeners could pick out the unique recording when given three to analyze. All that being said, a practical test like this video is very exciting to me. If wood makes THAT little of a difference in the finished product, great guitars can be cheaper and gorgeous guitars made from WHATEVER can be commonplace
Taylor, there are already various studies with frequency curves as you say, even a Thesis. There are also videos on that. But for papers for instance, search for "Vibroacustical Study of the Solid-Body Electric Guitar" from Yo Fujiso of the Chalmers University of Technology (2009) or "Body Woods and Electric Guitar's Frequency Spectrum" from Keith J. Soper of University of Toledo or even "A vibro-acoustical and perceptive Study of the neck-to-body Junction of a solid-body electric Guitar" from A. Paté et al. of University of Paris I think
Speaking as an Electrical Engineer this is exactly as I suspected! I've always held that 99% of the sound of an electric guitar is purely a function of the pickup and associated electronics since coil pickups are NOT very microphonic in nature. This has now been confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt. Thanks for doing those tests.
I am EE too, and I am always saying the same, it absolutley doesn't matter what wood the electric guitar is made of, even a acrylic guitar sounds amazing (!) Don't believe me? Look at Steve Vais acryllic signature JEM guitar! It is ALL about myths and sales bullshit that makes the MONEY.
The pickup and the associated electronics. I'm just starting this video so what is the best pickup and what are the associated electronics? I'd love to have a shopping list from an electrical Master such as you are
@@amnesie6615 with an acoustic guitar the story is completely reversed. Am I thinking right? I mean it sounds that way to me. I don't play electric guitar yet 😂
My jaw dropped when you started strumming the Air Guitar vs the Anderson. You've convinced me, tonewood doesn't matter, neckwood doesn't matter. All that is weight and aesthetics. Freaking amazing video man!
I would agree with you and the majority that "tone" wood doesn't matter one bit on an electric guitar as he has extensively proven but I'm still curious if it makes any difference to sustain and "tone" life
@@DrSamE it makes a difference in how it feels when vibrates against your belly as you play it. If it feels better, you will play better and think it sounds better. I feel that's what was driving the tonewood thing.
Neckwood MIGHT still matter when you actually use the neck/the frets as opposed to strumming an open chord or playing with a bottleneck. But I bet it’s so subtle I personally wouldn’t hear the difference.
That was the most important experiment ever done for electric guitar players and electric guitar builders!! I'm sure it took a ton of time but the results were priceless!!!
No, it wasn´t really. Only for the ones who now - falsly - see themselves proven right in their believe that wood doesn`t matter (meaning having a significant impact) in electric solid body guitars. If we are honest and go by the scientific method, this was not falsified by this video, was it?
While I agree the method isn’t 100% scientific, it’s the most scientific comparison I’ve ever seen. Jim never concludes wood doesn’t matter. I personally hear a fairly significant difference between the Anderson and all the other variations. The biggest difference is definitely the air guitar.
Modestoney. I guess I don't understand what you're saying. Don't know if you're dissing me or Jim or if you're agreeing with him😄 But it doesn't matter anyway. I hardly ever make comments on utube but this experiment was really phenomenal and I'm sure took a lot of time. So, good on you Jim. Keep up the good work.
@@modestoney1577 Not really bro. First of asll, the fact that he got three companies to answer with 5 answers was astounding. And second, they said themselves that body wood wasn't as big a factor as weve thought. Certainly weren't factoring in neck wood all this time. Well, I wasnt. Nor anyone else Ive ever seen in my life. Plus, did you even watch it? He put so much into it..making sure everytihng was trh same even how hard he strummed and everything. But all that swtuff he dide wasnt enough for you huh? I think you've been preaching body tone wood for so long...thats what you dont like about it.
Leo Fender must have had the same idea: that for solid body guitars, tone wood is more placebo effect than anything. He experimented with pine, ash, alder and probably plywood. But not for “tone”, for structure and stability. It takes a lot of strength to stay straight and not bend or especially twist under string tension. It was Gibson, trying to catch up with Fender that introduced the myth that expensive and exotic tropical hardwoods improved the tone of a solid body. It was a marketing ploy. Still is.
@@marctestarossa have you had the chance to play on a carbon fiber body acoustic guitar? Lol there no wood at all on those and they sound almost dead on to most acoustic guitars. I think tone wood is more of a marketing selling point rather than function. Regardless of wood choice
I love this. I remember listening to and reading comments in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the HiFi press about how different cables sounded differently. The funniest claims were those about how different digital cables changed the sound, or even different mains cables. More recently, how bicycle frames with the same geometry but made from different materials would dampen or project road "buzz" through to the handlebars (ignoring those air-filled dampers wrapped around the wheels). More recently, my son and have discussed what he has read on forums about electric guitar tone being flavoured by the wood used, or the lacquer sprayed over it. I'm an electronics engineer so I instinctively knew what influenced the sound. I'm also a drummer. There was a fashion in the 90s for RIMS suspension mounts. The justification was that by not having your mounts on the shell, you allowed the shell to resonate more. Quite honestly, I couldn't hear any differences but the RIMS mounts were so clunky I was surprised people went with them. No... not surprised. People get sucked in by advertising claims for all sorts I guess. Few people care if there's a measurable, detectable improvement. They just want "different"... until "different" becomes the norm, and then they switch back to the original ideas and call it "retro". This was an excellent experiment. Loved your 4x2 guitar especially. Best wishes from the UK. 🇬🇧
Here because Glenn at Spectre Sound Studios recommends this video *very* highly for anyone trying to make the “tone” argument. You, sir, have done a fantastic service to the world of guitars & guitarists by making this video. Five stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Because like many many other previous tests, people put their hands over their ears and go "la la la laaaa". Everyone 'knows' the vast majority of instruments of overly priced, when you agree with that... you find it difficult to buy them. So it's easier to deny any evidence.
B/c they listen to ppl like paul reed smith who are invested in selling people fairy dust. And there are plenty of ppl who want their expensive solidbody to be more special than one that was less expensive.
Because there's only a few thousand videos out there demonstrating the kind of changes various woods can make to a guitar's tone. Warmoth posted a video a few months ago featuring different neck woods. ua-cam.com/video/z7jrZrrH4jA/v-deo.html The differences are what anyone that's actually built guitars already knew. Yes, there is a difference in tone. No, it's not anywhere near as much as the corksniffers would have you believe. Pretending that everything sounds the same is just as much snake oil as pretending that plastic tuner knobs give you more midrange, PAUL.
I've seen your video like 4 times, it's one of my favorites because you inderectly are treating a sensitive topic amongst guitarists which is the sustain in an electric guitar, where does it come from and how to improve it. Some guitarists are always adding things to the guitar in order to increase it
Love this video. Pretty much kills the whole “tone wood” debate for electric guitars. Acoustic instruments are another story. Wood absolutely makes a difference in them. But for companies charging insanely high prices for mahogany bodied electric guitars, just because of the mahogany, tell ‘em where to stick it.
It is almost all the top wood and braces that makes the tonal difference in acoustic guitars, though. Not all the wood. Antonio de Torres Jurado, called by some the most important guitar maker of the 19th century, did an experiment to prove this. In 1862 made a guitar with paper-mache back and sides and it sounded great. People could not tell the difference. That guitar still exists in a music museum in Barcelona. Five years ago, Robert O'Brien, a celebrated classical guitar luthier, who also teaches luthiery courses, repeated the experiment by making a classical guitar with cardboard back and sides and a wood top that he was going to scrap. It sounds great also.
What touches the strings on an electric guitar? The nut, the frets, and maybe most importantly, the saddles. These things actually touch the string, which is what creates the sound. The pickup is obviously the primary factor, type and position. Cool to see it shown so clearly here. I was shocked at the steel vs. brass saddle difference, actually. Very cool.
Excellent video! One thing that’s obvious from this video is that pickup height is often massively overlooked. Some people swap their perfectly nice pickups out endlessly chasing a sound when a couple of millimetres worth of adjustment here and there can make all the difference. If you like a higher action or you have a deeper neck angle you might need to play about with the pickup heights to get them all to sing together nicely. it’s a very cheap “worth a try” adjustment.
I agree. I play a Squire Affinity Strat as I’m pretty poor. The middle pick was dull and muddy. A couple of screw turns later best pick up on the guitar.
It's insane that even after doing all of this, some people will still die on the tonewood hill. This table&shelfcaster just got a tie with the fencecaster in the functional guitar tierlist for me lmao. Good job mate.
I built this guitar ua-cam.com/video/GfGkCQigbOo/v-deo.html I have 2 necks for it, one neck has a maple fretboard, the other a a rosewood board. I can tell you that the difference in tone between the 2 is huge, anybody who isn't deaf could easily notice the difference between them. @@sukitta2
Jim, I don't know where the tone comes from with a lot of us other guys, but yours comes from the Lord and a ton of patience. You're a really good picker. Especially enjoyed your slide work on the "air guitar". Keep up the fine work young man !
It usually takes creators 10 minutes to “test” one variable. Here it’s only 10 seconds to get the point across. Including the faulty tests that didn’t take pickup height into account made for a great plot twist. Super happy with the runtime of this video. Good stuff, thanks.
Next step, obviously, is to try weighing the bench with something other than honda... ducati engines, yamaha engines, harley engines, indian engines, etc. And then you will need to try them in every possible combination and engine size. Will an 80cc sound different than a 500cc? And of course, it is necessary to consider the implications of engine size for touring. It would not surprise me if you developed a guitar you could just ride to the gig. Thank you for helping to move science forward! I very much enjoy your video. Good ear on that slide, with no frets to visually guide you.
My thoughts exactly. Replacing the weight of the guitar body with a bench still equates to a measurable quantity of tone-producing material being used to make the strings resonate..
As someone who equally loves guitars and motorcycles, this comment is the best! And if you’re not using the engine from a Panigale, then you’re wasting your time 🙃
I always said that when you buy high-end electric guitars (and basses) the main thing you pay for is the playability, comfort and their collectible value. Not the sound, because you can get an almost exact sound on a cheaper guitar by swapping the parts. Playability is the biggest difference the price tag offers. This video has proven that, and more. But still I’m blown away on how the Air Guitar sounded. What an amazing and detailed experiment, this is THE BEST electric guitar comparison video EVER. I would very much like to see you do this on an Electric Bass, I wonder would the result be the same because the frequency they produce is different. And IME it’s always harder to find a good sounding Bass than Guitar.
What bass/strings/amps you like I’m a jazz guy for sure but love the zing of the stingray and have a reverend Raymond and really love it I’m pretty sold on fender nickel/steel 7250 I believe… very punchy and gritty Don’t like Ernie ball strings or dr Used to love roto until I found fender
Expensive guitars are all about build for me. Having a nice feeling neck, no frets scratching me, aligned nut, intonated correctly, etc. Sound can always be altered. To be it's all about pick ups and pick up height
@@kodykindhart5644 I own several Basses and put different Strings on them. But currently just down to two brands, DR and LaBella. Stingrays do have their own character. I prefer warmer sounding strings on a Ray, Nickels mostly.
Why would the price of a guitar effect playability. Makes no sense. It’s all salesmanship crap from the overpriced guitar makers whose overhead is higher, and attorney fees they payout.
@@BlainScholin You just got to try it for yourself. A skilled luthier can carve a neck, fretboard & body in a way that the instrument will fit your hands perfectly so they can explore the instrument effortlessly. Just like custom made suits, shoes, etc. If you think it’s all just marketing, you probably don’t know that most known Luthiers owns very small businesses and their shop is run by only themselves and a few other close relatives and have close to zero marketing budget. They became famous from word of mouth. And unfortunately, they’re not that sucessful financially. But if you’re talking about mass produce guitars made by giant companies like Fenders and Gibsons selling their guitars for over 3k with a build quality that other companies/luthiers can make for half of that, then yeah they definetely are just marketing. There are categories of Instrument makers, and what I described in my original comment refers to the genius Artists in form of Luthiers, not the mass pro factories own by businessmen disguising themselves as one.
The law of conservation of energy says: if you want sustain, don‘t let the string oscillation energy flow in the wood body. That‘s how a good ELECTRIC guitar is designed and correctly set up. So simple as that. Very good video, thnx! ❤ All the best, R. Wood
This is THE best, most detailed yet quick and straight to the point tone testing investigational video I've ever seen. This is borderline a scientifical university-funded study on guitar tone, just...wow amazing man
I would say Warmoth's test is much more accurate and scientific because they keep the variables down to one thing only, the body wood. When you have more than one variable there is no way to determine if one item or the combo of the items, what percentage of each combo items, are what is changing tone. You need to limit variables to accurately determine what is changing the sound.
@@Cpt_Adama By the same token, Warmoth's test involves the use of human hearing to determine results. Fundamentally that is flawed because there is a great variety not only in the human hearing apparatus itself, but in human perceptions of what is heard. A dry signal running directly into a high quality interface and then analyzed for quantitative numbers would provide a higher standard of evidence. It would also be helpful if the experiment was double blind, or even better if the "player" was a robotic apparatus that could precisely recreate each stroke of the pick. However, at that point what is the point? The important thing about sound and music is what people think they hear. When it comes to the video above and the results, the best that can be concluded is that either an old garage workbench as a guitar body is the equal of a Tom Anderson chambered swamp ash body OR the body wood matters so little as to be entirely inconsequential to the final sound. What I am interested in would be his results in testing strings. I personally find them to make a huge difference, but I am willing to concede the potential for my own biases to have a big influence on my perception of that difference. Will be interesting to see.
@@ERWebster You definitly could go down the "scientific" rabbit hole deeper, but I do think the Warmoth test was accurate enough to come up with a definite conclusion. My take away is that yes "tone wood" can make a difference, but only subtlety. In a complete mix it would be very difficult to tell the difference and a mixing engineer could EQ it to make it sound like what ever wood you want.
@@Cpt_Adama I agree for the most part. Regarding the scientific merit of either the Warmoth video or this one, drawing a conclusion based on a handful of data points is correlation at best and incidental happenstance at worst. A few hundred or even thousand points of carefully vetted data would get us to where statistically we could isolate a significant trend, if one existed. I have also been long in the camp of tonewood has a small effect on tone, but as time goes by and evidence mounts, I am finding that my internal estimate of how much effect it has is ever dropping. Fortunately, I don't need broad scientific consensus to arrive at a personal opinion, just sufficient demonstration and personal experience to strongly suggest a trend. After this video and others I am thinking that the effect of wood is extremely low, and as you said can easily be EQ'd away or entirely over-ridden by the tone of a pickup, if it can be heard at all.
Scientific in my view. The guy is checking hypotheses linking different Independent Variables with the Dependent Variable. Does not matter that he’s not putting numbers on the data. Data just means ‘that which is given’. A police detective is also scientific, posing and testing hypotheses. What’s going on here is Qualitative Positivism. The Technique is Qualitative and the Epistemology is Positivistic. These dimensions of methodology are wholly orthogonal (independent of each other). Great work
This is absolutely brilliant! Thank you indeed. I've been building private custom electrics for over 40 years, (c. 1977), and I've always maintained that body and neck wood has virtually and absolutely no to minimal effect on a full solid body axe, except in the player's mind, which may influence your tone where it really matters...in your hands, which is where 95% of your core tone comes from. To prove this I have a "Mystery Wood" sampler guitar that I invite all my potential customers to play before they commit to an instrument and its cost. It has never let me down. The guitar is a marvel to play with amazing tone produced by 1978 DiMarzio PAF and original Bill Lawrance SC pickups. The neck has been repeatedly upgraded, and is now roasted maple, But the body wood is, and always has been 100% garbage dump shite. So...I go to my grave in the firm belief that Tone woods variations and subtelties are applicable only to acoustic and hollow body instruments; period. Anything else is pure myth. Ash may make you feel better about your guitar than Alder, or Mahogany, but that is pure placebo effect. Thank you again for this excellently informative and highly entertaining proof. Well done indeed. Cheers 🍻
I bought an inexpensive PRS style guitar a few months ago. When I looked the electronics it sure looked like MDF/particle board where the instrument jack was. After a setup, new nut and pickup it sounds great. It's not heavy at all. The neck on it ended up being really nice. I think it's mostly about setup, electronics and the player. Also, it's amazing how much better my crappy guitars sounded after I practiced hard for a year.
As a guitar builder, how do you think - where do dead spots come from? I've had around 20 basses over the last 27 years (since I've started playing) and 2 or 3 of them had a dead spot or two. What could be the reason and how to get rid of them?
@Bassdriver Hello, and thank you for your excellent question. Tonal dead spots on solid body electric guitars and bases are related to pickup or setup deficiency. Step 1: Unplug the instrument. Carefully lean the headstock against a cabinet or a bench, or even just a big board. Play every note along the entire fretboard slowly, listening for consistency in volume and true voice. Any notes that sound dampened or muffled need attention. The problem either comes from the fret or 2 frets directly above the note, in a phenomenon similar to but not quite the opposite of fret buzz, or it can sometimes be a sympathetic muting at the bridge saddle exclusive to that note. This happens more often with bridge saddles that have worn unevenly, or have been pitted by years of hand grease and grime, or simple age through play wear and tear. In that case, you need to work the frets so that the muted note sounds true, or replace the offending saddle, or saddles. If all your notes are acousticslly true and the problem still persists then... Step 2: If every note on the unplugged instrument sounds fine, then you have a bigger problem; The electronics, and most probably a fatal flaw in the pickup(s). First check your pots and especially the resistors on your tone pots. If you don't know how to go about it, take it to someone who does. Have them check the entire circuit. It could be as simple as a bad solder joint or deficient or defective resistor or pot, all the way to an internal bad magnet or a miniscule dead spot on the copper winds in one or more of your pickups. Run through a logical process of elimination by identifying if it is a pot or resistor or bad solder, and if all else seems good, then your last stop is identifying in which pickup the defect lives. In that case, and before you invest in a new pickup, if you have a tester pickup lying about, wire it up, play every note and see if the problem goes away. If it does, then make a decision on if you want to replace the pickup(s), or live with the problem, or unload the instrument. In all cases, this process is time consuming, but also a great learning experience that makes you intimatly familiar with the instrument and its entire aural spectrum and workings.This is knowledge you can retain and transfer to all your instruments and builds. Remember to approach it positively, and you will have a positive experience and result. Cheers!
Excellent findings! This pretty much reaffirms what I believe attributes most to tone. Acoustic guitars might be slightly different in terms of tonality, but electric guitars pretty much only sound as good as their electronics.
@@david_lynch Sounds like you missed the point. The 2 x 4 sounded damn close to the Anderson with the same pickup, pickup placement and distance, and same electronics. Other “good guitars” would have different pickups, with different pickup height and positions, etc... I think Jim shows definitively that the woods have very little effect on the tone.
@@david_onbass There are many ways to test the idea that the wood of an electric guitar affects tone. What I call "good guitars" are guitars whose wood really affects the tone, in a good way. In the video I provided, the author tests the sound of two identical guitars (the same year and the same model) with the same set of pickups. The difference in tone is really audible, moreover, in a blind test (try it). This is clearly audible on video, in reality the difference is even more significant, especially if you take Gibson Les Paul guitar made from the 1950s to 1968 (may be 1969) and compare with some made in 2012, for example.
Thank you for your faithful service to the world of tone. We can all finally give up the search for the perfect guitar and instead look for the perfect pickup.
I've been playing guitars for nearly 40 years. IMO the tone wood argument is ridiculous. It's about pickups, strings, and electronics. I think you've done a great job demonstrating that. Don't mention this to PRS though. "The best tone comes from our 200 year aged stock of Brazilian pappy burly wood. Its unique character comes from the Bashiva Beetle which burrows its dung deep into the trunk of the tree. For this reason it's an additional $3000 per linear square inch, but WELL worth it!" Got to love marketing.
😂 so true. My only counter-argument is that my first experience with a PRS was 25ish years ago where i picked one up at a Sam Ash, bent the F*CK out of the whammy bar all the way down to the fret board and popped it back up to a perfectly in tune guitar!?!? Their stock locking nut system on the headstock tuners is pretty incredible.
I'm no one to judge if wood makes a difference and I don't care as much as other people do, if I like the guitar I like it and I don't care about wood nor anything. Paul is an ass but PRS guitars are amazing. Their super expensive models are bullshit tho.
I wish they were just honest and say, "Hey look these are expensive collector items, akin to furniture, but they can also be used to play music every once in a while." :D
You confirmed alot of things I've been thinking for years when it comes to electric guitar.All the myths that people hang on to seem to come from the world of acoustic guitar that just don't make a big difference on electric.
Finally scientific method to tease out guitar tone factors! Thanks Jim. I'll bet that bench attached to the air guitar does provide a certain amount of sustain though the tone seemed so close. Subscribing.
I figured out that the most important part of sound was the pickups when I put a SD JB in my $50 squier and it sounded identical to my $2000 LP standard with the same pickup haha. I would think the biggest factor when it comes to high end instruments is the fit and finish, or in other words, looks, feel, material quality etc. I would surmise that a competent luthier could make that tele kit feel pretty close to the anderson. Thanks for spending all the time you did making this video, it must have taken forever.
True , picks ups + amp tweaking. I saw other videos of blind test for tone wood. The conclusion was the same. With a 3k guitar Tone won't change but the playability and confort will change. I think it's also about passion when you play for years, you just want a high end instrument. I've been playing on 500-800 dollars guitar for years. Then I bought à 1500 Ibanez this Summer and immediatly wanted à J. Custom( and bought it 1month ago) You just feel a gap of quality. A huge one
You are exactly right. Bring a 300 dollar Squier to a luthier, have the luthier at it. It'll be as good Ultra series. Electronics is another matter of course, you'll need to replace it. But playability setup, and comfort? Luthier can do that to a Squier.
Yeah, in 2022 dollars anything past about 800-1000 is just jewelry or musical bling being added and not sonic quality. So buy cheap and add what counts to your own taste and enjoy.
I remember Les Paul proving to Gibson that he didn't need a hollow body on an electric to get good tone and used a 2x4 with a detachable 2 part body on the sides. That's how he got them to make him the solid body electric
@@DailyBrusher Just checked Rob Scallons video on it again to make sure I don't have to delete my other comment. you're right, "The Log" is the 'official' name under which it is displayed in the museum, but the people at the Gibson factory mocked it as "The Broomstick" And ofc, it was a 4x4
Loved your tests. As a retired Luthier I was always amused by all the things I used to hear from customers as well as comments made on guitar forums. My own personal experience taught me that there was far more BS out there than facts. I even "blind ear" tested some people to see if they could tell the difference in sound between some HB pickups and Gibson PAFs--they thought they'd have no trouble determining which was which. Boy were they wrong LOL! Likewise, a guitar I built with different wood species than a typical Les Paul fooled them as well. I particularly loved it when they'd pick my guitar as the better sounding one 😄 I did experience better resonance and slight differences in sustain with different body construction. Pickups do make a difference as does the circuitry when it comes to sound and that's the best way to upgrade a low end model (or a Partscaster). But, in the hands of a good player, and plugged into a decent amp, even a low end guitar can sound much better. It reminded me how often people would rave about a brass nut sounding so much better--I would then say to them "So, you play a lot of open strings when you play?" They would be puzzled, until I pointed out to them that you take the nut out of play when fretting chords and individual notes LOL!
Love hearing opinions from experienced luthiers. I imagine guitars and wines are similar in the sense that the “connoisseurs” usually can’t pass a blind test. I always thought pickups made the biggest difference, then body size. I really only care about the type of wood for acoustic guitars.
@@CYON4D Thanks--the truth is, it's easy for people to buy into the hype about guitars because we all wanted to demystify why some guitar players and their guitars sounded so awesome (I was no different when I was a young guitar player and eager to play and sound better). Now that I'm an old fart I play and sound much better LOL! Van Halen always sounded better than the folks who tried his guitar and amp--it wasn't the wood or the pickups--it was the man behind the axe!
@@owenmoore7340 And I can agree with that for acoustic guitars--the wood and the finish on them makes a difference, as does how they made, bracing, sound holes, etc. I agree on the wine too--I'll never be a wine snob and I loved it when the palettes of the so-called experts were fooled years back by the superb wines from California and even in Canada and other countries LOL! As with all things, it also comes down to what you like. E.G. when it came to guitars, I was a Fender lover first, and so the first quality guitar I bought was a pre CBS Telecaster (swamp ash body with a maple neck and fingerboard). I stupidly sold it to buy a car in the 70s and the closest I found to it after that was a Japanese made Squier that I still own today. It sounds as good as I recall but the neck is slightly different than my original--but still a pleasure to play. RIP Leo Fender! I always wanted to build guitars as great, (or better), than George and Leo--that was my goal, but I really don't feel that I did any better than to match what they did. But I had a lot of fun trying!
Honestly, I'm no where near experienced enough to believe I could pick it out blind, but the no body guitar seemed to have a much rounder sound (other than when he strummed hard, but that could do with the difference in force). Hearing that difference through UA-cam's compression leads me to believe that IRL it's a larger difference. With that said, I'm a firm believer that the player makes the biggest difference in tone, followed by the amp, followed by the type of pickup. There's also no doubt in my mind that different constructions has a HUGE affect on sustain. My Gibson Les Paul Standard has never ending sustain - I'm guessing due to fixed bridge alongside of the weight of the guitar (it's one of the old non weight-relieved ones), and the set neck - and for some reason, my EBMM Majesty has surprisingly good sustain. The neck through design has to be the biggest contributing factor because the guitar itself is insanely light, and it has a floating bridge. It definitely doesn't have as much sustain as my LP, but especially considering the floating bridge, it's truly insane to think about what they were able to do! One of the other things that I truly believe that people forget is that people are going to typically hear the guitar either live, or in a mix, and it's going to be almost impossible to hear the nuances. IMO, the most important thing for a guitarist's guitar is that they're playing a guitar that they're comfortable with, one that gives them the feel they like, and one that inspires them.
Great freaking job dude. I'm proud of you. Something else you just proven that you may have known is that you don't need a fretboard or frets to get a quality guitar sound out of a guitar. The myth has been broken. The air guitar works just as well with the exception of not being able to press down on a fret board to get a sequence of individual notes. I wonder if anybody else has gone this far? Keep your thinking hat on and send over more videos as you come up with ideas in the music world. We gave you a thumbs up.
This video deserves to blow up. It really should be in the millions or tens of millions. So many guitarists should see this and there are a lot of guitarists in the world
@@planetdog1641 yeah, but people are still paying too much for hype, this video emphasizes what sounds like what & shows how to get closer to what u want starting with a vintage 1950s garage cured 2 x 4 edit: sunburst finish is extra
Eh. This video is flawed. It's connected to a huge wooden bench, and it uses the worst bridge possible for this test - The telecaster bridge, which contributes to to the majority of tone. Then to add insult to injury it's tested with a slide technique which is none to nullify tuning and tone issues. All in all... This video was a massive waste.
@@purrpocalypse yes, the overall guitar has to contributes to the tone. The vibrating strings are part of a system, not isolated on their own. Otherwise, all guitars would sound very similar instead of unique.
My sense is that pickups, picking distance from bridge, steel plastic or finger picking, equalizer and tone knob settings, volume and heat on your tube amp, and quality of the amp itself have the most produced role in tone. What we've got here is rather clear proof that the body and the headstock create negligible differences. This was a lot of work to make, so thanks Jim!
Ngl from the beginning it already sounds like snake oil bussines type a thing An electronic instrument, that is affected by it's materials? That just sounds weird, imagine if yamaha keyboards were "made of rose wood for better tone" No one would fuckin believe it 😂
All the guys over here at Gear ‘n Gigs really want to thank you for doing this video. It has given us a lot of conversational fodder to be sure, and has really changed our outlook on guitar tone. Really appreciate your hard work and diligence on this, and your scientific methodology is very professional. Well done sir!
Status > function. If someone released a mobile phone that had identical specs to the latest iPhone, but at a fraction of the cost, the effect on iPhone sales would be negligible. Same rules apply to pretty much every other product on the market.
@@SimpleManGuitars1973 only for those enlightened few. Most buyers of electric guitars will believe the myth, and prefer the shiny model. It's why folk buy an audi over a skoda, yet ostensibly the same device.
Ok... First off, thank you for all the effort you put into these tests! The entire guitar community is greatly in your debt. And I personally am grateful because I am a hobbyist guitar builder and modder. I am about to launch into building some custom designs, and this information really helps me with determining wood selection, etc. for my builds. You rock, my friend!
Your final result is what I've been trying to tell people for years! Considering the physics, all that's required is/are two fixed points in space, and a device/circuit which translates the vibration of the strings into signal.
I learned this when I built a cigar box guitar. The back of the box was detachable so when you took it off it was just a square frame and a neck with the strings hanging over empty space. Made of bolsa wood pine struts and glue. Sounded massive. That was the moment when I was like, tonewood is totally bs.
Being a lefty building my own guitars seemed handy, and I figured most of these things out in the process. The only thing I will say about guitars is that the feel of the instrument is most important and what makes you bond with a guitar. I love the feel of some guitars that my friends who play hate, they feel comfortable and easy to play to me and uncomfortable and clumsy to someone else. And in the end this will be the biggest factor in tone, because a guitar that you love to play will make you play the most and thus make you sound better. At the end of the day the tone is in the fingers, get a guitar that feels good to YOU and if that is a squire great, if it’s a custom shop great, just find a guitar that puts a smile on your face:)
A bad tone irritates me, but isn't as important to others. I build my own guitars, and amps. It's the only way to get what you really want. The way the amp responds is part of the feel thing to me. I hate fighting my gear to pull tone. I would rather try to control an unforgiving rig. To each their own.
I´m a lefty too and can relate to your comment. Ever since i started playing i´ve been forced to figure this stuff out, by making my own instruments and modifying others. I guess our harder path made us realize this kind of things way earlier, because for a normal, right handed player it´s easier to just buy stuff.
i have built over a dozen guitars. One thing ive found is the hight of the tail piece , relative to the bridge , greatly effects the tension on the strings . Different people will like different tension.
@@foylebutler8952 That's assuming your build included a tailpiece design. The Fender style equivalent would be through-body vs bridge through stringing.
Man, the amount of work you put into making this video was tremendous and every player out there should say thank you! That was hours of bench work that didn't make it into the video. Thank you!
I doubt that. Anyone that seriously collects knows that guitars are pickup platforms. Saddles make a tiny bit of difference but the sound of a guitar comes from its pickup. I have 25 guitars and each one has a different pickup. EMG's, DiMarzio, Seymour Duncan, Fender, Gibson, Danelectro, etc. I love them all.
@Mario Reyes I used to be a "stereophile". Every "high-end" store I went in to sold some sort of ultra-expensive snake oil. My favourite was speaker wire and devices to lift speaker wire off the ground. There is a story where the folks at McIntosh (if memory serves... which it often does not) did a blind test with one set of expensive speaker wires and then another set of expensive speaker wires. They had the stereophile press describe the two and choose which sounded best - which they did. They waxed poetically about wire A, and wire B with some choosing the former and the others choosing the latter. The only thing was, they used a coat hanger wire in place of expensive speaker wire - for both tests. You sound like the stereophile press in this story.
I thought a lot of times... "what if someone manage to make a guitar with no wood to test if tonewood is even real?" From a rational and logic point of view there should be no audible influence of the wood in a electric guitar, because it´s just a string atached and vibrating between two points made of metal, not wood. You really nailed it with this video, it´s excellent and opens the door to a lot more questions from here on.
The neck itself also has a resonance, as does the body but in a different way. While it does not alter the tone it does alter the stability of the tone. I like to think that each significant change has an effect on the degradation of the tone, which gives a characteristic especially in vintage instruments that we got used to.
What? It's bolted down to a massive wooden bench on one side, and a massive wooden shelve on the other. It's a fun experiment, but it's pseudoscientific and settles nothing.
@@transmundanemusic well said!! An “air guitar” in name only. And of course what the strings are mounted to affects the tone - the structure of the guitar (how it’s made, what it’s made of, its shape, its weight, the method of fixing body and neck, etc.) will all affect its resonant frequency and its frequency spectrum. This means that it will affect the way the guitar structure absorbs and dissipates (or indeed reinforces and returns) the energy of the strings to different extents at different frequencies. This is what is happening when you feel your electric guitar vibrating even when you play it totally unplugged. This means the structure of the guitar affects the way the strings vibrate. As the pickups produce a signal that is dependent upon the specific string vibration and its harmonic content the affect the guitar structure has on the string vibration will be translated into the signal from the pickups. If anyone tries to tell you that science proves only pickups and electronics matter on an electric guitar then this is a sure fire sign that they don’t actually understand physics at all 🤷🏼♂️
When you think about how sound is generated on an electric guitar, it's simply the vibration of the metal strings disturbing the electromagnetic field generated by the pickup. As you found out, the most important adjustments are the ones that tune the magnetic fields and filter the sound in electronics. The body, neck, and other parts of the construction have a much lower impact in that they can only tune how well the strings vibrate. Les Paul famously took a 4x4 post as a solid piece from the top of the neck to the base of the guitar. He carved the neck portion down so it played like a regular guitar neck. Then he cut off the sides of an acoustic and glued them to the sides of the 4x4. Apparently the solid piece of wood provided a sustain for the strings that was unmatched by guitars with a separate neck and body. At least this is the story my professors at Full Sail told back in the 90s.
There's actually a great video where a guy goes to the Gibson museum to play a reproduction of that first plank guitar. Details the history, too. First thing Les thought of was a railroad tie for best sustain because was most dense thing he could find!
It's likely that wood and construction has *some* impact on sustain, but I don't know how significant it is. A rubber-bodied guitar might achieve the same tone as a normal guitar, but I'd expect the vibration to be damped out more quickly. That's an extreme example, of course.
@@JMMC1005 Since tuning the string over the magnetic field is one of the largest impacts on sound, a rubber body guitar will probably fail because it can't maintain it's shape. Unless that rubber was reinforced with something, you probably wouldn't even be able to tune it. I've seen tons of polymer based bodies or resin pour style bodies from people's personal projects. I've even seen some aluminum bodied guitars (a Japanese company makes them). Biggest factor here is the rigidity of the materials.
And the only reason he put the sides of the acoustic on was because people would ridicule the "broomstick" instead of recognizing its amazing sound and the performance.
@@berinloritsch Well, yeah, that's true. I used rubber as an extreme example, but it wouldn't really work for other reasons. Interestingly, the guy has just released a new video investigating the effect of construction on sustain! I'm off to watch it.
Dude the degree to which you test each INDIVIDUAL FACTOR ONE BY ONE..........this video qualifies as "legendary-tier". Not to mention the filming and general attention to detail. I still can't wrap my head around how you got so much detail into a video so concise as this. Just amazing work, nothing more to be said. Back in the day this video would have five stars
As an engineer, I approve your process. I have always predicted that the pickups are at least 99% of the tone. The only idea I have had on how much a role the wood has on the tone is that the vibration you feel in the wood is energy lost from the string. So a guitar that vibrates more pulls more from the strings. This has been my guess on why something like a carbon fiber guitar would have more sustain, less energy is lost from the string to the body.
Paul Reed Smith in some video used the phrase "Guitar building is a subtractive equation" which makes perfect sense. Your materials and construction only ever remove frequencies.
As a rocket scientist i don't really approve of his methods. Hold on , I'm going to call my buddy, he's a chef i need to know his thoughts on this. Ok I'm back,he wasn't too convinced so he called his buddy, he's a astro physicist so he believes makes him even more qualified to make observations about guitar tones. He said that his conclusions after carefully removing them from his human exit hole match up with yours. You sir or Madam are a genius.
@@AllCarsUnited just saying that as someone who spends all day determining the effects different variables impact on an overall system, his process was solid. Unlike alot of other videos where people change multiple variables without thinking it through. What rockets do you work on?
This is amazing! Of course I think it’s amazing because it supports what I’ve believed to be true for years. My field of expertise is in coatings, lacquers and poly’s. All of my products are applied to a wide variety of wood. When people say they can hear the difference between finishes and woods on electrics it drives me insane. I’ve heard people we all admire say a guitar coated in poly is heavier than one with lacquer. I have a $5k scale that can’t tell the difference so I for sure don’t believe a human can. I can go on and on about the crazy things I’ve heard from experienced players and makers. Great job and I hope you don’t get to much hate. ✌️
HAHAH YEAH THIS 😂 "So you're telling me you can hear the difference when my tuner, and the spectrogram shows no difference? That sounds like information bias to me"
Yeah a Squire or Epiphone with some Seymour Duncan pickups is good enough. Plus, plenty of practice, creativity and motivation. Also a pro set up will make it comfortable. I have an Epi wannabe Jimmy Page set up and a Rivers Cuomo (Weezer) Squire strat.
People get hyped about a topic and then naturally gravitate towards validating themselves as expert gurus. Reality is much different then the perceptions they believe to be scientific truth is actually rooted in non-scientific biases based off a number of factors like idolized preferences, peer acceptance, mainstream approval and other stuff that gives them the validation they seek. It's all a farce.
I'll let you in on a secret. It doesn't matter what equipment you use to measure it, if someone's ear likes the sound of something more they are going to say its better. It blows my mind how many people are up in arms about this. Who cares buy and play what you want. Coat it in what you want. Use whatever wood or material you want.
@@The_Cat_Authority The real issue is the spread of misinformation which leads people to *think* that they know what they want, and beleive that they need to spend ridiculous amounts of money on boutique builds just in order to achieve a great tone. A lot of the time we don't actually know what we want, we're just going off of what we've heard other more experienced players say, mixed with our own confirmation bias. We might think that we know what we want, but in reality we're often working off of bad information that's been passed down from player to player across generations. This is the first time I've seen someone seriously attempt to test some of these commonly held opinions regarding tone. For me, this video was certainly eye opening, and I'd love to see more tests like this in the future.
i've been saying this for years building basses. unless something is actively dampening your tone like a VERY poor bridge design, 95 percent of tone is the electronics and strings. and yes i considered string length (scale) as part of "string" category. i have a personal collection of like 15 instruments and i used the exact same electronics and pickup height and they all use stringjoy strings and all the 34 inch basses sound the same and all the 32-29 fanned fret ones sound the same. the same exact setup on a 36 inch scale sounds different and the one with baritone humbuckers sound completely different. it's an electric instrument, folks. most of your sound are the electrical parts and the only thing that interacts with the magnetic coils are the damn ferrous strings. unless you make the body out of frigging bed foam or wet modeling clay, you;re not dampening the tone enough to matter from one wood to the next. i got a buddy who had a 120 dollar squire i improved just by dropping in a really expensive nice pickguard loaded with active pickups and it sounds exactly like the totally different thousand dollar American fender with the same pickguard set. Tonewood is 99 percent mystical bullshit.
bullshit. if anything its a lot more easy to hear a difference of the body resonance with a bass. they all simply have different modal resonances, even with the same neck/pickups. I don't know if you've actually measured anything or just saying this out of the blue lmao
No it's not. You guys keep saying that but then you admit that make ng a guitar out of clay or whatever would dampen the sound. So tome wood is a thing. Certain woods can increase your sustain and thus change how the guitar interacts with you and due to the sustain the strings will oscillate for longer and the pickups will pick that up. It can even be measured in a lab and you can see the soundwaves on a graph. Just changing out the bridge material will change the tonal spectrum on the graph. So it's not BS it's just that some can't pick up on the nuances an some can. Also, you can clearly hear the difference in sound between his 2x4 and the Tele. At least I can. It's so fucking obvious. He didn't even measure the sound waves to show the difference. Y'all are such idiots.
I think in terms of electric instruments this is correct, but for acoustic instruments like violin, cello, and especially double bass this is simply not true.
@hgblackshadowmaster Carved top acoustic guitars fall under this category as well. Braced-to-hell modern boxes, still pretty significant. But too far out of the point of the video I guess. Any change in a system in going to result in *some* change for player or observer, placebo or not. It's just a question of how much of that is worth it to you as a player, right? The real issue is the mark-up and how people are sold *essentials* or *upgrades* that aren't. Oh well. Fools and foxes. Ugh, tonewood threads are worse than ligature threads on woodwind forums.
@@redsky1433 In fact, he did. Leo chose the woods he used for his guitars because they were sturdy without being too heavy, and they were cheaply available in 1951.
@@zhiracs yeah, certain guitar woods have still benefits. I dont personally like basswood much cause it get dings and chips way too easy compared to mahogany. Every Ibanez RG I have owned have their paint chipped pretty quick and sometimes I dont even recall hitting them anywhere but still the dings appear out from nowhere
9:16 I've always said most of my tone comes from two Honda engines next to my guitar. Seriously thanks so much for making this video. This is why I play G&L guitars -- they use the same pickups even in their import models. The rest is just playability and looks. Although I don't regret buying my US-made Doheny -- it has those two in spades.
G&L are absolutely stellar and massively underrated guitars. Only played a handful of them imported as well as USA models and they blow the doors off of every Fender I've ever played. Leo wasnt lying when he said he'd made the best guitars of his life at G&L.
"a 2x4 plank guitar might not be enough to push past deeply rooted beliefs". Oh man, nothing will. Just saw a video by a well known guitar reviewer saying this doesn't really prove wood doesn't matter. To me, just the mere fact that the air guitar sounds close to an actual guitar (and it sounds pretty close) should debunk eveything about wood. Great video!
You absolute legend! I found you on a Karl Jobst video too, thank you for teaching me how to paint cars. First video of yours I watched was the fiberglass bumper repair years ago haha. Cheers mate
Man, I've seen some people kick over a sacred cow or two, but you cut it up and bar-b-qued it! I build guitars, and have gotten in some deep and contentious discussions over this. To me, the key factors are strings, amplifier, and decent pickups (and not necessarily Seymour Duncan's, or DiMarzios), and what someone else here said, the player.
but how can we explain the massive differences between Fenders, gibsons and PRS guitars for example? And not only the originals, but any knockoff with those shapes as well. I have a PRS with split coils and it sounds nothing like my strat even with the same amp and same settings. Strats quack, teles twang, gibsons growl and PRSs purr, and that doesn't come from just pickups I guess.
@@rockboy360Massive differences because all the guitars you mention have extremely different pickups and other features that relies on pickup positions. And even if you chose 2 singles, or two humbuckers, they will often dont sound the same if they are not the same, that's even the point to make different pickups. Strats sounds strats only because they have specifically design pick-ups. Put some Gibsons humbuckers on it and it wont sound strat anymore.
I have a cheap Tele I retrofitted with Humbuckers. Sounds almost exactly like my Gibson SG. Whatever difference is there, it's the pickup position and height, but even I have a hard time telling the difference.
Electronics technician here. If the pick-ups we're sensitive enough to be affected by "tone wood" or the finish on the neck ,your guitar would be an extremely good microphone. External noise would vibrate the strings enough to be picked up. You'd literally hear your own breathing and pulse coming out of the amp when the guitar rests against your chest. While it's possible to make pickups that sensitive , we don't ( for obvious reasons ) A couple things you missed that actually matters in very slight ways. 1.The distance between the strings matters , classical guitar necks have a cleaner sound for "fingerstyle" because less vibration is induced into the other strings. But few people can hear the difference which is why electric guitars with classic necks are rare 2. A stiffer neck and body gives you more "sustain"....which the amp can also do. And that's about it. Everything else is just vanity and marketing.
Small correction in its place: A stiffer neck a body does NOT give you more sustain,- it increases the structural integrity of the instrument,- makes sure it doesn´t break or rips apart under heavy use, tension or load. Sustain comes from vibration of the strings NOT being transferred into the bridge, saddle and tuners and on into the wood, but instead vibrating the string more by the vibrations running back and forth the string for longer thus giving the pickup time to pick up a longer lasting vibration turning that in time into a longer lasting signal.
No... the body vibration resonates back with the strings and alters the way the strings vibrate which IS picked up by pickups. That's not how body wood affects the tone. It's not like the pickups pick up the body. The resonance of the body and the strings together change each other and the pickups pick up the strings. The body resonance just alters the string resonance. Yeah it's not a huge impact either way but I think you misunderstand the mechanism for that.
Like the weight and material of the body determines what frequencies the wood will interfere with, and "steal" those frequencies energy from the strings. And therefore the signal from the pickup from the string vibrating is different because the body affects the string vibration.
Ooooh, looks like we have a c-c-c-ca-cat fight on our hands. If you don't mind, I'll spend the time practicing some of the nice country licks Jim was playing.
The main reason the air guitar sounds so good is that you are using the air in a very old shop, which gives it that vintage sound.
The workbench the strings are attached to is from the '90s. That's basically vintage tonewood right there, bro.
@@DesertDweller1 can't argue with that either
Next video, moving the bench outside into the open air to test.
@@canadianguitarguru ...he's gotta figure out how to attach the strings to a floating bridge using magnets.
...alnico or ceramic tho???🤔🤔🤔
Having played the air guitar for years it always sounds exactly just like the album. Remarkable.
Without your facial expression and tone of voice, I think people are missing how funny your comment was. Good one!
Let's make an air band. I'll be on the air drums
I think facial expression is the single most important aspect of air guitar tones.
That's what I've found anyway, after 35+ years of research.
LOL!
No wonder so many players are just as good as I am!?!
I had noted but never considered air guitars never need to be tuned and are always in tune. Facial expressions, no beard or beard, and now mask and it’s types 😷 are in need of consideration.
Take a moment to appreciate the amount of string tuning this video takes.
For REAL!
Dear God, I hate retuning!
@@TotalDec Then you would really love setting up a floyd rose
or how many strings a rock band goes through in one tour
I’m glad my first guitar was a floating bridge so I’m used to the tuning of each string 20 times before it gets to pitch
Dude, you have literally destroyed a whole lot of money-grubbing marketing that we've been fed for many decades! In the musical world, this is one huge achievement, and a fantastic service to the global music world!!!
What an absolute legend of a video. VERY interesting
Agreed.
Will the air guitar chug?
But will it Chug? I smell a Collab maybe?? 🤣
Did the video chug though?
For chugging you better try the air guitar.
My list of most important tone factors:
1. The player
2. Pickups
3. How cool the guitar looks
4. The audience's blood alcohol content
5. How your preferred deity is feeling on that particular day
Why this comment isn't getting enough love is baffling to me
This is spot-on.
That pretty much nails it
Number 5 seems particularly important. I swear I can plug into the same amp, same settings, same guitar, on two different days and get completely different sounds sometimes.
#1 should be "the vocalist"
I think air from the equator brought north by the gulf stream would make that air guitar sound more organic and giving it that ethereal tone that you just can't get anyway else.
Or a fart after consuming loads of ghost peppers!
brand new sentence right there
@@fleecefoxes6471 Muchas gracias.
@@InTheSh8 Of course the peppers would have to be from heirloom seeds from India's NE high hills. Otherwise you wouldn't get that mojo , man.
gulfstream is in the ocean, you mean jetstream
Man that's some serious tone coming off that bench. Is it rosewood or maple?
it's actually mahogany
Those Honda engines really make the tone something special.
The first comparison strum on the air guitar is one of the funniest moments in guitartube history
An air guitar has all tones built in. This is a well known fact.
It’s not an air guitar. It’s a workbench guitar. Guitars can’t be made out of air.
I bust out laughing, that was perfect
@@brandonmccarron2920 I was looking at the comments confused where the air guitar was in the video. Then I realized oh yeah people are regarded.
@@averagereviews3389 it's right there in the video
Brazilian students of luthiery produced a paper in 2010, where they tested 9 guitar bodies, with 9 very different woods. They even had a mechanized strumming machine, that achieved the same strumming every time, and they concluded that same as this video. The paper is called "Sobre o acoplamento corda-corpo em guitarras elétricas e
sua relação com o timbre do instrumento", and can easily be found via Google. It's in Portuguese though.
Interesting
podda maneirao te amo cara vou ler isso obg pela dica
In a strange twist, I minored in Brazilian Portuguese in college (university of Tennessee) Thanks for posting.
I read it. Translation to English--they used the same necks and pickups on 9 different Telecaster bodies of different woods. No one could hear a difference nor could they measure a difference. They also measured the vibration of the wood and calculated how much that changed the string vibration and the amount was so neglible that they discounted it as possibly changing tone.
massa legal vou pesquisar
The message I get from this is: buy yourself a cheap guitar with a neck that feels comfortable to you, replace the cheap pickups with decent ones, have the guitar properly set up by a pro, and you're in business. Great video !
First take lessons, study and practice a lot, along with what you said.
Then once you practice a lot, maybe get better pots if needed so you can have a more linear volume change for the volume knob and EQ change for the tone knob. Also tuners if the OG tuners are crappy and can't stay in tune.
@@MikeSW
If that's your experience i'm sorry to say that you've been scammed, me and my friends have built ridicilously specced partscasters and mod rods in the 500e ballpark
@@MikeSW One (potential) benefit of buying a 'project' guitar and upgrading it as you go along is that you don't have to pay the full price upfront, you can upgrade stuff here and there as your skill/commitment increases. The only downside to that is that you can't compare your progress on a like-for-like setup.
And hey, most folks looking to mod their car/bike/computer/guitar probably enjoy tinkering and 'making it their own' instead of just buying something off the shelf.
I have nothing against buying something off the shelf, but a beginner isn't likely to know what they want/need at the outset.
@@MikeSW I can see where you come from. Legit some guitar brands have better value on their guitar than buying cheaper and upgrade later.
100% accurate. I used to believe neck wood mattered the most until a pro luthier and builder did a deep dive with me into how pickups work. By FAR the biggest factor.
When I was a young man, ands full of unwarranted opinions, I swore that only maple fretboards could give me the "tone" I had developed. I played religiously, tweaking every aspect of my tone until it was perfect, but always swearing by the maple fretboard.
Then, one day, I was travelling, and didn't have my beloved Candy Apple Red Strat (I still believe that Candy Apple Red produces the best tone) and was invited to sit in on a jam by my uncle.
I told him that I didn't have my Strat, but he promised to loan me his. When I got to the jam, I was appalled to learn that his Strat had a rosewood fretboard. I resigned myself to sounding like shit. I didn't have my amp. I didn't have my guitar. The fretboard was god damned rosewood. I sat down to play.
A couple of hours into the session, I realized that not only was my tone good, but it sounded like my tone. That's when I realized that it wasn't the tweaking of knobs that had polished my tone. It was the hours of relentless playing.
Since then, I've owned and played some beautiful guitars, and some real pieces of shit. If I can get them to stay in tune for a little while, they all sound good.
@earhornjones You got an audible laugh out of your Cany Apple tone remark 🤣
Ya I'm not sure sure if it's my age, or the trends of the time, but I'm observing more of a demand for critical thinking and proof in recent years.
pickups mic the sound of the guitar. bad sounding electric unplugged=bad or stale sound when amplified
@@theuserthatishereYou’re completely wrong here. Pickups DO NOT work like a microphone. It doesn’t pick up sound, it picks up the string vibration through an electro magnetic field. Thus, the pickup matters more than anything else on the guitar.
AMEN ! Pick-ups on electric guitar and nothing more. Wood on acoustic guitar
"This list is long, but it's finite. So I started chipping away at it." This is a beautiful message applicable well beyond the bounds of this video.
Thats how I handle the ladies.
Well said!
Good job! I work as a postpro audio engineer. What regularly happens is this. A client sitting next to me demands a certain change whilst I'm changing something else. I go back to the part that he wants to have changed to have a listen first. Client says: "thanks that's better"
Also the amount of times I heard stuff change whilst working on a bypassed plugin...
Expectation plays such a big role in perception it's insane.
DFA Slider?
I had a job for several years selling men clothes, One day someone walked in saw a nice sweater and said I want that...I looked up the right size for him and it fitted perfectly.
He said its too small... Well give me your sweater and I will look for you in the basement if we have another one in the good size... I folded the same sweater nicely in shape again, put it in a plastic bag, went upstairs in the store again and handed the sweater over to the guy, he put it on ( again...:-) ) and said, : "Yeah much better !!, Thank you......
It's like wine tasting. Same wine could be $5 or $100, depends if you ate pizza yesterday, or a maybe dog barked before your sip
Exactly. Watching this video, the 2x4 sounds clearly better to me ever time. But I fully expect I wouldn't be able to pick it out blind.
Producer: "Can we make that more 'orange'?" Me: "Sure, you dial it in. Use that EQ. Roll off a bit of 5K to start..." Producer: "yeah, much better." Me knowing: (that EQ is bypassed)
You deserve a medal for this. I am not surprised in the slightest by the result so far. Tonewood? The wood is selected for cost. Shape? How well does Bo Diddley's square guitar play quarter notes? neck material, because somehow maple has "more snap". Please. You have shown the emperor has no clothes. Well done!
He actually has no body.
@Mario Reyes Tell me, on Strats made in Mexico, are the boards that make up the body laminated together with Tone Glue?
@Mario Reyes I can PROMISE you, In a double blind study... you would not be able to significantly differentiate the difference.
Data does not lie, Science does not lie bro. I don't care if you have been playing for 90 years. That means nothing. Take a double blind study, and you will see how laughably wrong you are
@Mario Reyes tone wood only matters on acoustics not plugged in. PERIOD. Acoustics are actually getting their sound from bouncing off the body wood. It doesn’t matter at all on electrics because none of that is happening.
@Mario Reyes I wonder if someone with a good quality spectrum analyzer and speakers measured the sound what it would show. That would be more definitive then an untrained ear. Of course a person would have to be technically proficient at analyzing sound in the frequency domain.
Best few minutes I have spent on a vid like this in years. Thank you for the clarity. I will bet the make of strings will also be the other significant factor
I can only imagine how long this took to produce. Just the editing alone must have taken days.
Absolutely brilliant!
I'm seeing a lot of wood shavings around the shop there so I'd imagine the tone wood in the air is helping the air guitar get those nice, warm tones!
Maybe the bench is made out of some quality wood that you can't get anymore these days :D
I think maybe the engineering prowess of Honda’s engines blessed the air in the garage which made the tone so good
I just wanted to say MST3K is awesome.
I'm telling you, it's the old Honda engines holding down the bench. lol
In recent years I already had heavy suspicions that 90% of the value in an expensive guitar comes from how comfortable/enjoyable it is to play, as well as how well it stays in tune (that's where things like the construction, hardware and especially the neck come in place), because the other 10% value could at the very least be satisfyingly obtained through the electronics, setting and amp combination. On your final test, I couldn't help but have a smile of my face.
Yep
And with a little research, some basic tools, and a cheap guitar to practice on, you can do the comfort work yourself.
My $250 Ibanez plays as well as any $1000+ off the shelf model, simply because I went through the trouble of doing the fretboard work myself.
I've got s pretty extensive collection and have to say, my PRS CE tops any of my other more expensive guitars. Why? The fit, weight,small attention to detail
I used to work on guitars in a busy well renowned London workshop and 70 % of our work was properly setting up new and old guitars and it always gave me a sense of pride when you took a loved (new or old) instrument that felt s**t under the fingers set it up and then seeing the delight on the owners face when they started playing it. Some manufacturers were better than overs but still for the money of some new instruments out there you'd have thought theyd set them up better to sell more! Then again it gave me an income.
@@coyotejohn3101 Not all of us are good with our hands in that way or have the space or tools to do it!
@@TheBanana93 So many guitars seem to arrive at the music shops with horrible setup. I have changed many people's idea of what a basic guitar setup is, how a guitar can feel, with a truss rod adjustment and lowered nut height. Tools required - a single allen key and a piece of sandpaper on a flat bench. Rarely have I come across a guitar that I could not improve in this way. It seems to me most of us are afraid to attempt any adjustment. I was terrified for years until I tried. My understanding of the instrument and ability to play the instrument skyrocketed once I took the leap.
Great respect for the tremendous amount of work that went into making this video.
I spent about two years switching out every part there was on my guitars and came to the conclusion that I should just play more. This video proves that.
This. And the fact that there are some guitars more suitable for specific genres than others. I‘ve blown a shit load of money to transform my Les Paul into a modern metal mashine when all I had to do was go out and buy a freaking Ormsby.
Now you're talking
@@flowryan5829 After being totally obsessed with gear and even being a complete freak with small things like capacitor values I found that almost none of it really matters. Just play. You can play metal on a Telecaster and you can play jazz on a Jem. A versatile amp seems to be the one thing I needed to get every sound I wanted.
@@timbervandenhul9383 you are completely right. The guitar doesn‘t matter for the most part. BUT: You can‘t tune down with a 24.75 inch guitar down the same way you could with a 25.5-27.5 inch multiscale guitar.
That‘s what I meant.
@@flowryan5829 you can compensate with thicker strings to some degree, how low are we talking?
I was always very skeptical of the whole “mahogany body gives warmth and the flame maple top adds a shimmering top end” and I’m like nah pretty sure you mostly hear your pickups and amp. This confirms that very cool
I hear those kinds of phrases all the time lol this video definitely debunks that
People literally hear with their eyes. Put both in a blind test and now they can't tell the difference.
It definitely adds flare to your playing :)
I would simply choose whichever wood is least susceptible to changing shape in different temp/humidity.
@@katyungodly there are guitars made of metal or carbon. They're really underrated.
You’ve done a great service to the guitar community with this video.
and a great disservice to guitar centers world wide lol
No amount of evidence to the contrary has *ever* been able to convince The True Believers.
@@Jimiz666 exactly my thoughts. You can't change the views of evangelists with science.
Maybe most of the sound differences are heard acoustically
Years ago William Gelvin from Gelvin Custom Guitars, throughout many others, made videos debunking tonewood, the backlash was hard for him he ended up just stop talking about it. He was kind enough to pull up videos, while he was trying to impose facts and science over the discussion table, which breakdown the physics on this subject and the videos are still up on his channel.
He deserve some recognition, i'm pretty sure this video and it's impact was possible thanks to all the prior attempts to debunk the myths on this tonewood bs.
This great experiment confirms some notions I’ve had based on my background in physics and electrical engineering. The heavy and stiff body and neck of a solid body guitar just doesn’t absorb a lot of the energy from the waves that propagate between the nut and bridge. That’s why you don’t hear much sound when a solid body guitar is being played without an amp. Since a solid body doesn’t interact much with the strings, it has little effect on the sound. That leaves the pickups and pots and capacitors, along with the strings themselves. So: with same strings, pickups, spacings and lengths, pots and caps, the sound is gonna be much the same. Other effects are subtle. I’m not saying they don’t exist or that they can’t be heard or that they don’t matter. Just that strings, pickups, spacings and lengths, pots and caps dominate. Then there’s the effect of the amp, which can be anything but subtle!
Thanks!!!!
You left out the speakers, which are more important than the amplifier (as long as it is operating in the linear region.)
Wait a sec. So when you have a hollow body guitar and a solid body, they sound drastically different - is that just pickups too, then? Are we agreeing to that? Because this guy has a no-body guitar, comparing to a solid body and it sounds exactly the same.
What say you Physics-man?
@@Sparksnorthern The so-called air guitar is still connected to two large, stiff masses and couples into them as well as the air and the pickups. When a string oscillates, it causes tension on the string. This pulls against the supports on both ends of the string at the frequency of oscillation. People who own double neck guitars can demonstrate that you can play one neck and pick up the sound using the pickups on the other neck, since the energy is conducted through the body into the other set of strings.
@@Sparksnorthern The air guitar in this video is a lot closer to a solid body than to a hollow body. What makes the hollow body sound different is that it has a resonating cavity -- the air guitar does not (well, it kinda does, but it's as big as the whole room and it would need to be empty to really work).
I think the biggest determining factor in guitar tone is what size Honda engines you are using to hold down the shelf! Thank you for an excellent video that proves the most important parts of electric guitar tone have nothing to do with wood
You say that in jest but as a scientist who has designed studies, this must be taken into account. This is a very valid "Feasibility study" (in science words) but I can see some issues. As mentioned above, one must take into consideration the possiblity that the 4 different guitars were actually all made of very resonant wood. Easy to think "well a 2x4 could not be resonant" but how do we know that. Perhaps mount the exact same experiment to a piece of Trex decking (plastic 2x4). Also try it with a metal bar (much harder to do). Same with the air guitar. I would like to see a further comparison using plastic or dense foam in the shape of a guitar and a metal shelf and bar mimicing the other 2. Again, scientifically speaking, it is entirely possible that 4 very resonant woods were chosen here. This is not to detract from the excellent experiment that was done. This is outstanding and needs to be continued. I would be willing to chip in on some materials to see more!
and if they're v-tec and which generation plays a big role too!
@@drjsmajor if we were doing an academic study of this topic then yes I’m with you and we it would be cool to take this even further, but I think this video was clear enough and pretty much proved the only thing that matters is the electronics.
Think they were Honda tonecasters! 🤣
Honda is leaving F1 so they can start supplying power units for guitars.
As someone who works in electronics repair, this was the result I expected. Your thought process and thoroughness were a pleasure to watch.
Yeah also have a background in electronics and similarly my first thought was anything affecting the electronic line is going to be the most important next to the player.
@@larryboles5064 the sound in an electric comes from the pick up configuration and the way the strings are setup, so scale and tension & bridge/trem setup. Body type does has an effect as why an archtop has a different sound, but for solids not as much, there's a slight influence in timbre and sustain but it's trumped by the pick up config and bridge setup.
The thought process was the scientific method.
I've always suspected it made little to no difference. I used to paint guitars occasionally for a music shop and always used to receive the instruments in parts, not being a musician myself I did ask the shop owner if the sound might change if I was doing a paint job that needed a lot of layers and clear coat and he waved a little notebook at me and said "As long as I don't lose this it'll sound the same when it leaves as it did when it arrived". He was of the opinion that as long as the electronics were exactly right then the rest was irrelevant.
So he wasn't saying that as long as the money keeps coming in don't worry about it?
No, I believe the notebook was a diagram of the electronics.
@@Art-zs6sl He wasn't a greedy man as far as I could work out, it was a little local shop where he sold and repaired used instruments. He never charged me any commission for supplying me with work when he was entitled to it (not sure on the legality but I offered him 10% and he refused), he just took an hours labour for taking the guitar apart and putting it back together when I was done
Always coming back to watch this video. It's unbelievable.
The pickup height adjusted was groundbreaking to me. Unbelievably clear.
I love the way you handled and navigated your way through this experience. It really reminded me of conducting statistical experiments.
Pickup height is such a massive factor with tone. For high gain it lends or reduces clarity, but with cleaner sounds you really hear dynamic ranges like crazy. Along with that, adjusting the pole pieces changes things (being careful not to unscrew a pole completely!).
Absolutely STELLAR video! Fascinating and shocking. I’m gonna be paying a LOT more attention to pickup height now! Thank you!
a 2x4 guitar would make a good step-dad guitar.
Cool seeing you here step-dad.
.
This guy really understands the importance of research methodology
There aren’t enough variables in his test to declare that body wood doesn’t matter.
@Mario Reyes The nut makes direct contacting with the vibrating string, the wood below the bridge doesn't. 🤦🏻♂️
if he knew how to research he would have seen that all this has already been thouroughly tested by guitar makers...
@@myname-mz3lo I would counter with the sales factor. Who would buy a banana gaffa taped to a wall?: apparently it was worth $120,000!!
@@myname-mz3lo guitar makers have a very big incentive to keep the myth of electric guitar tone wood going as it makes them a hellla lot of money
Hi Jim.
Commenting again here to let you know this video has changed my life as a recording engineer and producer of artists. This video, and the others youve made, have changed everything for me. I really do owe you.
Thanks man.
Hi, In case you missed it... Jim attached that guitar bridge to a WOODEN workbench that probably weighs 75 pounds and claimed there was no wood.
@@joea9608 there was still no difference in tone though. if the wood was that important then 70 extra pounds of wood would make a huge difference, right?
@@seralouise. You may not have heard a difference but others do. I wish people could just accept that.
@ u hear what u want to hear. tonewood is just marketing jargon from the times when they tried to market electric guitars like luxury furniture items. u say the name of a high quality wood and u instruct all the salesmen to inform the consumers that the wood is smth that they need in order to sound good. the limited resonance of a solid chunk of of wood is not what is being picked up and amplified by the magnets in the pickups. its all the strings, and whatever u put in the chain after it. the wood in guitars does not breathe it, it does not resonate and it is not alive. if it did matter then alternate materials like aluminum, carbon fiber, resin, fiberglass etc etc would not be viable but they are and have been in use by many notable professional musicians for decades.
Nice demonstration of the importance of "tone air" in the guitar's sound. You didn't mention where you got the air from, though. Next we can see a comparison of air from different workplaces, public parks, and sports stadiums to see the impact each has on overall tone.
I use only a pure nitrogen-filled room for recording. It adds so much warmth and sparkle to the tone. Very analog.
@@cullendelmore2614 i sugest you to try a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. Realy sparkling tone and mind blowing experience guaranteed ;)
And you also forgot to mention to possibility of using "chambered air", a very common technique for achieving lighter bodiless bodies.
I like recording my air guitar in LA to get a super dirty tone.
Gotta love that stadium rock tone. It must be from all the sweat left hanging in the air by the sports-ball athletes. I'm pretty sure American football sounds the best with basketball being a close second.
Well done, man!! Bravo!
You know the pups are the king of the tone on an electric.
And that speaker, it really does affect the sound of the amp, because, well, obviously.
Now you have a great video to direct morons and bass players to.
Glen, it‘s clearly the tone wood that makes the difference 😏🙈🤘
Awesome. I was just going to link you to this video!
Although wood is useless for changing the actual tone, a guitar made of better quality wood will stay in tune more consistently through temperature and humidity changes in the environment. And what good is a guitar with a great tone if it doesn't stay in tune for a whole song? (ask Gibson LOL). If you're gigging indoors, outdoors, summer, winter, etc you need something that will be reliable.
Maybe we should shift fully into making guitars out of synthetic materials, since it doesn't affect the tone anyway, and they won't be affected by the environment.
@@SpotlightKid83 That's really not a terrible idea. It might even be cheaper to make guitars with synthetic materials.
This could have been a Mythbusters episode. I love how such a scientific approach has been taken in this analysis. Absolute genius. The best analysis of its kind in the history of electric guitar I would say.
Doesn't have 30 minutes of ads
Still a purely subjective test. He should have recorded the audio signals, and shown how much the audio signal matched or didn’t with each change. That would have been far more definitive
@@eurly93 LMAO. It sounds the same. It is the same. It's the same. The same.
S A M E.
@@eurly93false
@@eurly93 would the difference matter though if you can hardly hear it at all?
let's say he did that and they didn't perfectly align, what would it matter?
your ears are not hearing a graph that shows slight inconsistency.
what you are _hearing_ is nearly indistinguishable.
Literally the BEST video I’ve ever seen on this subject ! Thank you for taking the time to film it
Awesome to see someone finally crush the nonsense theory of “tone wood” as pertains to electric guitars. I’ve owned Strats and Teles with both maple and rosewood necks, ash and alder bodies (as well as Les Pauls with chambered and solid bodies) and always found there to be a bigger difference in tone between two IDENTICAL guitars than two versions of the same guitar. It always came down to pickup / string height, tolerances of the tone caps, and even slight differences amongst pickups from the same manufacturer.
Excellent and entertaining video !
Well, maybe the wood doesnt affect the sound that much, but, they do play a very important role in tune stability, how it gets old, comfort, the looks, i mean, as seen on this video, the tone is the least important thing if were talking about wood, but it is important in some other aspects as an instrument.
They forget the reason gibson and fender sounds very different unplugged is Because of the construction.
Scale length and neck joint.
Also fender telecaster/strat has cavity under the pickguard unlike the les paul/sg which is completely solid which is why they sound more resonant.
@@franciscobravoortiz566 sure but the discussion here is only about tone, the whole theory about how much wood affects tone. Aesthetics and stability are not so controversial as the tone.
@@melodica5407 my strat is more resonant than my Les Paul.
@@melodica5407 are u gonna play your electric guitar unplugged tho? No so it doesn’t matter
I think "tone wood" in electrics is a carry-over from acoustic instruments where the wood really does make a difference.
I think that's a very intelligent theory.
musician and guitarists are just kind of gullible and absurd and very very superstitious
I think this is an insightful, mature, and open minded thread of comments.
How the guitar sounds acoustically is how the guitar sounds, the pickup is just a microphone and some have characteristics that also change the sound but electrically instead of how the strings sound
@@c.a.k.comedy692 A pickup is not a microphone. Watch the video.
I was really indecisive the other day pondering if I should buy a 50yo wooden table and a vintage honda motor to set-up some strings and play live, and after watching this video I've never been so sure of anything in my entire life
🤘🤣
Or just a cheapo guitar kit with the best pickups and hardware you can buy. You can give it a cool paint job even.
The only trouble with this is bring it to gigs!😊
@@iamoraal it sounds so good, gigs will come to him instead.
finally somebody gets the video
This is a FANTASTIC video. The "air guitar" alone is a piece of art
I don't have a guitar yet and as a habitual overthinker, this helps take the pressure off of choosing
Just buy an epiphone les paul
Just get a guitar that looks fockin sick mate, and when you feel like it, look into guitars you like the sound of and stick the pickups from that guitar in your guitar.
Dont listen to the epiphone guy. Buy a guitar you like with pickups that suits your genre if you have the financial ability to choose. However focus on tuning stability and playability if you're on a budget.
It’s not an air guitar. It’s a workbench guitar.
Find one that feels good in your hands and is striking enough that you can't help but pick it up every time you walk by it. This is good advice in choosing a wife, too!
I think the bench with the Honda engines had more sustain! Awesome video!
i wonder if its “neck” has more or less give
@@bad1080 I prefer a Harley at the low E, and a Norton at the high E. More oomph in the bottom end and clearer highs.
I hope Epiphone buys him and comes out with a more affordable variant of the bench
I would hazard a guess it's because less energy is being lost in the neck
Honda engines last longer, so yeah, stands to reason....
I’m a physicist so this is exactly my kind of thing. The only thing I’d like to add is some more objective measurements. Compare EQ curves, time how long a note rings out, etc. I appreciate your approach of using amped sound as the true test, but it would be interesting to see if there’s objective differences, especially given that they might become more apparent in different contexts.
total time of a string vibration of course will be different between materials because of damping but in practical application (material being rigid enough to hold tuning) any difference will be well below noise floor of a pickup )
someone did a study like this (can't find the link at the moment). They made "guitars" out of planks of wood, mounted a pickup/hardware, and measured the signal straight into the DAW. The researchers found minor spectral differences between guitars of different woods. They also claim most listeners could pick out the unique recording when given three to analyze. All that being said, a practical test like this video is very exciting to me. If wood makes THAT little of a difference in the finished product, great guitars can be cheaper and gorgeous guitars made from WHATEVER can be commonplace
Taylor, there are already various studies with frequency curves as you say, even a Thesis. There are also videos on that. But for papers for instance, search for "Vibroacustical Study of the Solid-Body Electric Guitar" from Yo Fujiso of the Chalmers University of Technology (2009) or "Body Woods and Electric Guitar's Frequency Spectrum" from Keith J. Soper of University of Toledo or even "A vibro-acoustical and perceptive Study of the neck-to-body Junction of a solid-body electric Guitar" from A. Paté et al. of University of Paris I think
@@JCleggy it was the swedish dude, johan
It's oscilloscope time gang!!!
Speaking as an Electrical Engineer this is exactly as I suspected! I've always held that 99% of the sound of an electric guitar is purely a function of the pickup and associated electronics since coil pickups are NOT very microphonic in nature. This has now been confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt. Thanks for doing those tests.
I am EE too, and I am always saying the same, it absolutley doesn't matter what wood the electric guitar is made of, even a acrylic guitar sounds amazing (!) Don't believe me? Look at Steve Vais acryllic signature JEM guitar! It is ALL about myths and sales bullshit that makes the MONEY.
The pickup and the associated electronics. I'm just starting this video so what is the best pickup and what are the associated electronics? I'd love to have a shopping list from an electrical Master such as you are
@@amnesie6615 with an acoustic guitar the story is completely reversed. Am I thinking right? I mean it sounds that way to me.
I don't play electric guitar
yet 😂
Coils are microphonic, thats why they are wax potted
Wood has no effect on electromagnetic fields..... physics 101
this is one of the best youtube videos that i have ever seen. i still come back to it from time to time to watch it like you do with a movie
My jaw dropped when you started strumming the Air Guitar vs the Anderson. You've convinced me, tonewood doesn't matter, neckwood doesn't matter. All that is weight and aesthetics. Freaking amazing video man!
I would agree with you and the majority that "tone" wood doesn't matter one bit on an electric guitar as he has extensively proven but I'm still curious if it makes any difference to sustain and "tone" life
@@mrnorvegianguitarman No, it wont. UNLESS you plan to play your electric guitar without an amp, "acoustically". Then it might matter a tiny bit.
@@DrSamE it makes a difference in how it feels when vibrates against your belly as you play it. If it feels better, you will play better and think it sounds better. I feel that's what was driving the tonewood thing.
The biggest change was the pickup and the pickup height. That's what we anti-tonewood people have been saying all along.
Neckwood MIGHT still matter when you actually use the neck/the frets as opposed to strumming an open chord or playing with a bottleneck.
But I bet it’s so subtle I personally wouldn’t hear the difference.
That was the most important experiment ever done for electric guitar players and electric guitar builders!! I'm sure it took a ton of time but the results were priceless!!!
No, it wasn´t really.
Only for the ones who now - falsly - see themselves proven right in their believe that wood doesn`t matter (meaning having a significant impact) in electric solid body guitars.
If we are honest and go by the scientific method, this was not falsified by this video, was it?
While I agree the method isn’t 100% scientific, it’s the most scientific comparison I’ve ever seen. Jim never concludes wood doesn’t matter. I personally hear a fairly significant difference between the Anderson and all the other variations. The biggest difference is definitely the air guitar.
Modestoney. I guess I don't understand what you're saying. Don't know if you're dissing me or Jim or if you're agreeing with him😄 But it doesn't matter anyway. I hardly ever make comments on utube but this experiment was really phenomenal and I'm sure took a lot of time. So, good on you Jim. Keep up the good work.
@@modestoney1577 Not really bro. First of asll, the fact that he got three companies to answer with 5 answers was astounding.
And second, they said themselves that body wood wasn't as big a factor as weve thought.
Certainly weren't factoring in neck wood all this time. Well, I wasnt. Nor anyone else Ive ever seen in my life.
Plus, did you even watch it? He put so much into it..making sure everytihng was trh same even how hard he strummed and everything. But all that swtuff he dide wasnt enough for you huh?
I think you've been preaching body tone wood for so long...thats what you dont like about it.
Nope.
Leo Fender must have had the same idea: that for solid body guitars, tone wood is more placebo effect than anything. He experimented with pine, ash, alder and probably plywood. But not for “tone”, for structure and stability. It takes a lot of strength to stay straight and not bend or especially twist under string tension. It was Gibson, trying to catch up with Fender that introduced the myth that expensive and exotic tropical hardwoods improved the tone of a solid body. It was a marketing ploy. Still is.
I agree. 'Tone wood' is absolute BS.
@@wireworks4252 in electric guitars, ya, pretty much. With acoustic guitars it makes a hell of a difference.
@@marctestarossa Electric guitars are the topic here, not acoustic ones.
@@nowave7 ok
@@marctestarossa have you had the chance to play on a carbon fiber body acoustic guitar? Lol there no wood at all on those and they sound almost dead on to most acoustic guitars. I think tone wood is more of a marketing selling point rather than function. Regardless of wood choice
I love this. I remember listening to and reading comments in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the HiFi press about how different cables sounded differently. The funniest claims were those about how different digital cables changed the sound, or even different mains cables. More recently, how bicycle frames with the same geometry but made from different materials would dampen or project road "buzz" through to the handlebars (ignoring those air-filled dampers wrapped around the wheels).
More recently, my son and have discussed what he has read on forums about electric guitar tone being flavoured by the wood used, or the lacquer sprayed over it. I'm an electronics engineer so I instinctively knew what influenced the sound.
I'm also a drummer. There was a fashion in the 90s for RIMS suspension mounts. The justification was that by not having your mounts on the shell, you allowed the shell to resonate more. Quite honestly, I couldn't hear any differences but the RIMS mounts were so clunky I was surprised people went with them. No... not surprised. People get sucked in by advertising claims for all sorts I guess. Few people care if there's a measurable, detectable improvement. They just want "different"... until "different" becomes the norm, and then they switch back to the original ideas and call it "retro".
This was an excellent experiment. Loved your 4x2 guitar especially. Best wishes from the UK. 🇬🇧
Here because Glenn at Spectre Sound Studios recommends this video *very* highly for anyone trying to make the “tone” argument. You, sir, have done a fantastic service to the world of guitars & guitarists by making this video. Five stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Glenn yelled at me and told me to come here too! If shouty Canadian man says, I do. I was not disappointed.
you reminded me of when youtube had a star rating system lol, made me feel old!
@@MainPower9507 You think that’s bad? I remember ebaumsworld 😂 Did you know they’re still around?? 😳
@@timradford4393 "shouty Canadian man" LMAO..... Aint that the truth..
what exactly is the tone argument?
How has this video not exploded and broken the guitar community?!
Because like many many other previous tests, people put their hands over their ears and go "la la la laaaa". Everyone 'knows' the vast majority of instruments of overly priced, when you agree with that... you find it difficult to buy them. So it's easier to deny any evidence.
B/c they listen to ppl like paul reed smith who are invested in selling people fairy dust. And there are plenty of ppl who want their expensive solidbody to be more special than one that was less expensive.
If you had bought a guitar for 10k, you'd also want to convince yourself you didn't just light 10k on fire.
Because there's only a few thousand videos out there demonstrating the kind of changes various woods can make to a guitar's tone.
Warmoth posted a video a few months ago featuring different neck woods. ua-cam.com/video/z7jrZrrH4jA/v-deo.html
The differences are what anyone that's actually built guitars already knew. Yes, there is a difference in tone. No, it's not anywhere near as much as the corksniffers would have you believe. Pretending that everything sounds the same is just as much snake oil as pretending that plastic tuner knobs give you more midrange, PAUL.
@@ObscuraDeCapra You realise you've just linked to a video which demonstrates that different necks make absolutely no difference to the tone right?
Ive played guitar for 30 plus years and This is the single most knowledgeable guitar video I've ever seen, thank you so much good work man !
I've seen your video like 4 times, it's one of my favorites because you inderectly are treating a sensitive topic amongst guitarists which is the sustain in an electric guitar, where does it come from and how to improve it. Some guitarists are always adding things to the guitar in order to increase it
Love this video. Pretty much kills the whole “tone wood” debate for electric guitars.
Acoustic instruments are another story. Wood absolutely makes a difference in them.
But for companies charging insanely high prices for mahogany bodied electric guitars, just because of the mahogany, tell ‘em where to stick it.
B*I*N*G*O*!
It is almost all the top wood and braces that makes the tonal difference in acoustic guitars, though. Not all the wood. Antonio de Torres Jurado, called by some the most important guitar maker of the 19th century, did an experiment to prove this. In 1862 made a guitar with paper-mache back and sides and it sounded great. People could not tell the difference. That guitar still exists in a music museum in Barcelona. Five years ago, Robert O'Brien, a celebrated classical guitar luthier, who also teaches luthiery courses, repeated the experiment by making a classical guitar with cardboard back and sides and a wood top that he was going to scrap. It sounds great also.
@@thirdactwarrior317 Thanks for this wonderful comment, and for sending me down a rabbit hole of researching 19th century luthiers.
Some records mic up semi hollow guitars as well which adds to the confusion
What touches the strings on an electric guitar? The nut, the frets, and maybe most importantly, the saddles. These things actually touch the string, which is what creates the sound. The pickup is obviously the primary factor, type and position. Cool to see it shown so clearly here. I was shocked at the steel vs. brass saddle difference, actually. Very cool.
Excellent video! One thing that’s obvious from this video is that pickup height is often massively overlooked. Some people swap their perfectly nice pickups out endlessly chasing a sound when a couple of millimetres worth of adjustment here and there can make all the difference. If you like a higher action or you have a deeper neck angle you might need to play about with the pickup heights to get them all to sing together nicely. it’s a very cheap “worth a try” adjustment.
I agree. I play a Squire Affinity Strat as I’m pretty poor. The middle pick was dull and muddy. A couple of screw turns later best pick up on the guitar.
It's insane that even after doing all of this, some people will still die on the tonewood hill. This table&shelfcaster just got a tie with the fencecaster in the functional guitar tierlist for me lmao. Good job mate.
Anyone who plays acoustically will die on the tonewood hill. However, it's laughable for the electric guitars.
@@le_th_ And STILL, a lot of electric players still die on that hill as well. Maybe there's something else on that hill, like good coffee or smt.
I built this guitar ua-cam.com/video/GfGkCQigbOo/v-deo.html I have 2 necks for it, one neck has a maple fretboard, the other a a rosewood board. I can tell you that the difference in tone between the 2 is huge, anybody who isn't deaf could easily notice the difference between them. @@sukitta2
Nah, just a lot of denial.@@sukitta2
Hey, if they still want to blow close to six grand for “the very best” PRS, I say let them. I mean after all, some people still swear by Biden!
Jim, I don't know where the tone comes from with a lot of us other guys, but yours comes from the Lord and a ton of patience. You're a really good picker. Especially enjoyed your slide work on the "air guitar". Keep up the fine work young man !
It usually takes creators 10 minutes to “test” one variable. Here it’s only 10 seconds to get the point across.
Including the faulty tests that didn’t take pickup height into account made for a great plot twist.
Super happy with the runtime of this video. Good stuff, thanks.
Next step, obviously, is to try weighing the bench with something other than honda... ducati engines, yamaha engines, harley engines, indian engines, etc. And then you will need to try them in every possible combination and engine size. Will an 80cc sound different than a 500cc? And of course, it is necessary to consider the implications of engine size for touring. It would not surprise me if you developed a guitar you could just ride to the gig. Thank you for helping to move science forward! I very much enjoy your video. Good ear on that slide, with no frets to visually guide you.
And remember that the Ducati might have a desmodromic valve train: you have to account for the subtleties!
Tone from motorcycle engine is a myth. It’s really the workbench. He needs to find an early 60s vintage workbench. I bet that’ll sound sweet.
@@TennisCoachChip and take a axe and make it a "relic" workbench....ultimate custom shop sound....
My thoughts exactly. Replacing the weight of the guitar body with a bench still equates to a measurable quantity of tone-producing material being used to make the strings resonate..
As someone who equally loves guitars and motorcycles, this comment is the best! And if you’re not using the engine from a Panigale, then you’re wasting your time 🙃
I always said that when you buy high-end electric guitars (and basses) the main thing you pay for is the playability, comfort and their collectible value. Not the sound, because you can get an almost exact sound on a cheaper guitar by swapping the parts. Playability is the biggest difference the price tag offers. This video has proven that, and more.
But still I’m blown away on how the Air Guitar sounded. What an amazing and detailed experiment, this is THE BEST electric guitar comparison video EVER.
I would very much like to see you do this on an Electric Bass, I wonder would the result be the same because the frequency they produce is different. And IME it’s always harder to find a good sounding Bass than Guitar.
What bass/strings/amps you like
I’m a jazz guy for sure but love the zing of the stingray and have a reverend Raymond and really love it
I’m pretty sold on fender nickel/steel 7250 I believe… very punchy and gritty
Don’t like Ernie ball strings or dr
Used to love roto until I found fender
Expensive guitars are all about build for me. Having a nice feeling neck, no frets scratching me, aligned nut, intonated correctly, etc.
Sound can always be altered. To be it's all about pick ups and pick up height
@@kodykindhart5644 I own several Basses and put different Strings on them. But currently just down to two brands, DR and LaBella. Stingrays do have their own character. I prefer warmer sounding strings on a Ray, Nickels mostly.
Why would the price of a guitar effect playability. Makes no sense. It’s all salesmanship crap from the overpriced guitar makers whose overhead is higher, and attorney fees they payout.
@@BlainScholin You just got to try it for yourself. A skilled luthier can carve a neck, fretboard & body in a way that the instrument will fit your hands perfectly so they can explore the instrument effortlessly. Just like custom made suits, shoes, etc.
If you think it’s all just marketing, you probably don’t know that most known Luthiers owns very small businesses and their shop is run by only themselves and a few other close relatives and have close to zero marketing budget. They became famous from word of mouth. And unfortunately, they’re not that sucessful financially.
But if you’re talking about mass produce guitars made by giant companies like Fenders and Gibsons selling their guitars for over 3k with a build quality that other companies/luthiers can make for half of that, then yeah they definetely are just marketing.
There are categories of Instrument makers, and what I described in my original comment refers to the genius Artists in form of Luthiers, not the mass pro factories own by businessmen disguising themselves as one.
The law of conservation of energy says: if you want sustain, don‘t let the string oscillation energy flow in the wood body.
That‘s how a good ELECTRIC guitar is designed and correctly set up.
So simple as that.
Very good video, thnx! ❤
All the best,
R. Wood
This is THE best, most detailed yet quick and straight to the point tone testing investigational video I've ever seen. This is borderline a scientifical university-funded study on guitar tone, just...wow amazing man
I would say Warmoth's test is much more accurate and scientific because they keep the variables down to one thing only, the body wood. When you have more than one variable there is no way to determine if one item or the combo of the items, what percentage of each combo items, are what is changing tone. You need to limit variables to accurately determine what is changing the sound.
@@Cpt_Adama By the same token, Warmoth's test involves the use of human hearing to determine results. Fundamentally that is flawed because there is a great variety not only in the human hearing apparatus itself, but in human perceptions of what is heard. A dry signal running directly into a high quality interface and then analyzed for quantitative numbers would provide a higher standard of evidence. It would also be helpful if the experiment was double blind, or even better if the "player" was a robotic apparatus that could precisely recreate each stroke of the pick.
However, at that point what is the point? The important thing about sound and music is what people think they hear. When it comes to the video above and the results, the best that can be concluded is that either an old garage workbench as a guitar body is the equal of a Tom Anderson chambered swamp ash body OR the body wood matters so little as to be entirely inconsequential to the final sound.
What I am interested in would be his results in testing strings. I personally find them to make a huge difference, but I am willing to concede the potential for my own biases to have a big influence on my perception of that difference. Will be interesting to see.
@@ERWebster You definitly could go down the "scientific" rabbit hole deeper, but I do think the Warmoth test was accurate enough to come up with a definite conclusion. My take away is that yes "tone wood" can make a difference, but only subtlety. In a complete mix it would be very difficult to tell the difference and a mixing engineer could EQ it to make it sound like what ever wood you want.
@@Cpt_Adama I agree for the most part.
Regarding the scientific merit of either the Warmoth video or this one, drawing a conclusion based on a handful of data points is correlation at best and incidental happenstance at worst. A few hundred or even thousand points of carefully vetted data would get us to where statistically we could isolate a significant trend, if one existed.
I have also been long in the camp of tonewood has a small effect on tone, but as time goes by and evidence mounts, I am finding that my internal estimate of how much effect it has is ever dropping.
Fortunately, I don't need broad scientific consensus to arrive at a personal opinion, just sufficient demonstration and personal experience to strongly suggest a trend.
After this video and others I am thinking that the effect of wood is extremely low, and as you said can easily be EQ'd away or entirely over-ridden by the tone of a pickup, if it can be heard at all.
Scientific in my view. The guy is checking hypotheses linking different Independent Variables with the Dependent Variable. Does not matter that he’s not putting numbers on the data. Data just means ‘that which is given’. A police detective is also scientific, posing and testing hypotheses. What’s going on here is Qualitative Positivism. The Technique is Qualitative and the Epistemology is Positivistic. These dimensions of methodology are wholly orthogonal (independent of each other). Great work
This is absolutely brilliant! Thank you indeed. I've been building private custom electrics for over 40 years, (c. 1977), and I've always maintained that body and neck wood has virtually and absolutely no to minimal effect on a full solid body axe, except in the player's mind, which may influence your tone where it really matters...in your hands, which is where 95% of your core tone comes from.
To prove this I have a "Mystery Wood" sampler guitar that I invite all my potential customers to play before they commit to an instrument and its cost. It has never let me down. The guitar is a marvel to play with amazing tone produced by 1978 DiMarzio PAF and original Bill Lawrance SC pickups. The neck has been repeatedly upgraded, and is now roasted maple, But the body wood is, and always has been 100% garbage dump shite.
So...I go to my grave in the firm belief that Tone woods variations and subtelties are applicable only to acoustic and hollow body instruments; period. Anything else is pure myth. Ash may make you feel better about your guitar than Alder, or Mahogany, but that is pure placebo effect.
Thank you again for this excellently informative and highly entertaining proof. Well done indeed. Cheers 🍻
One of my favorite guitars is one that I built myself from parts and the body is made of plywood. People seem to like it when I play it...
I bought an inexpensive PRS style guitar a few months ago. When I looked the electronics it sure looked like MDF/particle board where the instrument jack was. After a setup, new nut and pickup it sounds great. It's not heavy at all. The neck on it ended up being really nice. I think it's mostly about setup, electronics and the player. Also, it's amazing how much better my crappy guitars sounded after I practiced hard for a year.
As a guitar builder, how do you think - where do dead spots come from? I've had around 20 basses over the last 27 years (since I've started playing) and 2 or 3 of them had a dead spot or two. What could be the reason and how to get rid of them?
@Bassdriver Hello, and thank you for your excellent question. Tonal dead spots on solid body electric guitars and bases are related to pickup or setup deficiency.
Step 1: Unplug the instrument. Carefully lean the headstock against a cabinet or a bench, or even just a big board. Play every note along the entire fretboard slowly, listening for consistency in volume and true voice. Any notes that sound dampened or muffled need attention. The problem either comes from the fret or 2 frets directly above the note, in a phenomenon similar to but not quite the opposite of fret buzz, or it can sometimes be a sympathetic muting at the bridge saddle exclusive to that note. This happens more often with bridge saddles that have worn unevenly, or have been pitted by years of hand grease and grime, or simple age through play wear and tear. In that case, you need to work the frets so that the muted note sounds true, or replace the offending saddle, or saddles. If all your notes are acousticslly true and the problem still persists then...
Step 2: If every note on the unplugged instrument sounds fine, then you have a bigger problem; The electronics, and most probably a fatal flaw in the pickup(s). First check your pots and especially the resistors on your tone pots. If you don't know how to go about it, take it to someone who does. Have them check the entire circuit. It could be as simple as a bad solder joint or deficient or defective resistor or pot, all the way to an internal bad magnet or a miniscule dead spot on the copper winds in one or more of your pickups.
Run through a logical process of elimination by identifying if it is a pot or resistor or bad solder, and if all else seems good, then your last stop is identifying in which pickup the defect lives. In that case, and before you invest in a new pickup, if you have a tester pickup lying about, wire it up, play every note and see if the problem goes away. If it does, then make a decision on if you want to replace the pickup(s), or live with the problem, or unload the instrument.
In all cases, this process is time consuming, but also a great learning experience that makes you intimatly familiar with the instrument and its entire aural spectrum and workings.This is knowledge you can retain and transfer to all your instruments and builds.
Remember to approach it positively, and you will have a positive experience and result.
Cheers!
@Bassdriver I posted an extensive reply...I hope it is there. Let me know please.
Excellent findings! This pretty much reaffirms what I believe attributes most to tone. Acoustic guitars might be slightly different in terms of tonality, but electric guitars pretty much only sound as good as their electronics.
And their hands
of course, considering the point of the pickups are to pickup ONLY the movement of the strings
Check out difference between GOOD guitars (not some random pieces of wood) - ua-cam.com/video/n4puGOEmGjs/v-deo.html
@@david_lynch Sounds like you missed the point. The 2 x 4 sounded damn close to the Anderson with the same pickup, pickup placement and distance, and same electronics. Other “good guitars” would have different pickups, with different pickup height and positions, etc... I think Jim shows definitively that the woods have very little effect on the tone.
@@david_onbass There are many ways to test the idea that the wood of an electric guitar affects tone. What I call "good guitars" are guitars whose wood really affects the tone, in a good way. In the video I provided, the author tests the sound of two identical guitars (the same year and the same model) with the same set of pickups. The difference in tone is really audible, moreover, in a blind test (try it). This is clearly audible on video, in reality the difference is even more significant, especially if you take Gibson Les Paul guitar made from the 1950s to 1968 (may be 1969) and compare with some made in 2012, for example.
What an awesome video! Man, thanks for all the hard work putting this together. I loved it!
Thank you for your faithful service to the world of tone. We can all finally give up the search for the perfect guitar and instead look for the perfect pickup.
And AMP. And pedals) But not a wood.
@@creepin_deth True, true.
String type makes a small difference, too
You should choose guitars based off of how they feel to play, not really the sound.
@@watersnortmoment3734You're right, the tone and sound of instruments doesn't matter whatsoever.
I've been playing guitars for nearly 40 years. IMO the tone wood argument is ridiculous. It's about pickups, strings, and electronics. I think you've done a great job demonstrating that. Don't mention this to PRS though. "The best tone comes from our 200 year aged stock of Brazilian pappy burly wood. Its unique character comes from the Bashiva Beetle which burrows its dung deep into the trunk of the tree. For this reason it's an additional $3000 per linear square inch, but WELL worth it!" Got to love marketing.
😂 so true. My only counter-argument is that my first experience with a PRS was 25ish years ago where i picked one up at a Sam Ash, bent the F*CK out of the whammy bar all the way down to the fret board and popped it back up to a perfectly in tune guitar!?!? Their stock locking nut system on the headstock tuners is pretty incredible.
I'm no one to judge if wood makes a difference and I don't care as much as other people do, if I like the guitar I like it and I don't care about wood nor anything. Paul is an ass but PRS guitars are amazing. Their super expensive models are bullshit tho.
I wish they were just honest and say, "Hey look these are expensive collector items, akin to furniture, but they can also be used to play music every once in a while." :D
Hahaha yesss
You confirmed alot of things I've been thinking for years when it comes to electric guitar.All the myths that people hang on to seem to come from the world of acoustic guitar that just don't make a big difference on electric.
The electronics will change more than any mass or wood choice. That being said. I like fancy wood.
Finally scientific method to tease out guitar tone factors! Thanks Jim. I'll bet that bench attached to the air guitar does provide a certain amount of sustain though the tone seemed so close. Subscribing.
I figured out that the most important part of sound was the pickups when I put a SD JB in my $50 squier and it sounded identical to my $2000 LP standard with the same pickup haha. I would think the biggest factor when it comes to high end instruments is the fit and finish, or in other words, looks, feel, material quality etc. I would surmise that a competent luthier could make that tele kit feel pretty close to the anderson.
Thanks for spending all the time you did making this video, it must have taken forever.
True , picks ups + amp tweaking.
I saw other videos of blind test for tone wood. The conclusion was the same.
With a 3k guitar Tone won't change but the playability and confort will change.
I think it's also about passion when you play for years, you just want a high end instrument.
I've been playing on 500-800 dollars guitar for years. Then I bought à 1500 Ibanez this Summer and immediatly wanted à J. Custom( and bought it 1month ago)
You just feel a gap of quality. A huge one
You are exactly right. Bring a 300 dollar Squier to a luthier, have the luthier at it. It'll be as good Ultra series. Electronics is another matter of course, you'll need to replace it. But playability setup, and comfort? Luthier can do that to a Squier.
Yeah, in 2022 dollars anything past about 800-1000 is just jewelry or musical bling being added and not sonic quality. So buy cheap and add what counts to your own taste and enjoy.
I remember Les Paul proving to Gibson that he didn't need a hollow body on an electric to get good tone and used a 2x4 with a detachable 2 part body on the sides. That's how he got them to make him the solid body electric
Ah yes, the broomstick.
I think it was 4x4
"The Log"!! Like the other commenter, I recall it being a 4 x 4?
@@LRM12o8
A 4x4? It must've been great for going up mountains.
@@RaymloR well it was a broomstick, meaning you could fly up the mountain and around the mountaintop on it if you're privy to the dark magic
@@DailyBrusher Just checked Rob Scallons video on it again to make sure I don't have to delete my other comment.
you're right, "The Log" is the 'official' name under which it is displayed in the museum, but the people at the Gibson factory mocked it as "The Broomstick"
And ofc, it was a 4x4
Loved your tests. As a retired Luthier I was always amused by all the things I used to hear from customers as well as comments made on guitar forums. My own personal experience taught me that there was far more BS out there than facts. I even "blind ear" tested some people to see if they could tell the difference in sound between some HB pickups and Gibson PAFs--they thought they'd have no trouble determining which was which. Boy were they wrong LOL! Likewise, a guitar I built with different wood species than a typical Les Paul fooled them as well. I particularly loved it when they'd pick my guitar as the better sounding one 😄 I did experience better resonance and slight differences in sustain with different body construction. Pickups do make a difference as does the circuitry when it comes to sound and that's the best way to upgrade a low end model (or a Partscaster). But, in the hands of a good player, and plugged into a decent amp, even a low end guitar can sound much better. It reminded me how often people would rave about a brass nut sounding so much better--I would then say to them "So, you play a lot of open strings when you play?" They would be puzzled, until I pointed out to them that you take the nut out of play when fretting chords and individual notes LOL!
What an awesome comment :)
Love hearing opinions from experienced luthiers. I imagine guitars and wines are similar in the sense that the “connoisseurs” usually can’t pass a blind test. I always thought pickups made the biggest difference, then body size. I really only care about the type of wood for acoustic guitars.
@@CYON4D Thanks--the truth is, it's easy for people to buy into the hype about guitars because we all wanted to demystify why some guitar players and their guitars sounded so awesome (I was no different when I was a young guitar player and eager to play and sound better). Now that I'm an old fart I play and sound much better LOL! Van Halen always sounded better than the folks who tried his guitar and amp--it wasn't the wood or the pickups--it was the man behind the axe!
@@owenmoore7340 And I can agree with that for acoustic guitars--the wood and the finish on them makes a difference, as does how they made, bracing, sound holes, etc. I agree on the wine too--I'll never be a wine snob and I loved it when the palettes of the so-called experts were fooled years back by the superb wines from California and even in Canada and other countries LOL! As with all things, it also comes down to what you like. E.G. when it came to guitars, I was a Fender lover first, and so the first quality guitar I bought was a pre CBS Telecaster (swamp ash body with a maple neck and fingerboard). I stupidly sold it to buy a car in the 70s and the closest I found to it after that was a Japanese made Squier that I still own today. It sounds as good as I recall but the neck is slightly different than my original--but still a pleasure to play. RIP Leo Fender! I always wanted to build guitars as great, (or better), than George and Leo--that was my goal, but I really don't feel that I did any better than to match what they did. But I had a lot of fun trying!
Honestly, I'm no where near experienced enough to believe I could pick it out blind, but the no body guitar seemed to have a much rounder sound (other than when he strummed hard, but that could do with the difference in force). Hearing that difference through UA-cam's compression leads me to believe that IRL it's a larger difference. With that said, I'm a firm believer that the player makes the biggest difference in tone, followed by the amp, followed by the type of pickup. There's also no doubt in my mind that different constructions has a HUGE affect on sustain. My Gibson Les Paul Standard has never ending sustain - I'm guessing due to fixed bridge alongside of the weight of the guitar (it's one of the old non weight-relieved ones), and the set neck - and for some reason, my EBMM Majesty has surprisingly good sustain. The neck through design has to be the biggest contributing factor because the guitar itself is insanely light, and it has a floating bridge. It definitely doesn't have as much sustain as my LP, but especially considering the floating bridge, it's truly insane to think about what they were able to do! One of the other things that I truly believe that people forget is that people are going to typically hear the guitar either live, or in a mix, and it's going to be almost impossible to hear the nuances. IMO, the most important thing for a guitarist's guitar is that they're playing a guitar that they're comfortable with, one that gives them the feel they like, and one that inspires them.
Great freaking job dude. I'm proud of you. Something else you just proven that you may have known is that you don't need a fretboard or frets to get a quality guitar sound out of a guitar. The myth has been broken. The air guitar works just as well with the exception of not being able to press down on a fret board to get a sequence of individual notes.
I wonder if anybody else has gone this far? Keep your thinking hat on and send over more videos as you come up with ideas in the music world. We gave you a thumbs up.
This video deserves to blow up. It really should be in the millions or tens of millions. So many guitarists should see this and there are a lot of guitarists in the world
And save money, away from electric guitar "snake oil salesmen".
@@osamabinladen824 no one is getting rich selling instruments.
@@planetdog1641 yeah, but people are still paying too much for hype, this video emphasizes what sounds like what & shows how to get closer to what u want starting with a vintage 1950s garage cured 2 x 4
edit: sunburst finish is extra
Eh. This video is flawed. It's connected to a huge wooden bench, and it uses the worst bridge possible for this test - The telecaster bridge, which contributes to to the majority of tone. Then to add insult to injury it's tested with a slide technique which is none to nullify tuning and tone issues. All in all... This video was a massive waste.
@@purrpocalypse yes, the overall guitar has to contributes to the tone. The vibrating strings are part of a system, not isolated on their own. Otherwise, all guitars would sound very similar instead of unique.
My sense is that pickups, picking distance from bridge, steel plastic or finger picking, equalizer and tone knob settings, volume and heat on your tube amp, and quality of the amp itself have the most produced role in tone.
What we've got here is rather clear proof that the body and the headstock create negligible differences. This was a lot of work to make, so thanks Jim!
Ngl from the beginning it already sounds like snake oil bussines type a thing
An electronic instrument, that is affected by it's materials?
That just sounds weird, imagine if yamaha keyboards were "made of rose wood for better tone"
No one would fuckin believe it 😂
don't forget the strings.
All the guys over here at Gear ‘n Gigs really want to thank you for doing this video. It has given us a lot of conversational fodder to be sure, and has really changed our outlook on guitar tone. Really appreciate your hard work and diligence on this, and your scientific methodology is very professional. Well done sir!
Theoretically couldn't this drastically drive down the cost of guitars if wood really doesn't matter?
Status > function. If someone released a mobile phone that had identical specs to the latest iPhone, but at a fraction of the cost, the effect on iPhone sales would be negligible. Same rules apply to pretty much every other product on the market.
@@SimpleManGuitars1973 only for those enlightened few. Most buyers of electric guitars will believe the myth, and prefer the shiny model. It's why folk buy an audi over a skoda, yet ostensibly the same device.
Ok... First off, thank you for all the effort you put into these tests! The entire guitar community is greatly in your debt. And I personally am grateful because I am a hobbyist guitar builder and modder. I am about to launch into building some custom designs, and this information really helps me with determining wood selection, etc. for my builds. You rock, my friend!
Your final result is what I've been trying to tell people for years!
Considering the physics, all that's required is/are two fixed points in space, and a device/circuit which translates the vibration of the strings into signal.
What are you one 'o them there readers?
I learned this when I built a cigar box guitar. The back of the box was detachable so when you took it off it was just a square frame and a neck with the strings hanging over empty space. Made of bolsa wood pine struts and glue. Sounded massive. That was the moment when I was like, tonewood is totally bs.
@@larrybethune3909 looks like we got ourselves a reader!
-RIP Bill Hicks
@@hamzacerkas4843 Bill Hicks = Alex Jones
@@ChronicMetamorphosis who that
Being a lefty building my own guitars seemed handy, and I figured most of these things out in the process. The only thing I will say about guitars is that the feel of the instrument is most important and what makes you bond with a guitar. I love the feel of some guitars that my friends who play hate, they feel comfortable and easy to play to me and uncomfortable and clumsy to someone else. And in the end this will be the biggest factor in tone, because a guitar that you love to play will make you play the most and thus make you sound better. At the end of the day the tone is in the fingers, get a guitar that feels good to YOU and if that is a squire great, if it’s a custom shop great, just find a guitar that puts a smile on your face:)
A bad tone irritates me, but isn't as important to others. I build my own guitars, and amps. It's the only way to get what you really want. The way the amp responds is part of the feel thing to me. I hate fighting my gear to pull tone. I would rather try to control an unforgiving rig. To each their own.
I´m a lefty too and can relate to your comment. Ever since i started playing i´ve been forced to figure this stuff out, by making my own instruments and modifying others. I guess our harder path made us realize this kind of things way earlier, because for a normal, right handed player it´s easier to just buy stuff.
Handy...
i have built over a dozen guitars. One thing ive found is the hight of the tail piece , relative to the bridge , greatly effects the tension on the strings . Different people will like different tension.
@@foylebutler8952 That's assuming your build included a tailpiece design. The Fender style equivalent would be through-body vs bridge through stringing.
Man, the amount of work you put into making this video was tremendous and every player out there should say thank you! That was hours of bench work that didn't make it into the video. Thank you!
Massive props for going the extra mile to test all this stuff!
So many Guitar bros had their world shook up with this video. I love it. Science wins over "feelings" and marketing.
I doubt that. Anyone that seriously collects knows that guitars are pickup platforms. Saddles make a tiny bit of difference but the sound of a guitar comes from its pickup. I have 25 guitars and each one has a different pickup. EMG's, DiMarzio, Seymour Duncan, Fender, Gibson, Danelectro, etc. I love them all.
@Mario Reyes I'll be waiting for your video where you prove that maple somehow gives pickups a brighter tone using actual science 😂😂
@Mario Reyes I used to be a "stereophile". Every "high-end" store I went in to sold some sort of ultra-expensive snake oil. My favourite was speaker wire and devices to lift speaker wire off the ground. There is a story where the folks at McIntosh (if memory serves... which it often does not) did a blind test with one set of expensive speaker wires and then another set of expensive speaker wires. They had the stereophile press describe the two and choose which sounded best - which they did. They waxed poetically about wire A, and wire B with some choosing the former and the others choosing the latter. The only thing was, they used a coat hanger wire in place of expensive speaker wire - for both tests. You sound like the stereophile press in this story.
@Mario Reyes if he replaced the benches with steel?
@@DESOUSAB I guess you've meant "audiophile"? Never heard about the "stereophile" term
I thought a lot of times... "what if someone manage to make a guitar with no wood to test if tonewood is even real?" From a rational and logic point of view there should be no audible influence of the wood in a electric guitar, because it´s just a string atached and vibrating between two points made of metal, not wood. You really nailed it with this video, it´s excellent and opens the door to a lot more questions from here on.
Well, check out difference between GOOD guitars (not some random pieces of wood) - ua-cam.com/video/n4puGOEmGjs/v-deo.html
The neck itself also has a resonance, as does the body but in a different way. While it does not alter the tone it does alter the stability of the tone. I like to think that each significant change has an effect on the degradation of the tone, which gives a characteristic especially in vintage instruments that we got used to.
Did you even watch the video
What? It's bolted down to a massive wooden bench on one side, and a massive wooden shelve on the other. It's a fun experiment, but it's pseudoscientific and settles nothing.
@@transmundanemusic well said!! An “air guitar” in name only.
And of course what the strings are mounted to affects the tone - the structure of the guitar (how it’s made, what it’s made of, its shape, its weight, the method of fixing body and neck, etc.) will all affect its resonant frequency and its frequency spectrum. This means that it will affect the way the guitar structure absorbs and dissipates (or indeed reinforces and returns) the energy of the strings to different extents at different frequencies. This is what is happening when you feel your electric guitar vibrating even when you play it totally unplugged.
This means the structure of the guitar affects the way the strings vibrate. As the pickups produce a signal that is dependent upon the specific string vibration and its harmonic content the affect the guitar structure has on the string vibration will be translated into the signal from the pickups.
If anyone tries to tell you that science proves only pickups and electronics matter on an electric guitar then this is a sure fire sign that they don’t actually understand physics at all 🤷🏼♂️
I have been trying to tell people for YEARS that that best tone wood for the body is a 1990 workbench weighted with Honda engines.
This video is an amazing demonstration, thank you so much for putting in all of the time and effort it took to get this together!
When you think about how sound is generated on an electric guitar, it's simply the vibration of the metal strings disturbing the electromagnetic field generated by the pickup. As you found out, the most important adjustments are the ones that tune the magnetic fields and filter the sound in electronics. The body, neck, and other parts of the construction have a much lower impact in that they can only tune how well the strings vibrate. Les Paul famously took a 4x4 post as a solid piece from the top of the neck to the base of the guitar. He carved the neck portion down so it played like a regular guitar neck. Then he cut off the sides of an acoustic and glued them to the sides of the 4x4. Apparently the solid piece of wood provided a sustain for the strings that was unmatched by guitars with a separate neck and body. At least this is the story my professors at Full Sail told back in the 90s.
There's actually a great video where a guy goes to the Gibson museum to play a reproduction of that first plank guitar. Details the history, too. First thing Les thought of was a railroad tie for best sustain because was most dense thing he could find!
It's likely that wood and construction has *some* impact on sustain, but I don't know how significant it is. A rubber-bodied guitar might achieve the same tone as a normal guitar, but I'd expect the vibration to be damped out more quickly. That's an extreme example, of course.
@@JMMC1005 Since tuning the string over the magnetic field is one of the largest impacts on sound, a rubber body guitar will probably fail because it can't maintain it's shape. Unless that rubber was reinforced with something, you probably wouldn't even be able to tune it. I've seen tons of polymer based bodies or resin pour style bodies from people's personal projects. I've even seen some aluminum bodied guitars (a Japanese company makes them). Biggest factor here is the rigidity of the materials.
And the only reason he put the sides of the acoustic on was because people would ridicule the "broomstick" instead of recognizing its amazing sound and the performance.
@@berinloritsch Well, yeah, that's true. I used rubber as an extreme example, but it wouldn't really work for other reasons. Interestingly, the guy has just released a new video investigating the effect of construction on sustain! I'm off to watch it.
We can't thank you enough for this amount of time and research. You did a top job.
Dude the degree to which you test each INDIVIDUAL FACTOR ONE BY ONE..........this video qualifies as "legendary-tier".
Not to mention the filming and general attention to detail. I still can't wrap my head around how you got so much detail into a video so concise as this.
Just amazing work, nothing more to be said. Back in the day this video would have five stars
bencede
Truly a science research!!!
You really went above and beyond here. Thanks for all this. Entertaining and informative!
As an engineer, I approve your process. I have always predicted that the pickups are at least 99% of the tone. The only idea I have had on how much a role the wood has on the tone is that the vibration you feel in the wood is energy lost from the string. So a guitar that vibrates more pulls more from the strings. This has been my guess on why something like a carbon fiber guitar would have more sustain, less energy is lost from the string to the body.
Paul Reed Smith in some video used the phrase "Guitar building is a subtractive equation" which makes perfect sense. Your materials and construction only ever remove frequencies.
Yes, and a lot of folks tell you the difference: A vibrating guitar also means a long sustain! Wood vibration is only important with acoustic guitars.
As a rocket scientist i don't really approve of his methods. Hold on , I'm going to call my buddy, he's a chef i need to know his thoughts on this.
Ok I'm back,he wasn't too convinced so he called his buddy, he's a astro physicist so he believes makes him even more qualified to make observations about guitar tones.
He said that his conclusions after carefully removing them from his human exit hole match up with yours.
You sir or Madam are a genius.
@@AllCarsUnited just saying that as someone who spends all day determining the effects different variables impact on an overall system, his process was solid. Unlike alot of other videos where people change multiple variables without thinking it through.
What rockets do you work on?
@@MCTGFoSheez red rockets for sure
This is amazing! Of course I think it’s amazing because it supports what I’ve believed to be true for years. My field of expertise is in coatings, lacquers and poly’s. All of my products are applied to a wide variety of wood. When people say they can hear the difference between finishes and woods on electrics it drives me insane. I’ve heard people we all admire say a guitar coated in poly is heavier than one with lacquer. I have a $5k scale that can’t tell the difference so I for sure don’t believe a human can. I can go on and on about the crazy things I’ve heard from experienced players and makers. Great job and I hope you don’t get to much hate. ✌️
HAHAH YEAH THIS 😂
"So you're telling me you can hear the difference when my tuner, and the spectrogram shows no difference? That sounds like information bias to me"
Yeah a Squire or Epiphone with some Seymour Duncan pickups is good enough. Plus, plenty of practice, creativity and motivation. Also a pro set up will make it comfortable. I have an Epi wannabe Jimmy Page set up and a Rivers Cuomo (Weezer) Squire strat.
People get hyped about a topic and then naturally gravitate towards validating themselves as expert gurus. Reality is much different then the perceptions they believe to be scientific truth is actually rooted in non-scientific biases based off a number of factors like idolized preferences, peer acceptance, mainstream approval and other stuff that gives them the validation they seek. It's all a farce.
I'll let you in on a secret. It doesn't matter what equipment you use to measure it, if someone's ear likes the sound of something more they are going to say its better. It blows my mind how many people are up in arms about this. Who cares buy and play what you want. Coat it in what you want. Use whatever wood or material you want.
@@The_Cat_Authority The real issue is the spread of misinformation which leads people to *think* that they know what they want, and beleive that they need to spend ridiculous amounts of money on boutique builds just in order to achieve a great tone.
A lot of the time we don't actually know what we want, we're just going off of what we've heard other more experienced players say, mixed with our own confirmation bias. We might think that we know what we want, but in reality we're often working off of bad information that's been passed down from player to player across generations.
This is the first time I've seen someone seriously attempt to test some of these commonly held opinions regarding tone.
For me, this video was certainly eye opening, and I'd love to see more tests like this in the future.
i've been saying this for years building basses. unless something is actively dampening your tone like a VERY poor bridge design, 95 percent of tone is the electronics and strings. and yes i considered string length (scale) as part of "string" category. i have a personal collection of like 15 instruments and i used the exact same electronics and pickup height and they all use stringjoy strings and all the 34 inch basses sound the same and all the 32-29 fanned fret ones sound the same. the same exact setup on a 36 inch scale sounds different and the one with baritone humbuckers sound completely different. it's an electric instrument, folks. most of your sound are the electrical parts and the only thing that interacts with the magnetic coils are the damn ferrous strings. unless you make the body out of frigging bed foam or wet modeling clay, you;re not dampening the tone enough to matter from one wood to the next. i got a buddy who had a 120 dollar squire i improved just by dropping in a really expensive nice pickguard loaded with active pickups and it sounds exactly like the totally different thousand dollar American fender with the same pickguard set. Tonewood is 99 percent mystical bullshit.
Well said. Some people just hate facts. LOL
bullshit. if anything its a lot more easy to hear a difference of the body resonance with a bass. they all simply have different modal resonances, even with the same neck/pickups. I don't know if you've actually measured anything or just saying this out of the blue lmao
No it's not. You guys keep saying that but then you admit that make ng a guitar out of clay or whatever would dampen the sound. So tome wood is a thing. Certain woods can increase your sustain and thus change how the guitar interacts with you and due to the sustain the strings will oscillate for longer and the pickups will pick that up. It can even be measured in a lab and you can see the soundwaves on a graph. Just changing out the bridge material will change the tonal spectrum on the graph. So it's not BS it's just that some can't pick up on the nuances an some can.
Also, you can clearly hear the difference in sound between his 2x4 and the Tele. At least I can. It's so fucking obvious. He didn't even measure the sound waves to show the difference. Y'all are such idiots.
I think in terms of electric instruments this is correct, but for acoustic instruments like violin, cello, and especially double bass this is simply not true.
@hgblackshadowmaster Carved top acoustic guitars fall under this category as well. Braced-to-hell modern boxes, still pretty significant. But too far out of the point of the video I guess.
Any change in a system in going to result in *some* change for player or observer, placebo or not. It's just a question of how much of that is worth it to you as a player, right?
The real issue is the mark-up and how people are sold *essentials* or *upgrades* that aren't. Oh well. Fools and foxes.
Ugh, tonewood threads are worse than ligature threads on woodwind forums.
Great video. Your research is phenomenal. You’re very persistent. Your knowledge of the instrument is incredible.
I guess Brian May together with his father had this figured out back in the 70’s. Legend. Thank you for the great content.
Leo Fender probably had it figured out too!
@@redsky1433 In fact, he did. Leo chose the woods he used for his guitars because they were sturdy without being too heavy, and they were cheaply available in 1951.
@@zhiracs yeah, certain guitar woods have still benefits. I dont personally like basswood much cause it get dings and chips way too easy compared to mahogany. Every Ibanez RG I have owned have their paint chipped pretty quick and sometimes I dont even recall hitting them anywhere but still the dings appear out from nowhere
@@zhiracs like the first tele ... it was pine wood
You've done something huge not only for the player community, but the luthier community. I will be using this as a reference often. Thank you!
9:16 I've always said most of my tone comes from two Honda engines next to my guitar.
Seriously thanks so much for making this video. This is why I play G&L guitars -- they use the same pickups even in their import models. The rest is just playability and looks. Although I don't regret buying my US-made Doheny -- it has those two in spades.
I have a nice collection of tokai hodos. Cheapest one cost me 15 quid and plays and sounds better than any £1000+ Fender.
G&L are absolutely stellar and massively underrated guitars. Only played a handful of them imported as well as USA models and they blow the doors off of every Fender I've ever played. Leo wasnt lying when he said he'd made the best guitars of his life at G&L.
"a 2x4 plank guitar might not be enough to push past deeply rooted beliefs". Oh man, nothing will. Just saw a video by a well known guitar reviewer saying this doesn't really prove wood doesn't matter. To me, just the mere fact that the air guitar sounds close to an actual guitar (and it sounds pretty close) should debunk eveything about wood. Great video!
which one was it? name and shame pls :P
The only problem with that thought is that when you make guitars out of something that isn't what they end up sounding like crap
I hear a difference between the 2x4 and the anderson. But not between the air guitar and the anderson. Maybe he just played slightly differently.
name-shame please!
And he would be right. Wood matters, just not for tone. For sustain, weight, durability, etc.
What an awesome video man. This must have taken a lot of work. I wish you all the best success in life 👊
You absolute legend! I found you on a Karl Jobst video too, thank you for teaching me how to paint cars. First video of yours I watched was the fiberglass bumper repair years ago haha. Cheers mate
Man, I've seen some people kick over a sacred cow or two, but you cut it up and bar-b-qued it! I build guitars, and have gotten in some deep and contentious discussions over this. To me, the key factors are strings, amplifier, and decent pickups (and not necessarily Seymour Duncan's, or DiMarzios), and what someone else here said, the player.
but how can we explain the massive differences between Fenders, gibsons and PRS guitars for example? And not only the originals, but any knockoff with those shapes as well.
I have a PRS with split coils and it sounds nothing like my strat even with the same amp and same settings.
Strats quack, teles twang, gibsons growl and PRSs purr, and that doesn't come from just pickups I guess.
@@rockboy360Massive differences because all the guitars you mention have extremely different pickups and other features that relies on pickup positions. And even if you chose 2 singles, or two humbuckers, they will often dont sound the same if they are not the same, that's even the point to make different pickups. Strats sounds strats only because they have specifically design pick-ups. Put some Gibsons humbuckers on it and it wont sound strat anymore.
@@rockboy360 To add to what Flo Cecotti wrote, those three guitars also have different scale lengths, 25.5", 24.75", and 25" respectively.
I have a cheap Tele I retrofitted with Humbuckers. Sounds almost exactly like my Gibson SG. Whatever difference is there, it's the pickup position and height, but even I have a hard time telling the difference.
@@rockboy360 did you even watch the video?
Many of my preconceptions have been shattered. Thanks for such an informative video!
Electronics technician here.
If the pick-ups we're sensitive enough to be affected by "tone wood" or the finish on the neck ,your guitar would be an extremely good microphone.
External noise would vibrate the strings enough to be picked up.
You'd literally hear your own breathing and pulse coming out of the amp when the guitar rests against your chest.
While it's possible to make pickups that sensitive , we don't
( for obvious reasons )
A couple things you missed that actually matters in very slight ways.
1.The distance between the strings matters , classical guitar necks have a cleaner sound for "fingerstyle" because less vibration is induced into the other strings.
But few people can hear the difference which is why electric guitars with classic necks are rare
2. A stiffer neck and body gives you more "sustain"....which the amp can also do.
And that's about it.
Everything else is just vanity and marketing.
Small correction in its place: A stiffer neck a body does NOT give you more sustain,- it increases the structural integrity of the instrument,- makes sure it doesn´t break or rips apart under heavy use, tension or load.
Sustain comes from vibration of the strings NOT being transferred into the bridge, saddle and tuners and on into the wood, but instead vibrating the string more by the vibrations running back and forth the string for longer thus giving the pickup time to pick up a longer lasting vibration turning that in time into a longer lasting signal.
No... the body vibration resonates back with the strings and alters the way the strings vibrate which IS picked up by pickups. That's not how body wood affects the tone. It's not like the pickups pick up the body. The resonance of the body and the strings together change each other and the pickups pick up the strings. The body resonance just alters the string resonance. Yeah it's not a huge impact either way but I think you misunderstand the mechanism for that.
Like the weight and material of the body determines what frequencies the wood will interfere with, and "steal" those frequencies energy from the strings. And therefore the signal from the pickup from the string vibrating is different because the body affects the string vibration.
@@Dude8718 not enough for the pickups to detect.
Ooooh, looks like we have a c-c-c-ca-cat fight on our hands. If you don't mind, I'll spend the time practicing some of the nice country licks Jim was playing.