@@HunnysPlaylists I didn't hear anything..duh..I saw what you typed but I didn't understand what you were trying to communicate...but if your saying P R Smith is right about wood effecting tone on electric guitars then 😂
I wonder what high end violin luthiers have to say about PRS buying up the good tonewoods that they really want for their craft, only to watch him build solid body electric guitars with the lot. I think they would say, "That's nuts!"
And they're charging thousands extra for that "tonewood" the violin cost that much because of the work and craftsmanship. PRS is cutting em out on cnc machines so...yea that is nuts! Tip buy a nice chunk of "tonewood" and make your own. that 7000 dollar prs all of the sudden costs about 600 and some work. And it's not 6400 dollars worth of work I promise. That 6400 dollars would buy the cnc machine you need to make tons more at little cost.
From the University of Paraná “On string-body coupling in electric guitars and its relationship with the instrument's timbre” Conclusions were : Summary 9 electric guitar bodies were built in the Telecaster model by the author RMP, these were assembled using the same set of arm and pickup. Once each body was assembled, the mechanical excitation of two electric guitar strings was performed, the sound obtained directly from the musical instrument was recorded for later analysis. A musical excerpt played with each electric guitar was also recorded. For these sounds, a treatment was carried out in order to obtain the harmonics that form them via Fourier transform, these harmonics are responsible for the timbre of the instrument. The harmonic spectra of each guitar are compared to each other and there are no significant differences between them. Thus, the timbre variations of electric guitars, according to the results obtained here, depend on factors other than the body wood itself, a fact that stems from the non-existence of a significant coupling between the string and the body of the instrument. A proposal for modeling the string-body coupling is also made, which shows that only a negligible amount of energy from the vibrating string reaches the body of the instrument and that an even smaller amount returns to the string.
@@leonbrownmusic of course econtents.bc.unicamp.br/inpec/index.php/physicae/article/view/13384/8764 econtents.bc.unicamp.br/inpec/index.php/physicae/article/view/13384
Why compare telecaster shaped guitars only? why nok compare tele and strat types and also Les pauls... Shurely they sounds different, if not by the wood, then by the type of bridge and body shape... If that comparison/theory is right, the sound should be pretty identical, even if the body shape is different...
With all my respect, Paul makes great guitars but his argument doesn’t make any sense. I believe that we can’t be naïf and assume that he is illiterate about it. The guy makes some of the best electric guitars out there and his company has a R&D department. He could easily backup his statement with evidence. However, why would he do that if he can sell more expensive guitars made from “better tonewood”? PRS even has a private stock of selected pieces of wood that you can personally select for your one of a kind super expensive guitar. Telling that tonewood matters is simply better for his business.
@@HunnysPlaylists woods make a difference but it's very minor. If pickups fail to pick up minor fret buzz there's just no way tone from wood makes any substantial difference once EQ, reverb, distortion, amp, speakers, cables, vocals, drums, bass, etc all enter the equation in a mix
I don't have a dog in the tonewood fight, but there must be something wrong with the argument here that it *couldn't* matter because of Faraday's laws. Hollowbody electrics sound different from solid bodies, presumably because the wooden structure affects the *way* the string vibrates (which is why using a solid center block makes a difference, etc.). I don't know whether wood species makes an audible difference in solid bodies, but the fact that it's all about electromagnetic induction doesn't mean it couldn't.
They don't sound different because of the wood. There are ways of making either the same guitar sound different or 2 guitars sound different from each other. The argument isn't that all guitars sound the same. It's that the wood is either not contributing to any difference at all or it has such a small difference that no one can tell. And not only has that been demonstrated by removing wood on a guitar it's been demonstrated time and again in double blind tests. The only way to get an audience to hear a difference is to show them a difference. Like if you see a blue guitar and a red guitar then you hear some difference that magically disappears when you hear an audio clips and you're asked when the blue guitar is playing and when the red guitar is. This has been proven true when people have used the same audio clip but changed the video shown and then people have claimed they hear a different tone between the 2 clips of identical audio. One aspect is that you might get more sustain and thus hollowbody or an amplified acoustic gets more feedback - but this is typically an undesirable thing and sustain isn't tone. Another thing to consider is piezo pickups or hearing the guitar's sound when you strum it when it's not plugged into an amp - this sound is going to vary based on the wood in the way that acoustic guitars sound different.
@@michael1 Fine, then that's the argument, not the argument from Faraday's laws. I'm probably with you on the conclusion; I just don't think you get there from Faraday's laws.
The principle by which an electric guitar pickup works is somewhat different than what you described. The string does not change the constant magnetic field of a permanent magnet. The string is magnetized because it is ferromagnetic (iron, cobalt, nickel). The magnetized string itself is a magnet; when it oscillates, it induces an alternating current in the copper coil that is in the pickups, at the frequency with which it oscillates.
Honest question, if the resonance from the wood isn't picked up by the magnetic field of the pick up then why does a chambered body sound different from a solid body when all other things are equal?
Does it? Has anyone produced any repeatable, quantifiable evidence? Or is that just what manufacturers are telling the public and amplified by hear say? But try this. Put a magnet on a tree. If it sticks then wood can affect the magnetic field. If it doesn't it can't.
@Leon Brown Music it does. It's nowhere near as noticeable as on an acoustic guitar obviously but there are a ton of videos on here of different custom shops showing the differences, some of them claiming they notice no difference when you can clearly hear one is brighter or crisper than the other. And since they are custom shops they use the same hardware, pick ups, neck, strings, wood, everything is the same aside from the fact that one body is chambered and one isn't. It's far more subtle than an acoustic like I said because the wood makes the sound there, but it is noticeable.
@@leonbrownmusicdude LOLOL are you being serious??? Just play them.. they sound radically different amplified. Maybe your hearing is crap or you don't own enough guitars..
@@leonbrownmusic check it out genius.. pick your guitar up and strum the open strings.. now place it on a table while ringing.. where do you think the energy to vibrate the table comes from??? Don't you think guitar woods soak up certain frequencies from the strings differently resulting in THE STRINGS THEMSELVES sounding/vibrating differently?
Paul Reed Smith is the same guy that just released new tuner "buttons" for his most expensive line of guitars and claimed in a Guitar World article that excess weight on the headstock by metal tuning buttons (knobs) "robs the guitar of midrange". I took a lot of heat from PRS lovers for a video I did calling the new tuners a SCAM. I also did a video testing his claim. I played two different electric guitars through a spectrum analyzer plugin, then added a few C clamps to the headstock of each guitar and played them again. There was almost no difference (imperceptible to my ear). I liken Paul to PT Barnum! He's a showman and a salesman. But all your arguments are spot on. I tried to explain this in my video about the PRS tuners and had all kinds of arguments in the comments. I had one commenter say that the guitar is a "circle of vibration" and that the vibrations started at the pickup, ran up the neck, over the headstock, around the back, and back to the pickup (you can't make this stuff up!). Not sure why people get so worked up over "tonewood" anyway. I guess to help justify the cost of their USA made Gibson or Fender.
Lots of people don't understand basics and electronics. Acoustic instruments: Yes. Electrics plugged in through an amp: No. Microphonic pickups: Yes. Electric guitar unplugged" Yes. Guitar vibration through your hands and body: Yes.
Fun recap you have here! I've watched/re-watched the PRS interview video then I stumbled across your recap. I found the same points you reference to be a bit... fishy. The focus seemed to range from stating wood as a big deal, to saying nut & saddle/bridge are most important, to discussing finding "the sound" by dissecting some vintage pickups and reverse engineering that "sound". Sooo, ...what? I thought there was some anger management issues in that interview that needed to be touched on, LOL. Great video!
After they knock on the block of wood they take it home and cut it all up into smaller pieces and coat them in lacquer. I don't understand how PRS can draw the comparison between a violin and an electric guitar. He knows the difference but continues to use the argument. I love my electric guitars that have a nice acoustic resonance, like my ES-335 and Duo Jet, they are nice to play unplugged. But, once I plug them in and crank the amp I can't hear the acoustics anymore.
Just a traveling electromagnetic technician here. Good on ya for going back to Faradays Laws of Induction! Wood is electromagnetically inert. You are 100% correct that wood has zero practical/measurable effect on the tone of an electric guitar. That said, the construction of the neck, the fretboard material, the nut & bridge material all have subtle effects on the tone but that can be said for all guitars.
According to physics, the less the body moves, the more energy stays in the string. Whether a musician actually wants that is another question altogether.
Paul is a one of a kind! I'll concede it makes a difference but the difference is so small that it doesn't matter. That's the question in my opinion - not does it exist but does it really matter.
It may exist, but as you said is so small it doesn't matter. The thing is you don't play an electric guitar unplugged, you plug it to an amp so you can modified the tone as you want, so at the end it doesn't matter at all
@@doknox False, it's fine to not understand the effect the wood has on the vibration of the bridge and nut. It's cool you made a guitar out of pine but that isn't evidence of anything other than you made a guitar out of pine that sounds good. I really wish public schools taught science to people because they clearly failed you here.
@@StupidGuitar isnt the point to have a instrument that plays and sounds good? I've built guitars out of cherry, oak, walnut, pine. What it does prove is the difference is minuscule and what sounds better is subjective. When using high gain it's nearly impossible to tell the difference. You can say otherwise but you are wrong. I dont care what wood it's made out of if it looks nice and plays nice it's a good guitar.😉 pretty sure danelectro was building guitars out of fiberboard and no one says a word. Lol. I'll build you a guitar outta plywood that plays and holds tune better than any gibson out there. But hey to each his own. Ps. Your public schools and science argument is hilarious. I can repair fix or build just about anything. The next time any of your appliances go out have fun spending hundreds getting it fixed or buying new. Lol. Most problems dont cost anymore than 20 bucks to fix but because you dont know anything we charge you 20 times the amount. Public schools...You must own a gibson.😂😂😂😂😂
I might be being paranoid here but to me it always seems like the people who sell things made from "tonewood" always say it makes a difference and the people who say it doesn't make a difference aren't selling guitars and so don't stand to lose anything from the opinion.
If you dampen the strings over the pickup so that they dont ring, and then knocks on the back ov the body of the guitar, don't you get some signal from the pickups? Isn't that knock the sound of strings and wood resonating, fed back to the strings via the bridge, even if the pickups supposedly just picks up the strings movement in the magnetic field?
@@fluxxpiee pickups project an electrical field via a copper wire solenoid created from the input signal of your guitar. this is projected upwards through the slugs/screws in your pickups and is magnetic due to a magnet under the solenoid. the strings cause vibrations into the body and back to the strings, and the electrical field now detects disturbances into the projected magnetic field. this changes the signal that moves back as your output signal to complete the circuit.
I'm aware that the tonewood case is weak on electric guitars, but what would you answer to someone saying that you can knock your guitar wood, and the pickups are able to pick up that sound, being audible on the speakers? Implying that the pickup not only picks the strings vibrating but the wood too.
I would say than knocking on the guitar makes the strings vibrate and the pickup detects it. Just the same as it will detect your voice if you get close and shout into it. Take the strings and bridge off. Remove any metal that might be able to vibrate and then try it.
@@leonbrownmusic Knocking vibrates the pickup relative to the strings, creating a relative motion between their magnetic field and the strings, which they pick up. Presumably in normal playing a little energy from the strings vibrates the body and those body vibrations ARE picked up by the pickups, but that signal is very, very faint compared to the direct effect of the strings vibrating over the pickup, and usually entirely inaudible. (See my longer comment about physics and psychophysics above.)
You get a much bigger effect from the nut material and the saddle material because the strings come into direct contact with these parts of the guitar. There is going to be a small influence from the wood because the nut and saddles are mounted into the neck wood and body wood and that will effect the vibrations of the system as a whole. However, the overwhelming quality of your sound is the shaping of the signal by your pick-ups and then passed to your amplifier. You can also achieve much greater tonal variations by things such as the type of strings, picking nearer or further from the bridge, the pick that you use and how hard you pick than you will ever hear from different types of wood.
@@nihilistlivesmatter5197 Try reading what I wrote before posting a stupid comment or go ahead and waste your time and money by jumping down the 'tonewood' rabbit-hole. PRS has a bunch of very expensive pretty guitars for disciples of tonewood.
The only argument I could ever possibly concede here (and you did kind of touch on this when you mentioned the strings being held firmly between two points) is IF the resonance of the guitar body/neck, can "feedback" and interfere with, or in another way influence the vibration of the string, in a manner significant enough to alter the vibration characteristics of that string, AND perhaps more importantly, in a way that can be audibly detected. Given the forces at work in a naturally vibrating string, the weakness of any such external vibratory feedback, and the ability of the human ear to detect it, I'm inclined to dismiss any such argument.
PRS’ take on tone woods is not surprising. He’s made a literal fortune by convincing people to pay THOUSANDS of dollars for a guitar with tone woods. Don’t get me wrong the custom PRS instruments are truly phenomenal ! However if he took and made a guitar out of Bass wood and poplar in the same way and also gave it the exact same level of care that he would a $10,000 custom. There would be virtually no difference in to tone. There might be a difference in sustain. But tone itself would be no different.
One clue is that you often see electric violins made of composite materials, or ones that have no real body and are just the apparatus to bow and finger the strings. Electric violin makers seem to know about this, so why not guitar makers? Well, its Mr Smith's job to sell you high priced guitars made from exotic woods with fancy finishes! Not that that's a bad thing though, if a guitar looks and feels great to play generally you will 'sound' better playing it.
Not the best analogy, though I agree PRS is just lying for money. Electric violins are usually acoustic-electric, using a piezo or other vibration-sensing pickup at the bridge, not magnetic pickups like an electric guitar's. (Or they were last time I paid much attention to them.) And they sound pretty nasty until you EQ and otherwise process the sound to make up for the lack of filtering effects that an acoustic violin body provides. (Often EQ, Chorus & reverb.) An electric guitar is a very different kind of thing, although it also depends on a bit of implicit EQ in the pickup and amp/speaker frequency response to sound nice.
Your last comment is true. Your connection to the guitar is an emotional connection, and while I failed the class in university where we were taught how to evaluate intangibles, I understand that intangibles can be important. I would go so far as to speculate that intangibles are the most important factor for very high-end guitars.
@@cimmerian100 A lot depends on what you mean by intangible. (One of the meanings is "incapable of being perceived." Another is just "not well-defined.") I'd like to see some really good experiments where several guitars are made in different ways and the differences are obscured, for example (1) lightweight cheap wood bodies weighted to weigh the same as expensive "tonewood" bodies, (2) all guitars played in total darkness so the players can't see the differences, (3) players not allowed to touch the headstock or other revealing features of the guitar, (4) swapping necks of bolt-ons to see whether the perceived sound depends more on neck wood than body wood (or neither, or a weird function of both), etc. (5) lots of objective measurements using a mechanical picking/strumming machine for consistency, to see what actual features people are noticing or preferring, and what they're calling them. (For example, does "warmer" usually just mean "less trebly"? Do people notice the same things listening to someone else as they do playing? How do people's preferences change with modest changes in the EQ curve?) You could do this much better than it's been done to date, in the usual ways people do good psych experiments: control for a bunch variables, blind the subjects AND the experimenter telling them what to do (the experimenter handing a guitar to the player should not know which guitar it is, either, so the player can't pick up on the experimenter's tells), and have enough subjects and enough trials that you get statistically significant results. Unfortunately all that costs time, effort and money. Doing good, convincing science is kind of a pain in the ass. It's a lot easier to measure the resonant frequencies of a guitar with open strings suspened by bungie cords than to figure out how they affect the sound in actual playing circumstances.
@@cimmerian100 It's a joke. Intangibles are intangibles because they can't be evaluated. Also if you like a particular guitar because it is relic'ed, obviously in a dark room you wouldn't know it was relic'ed so the affect of the relic'ing would be eliminated.
Tonewood is bullshit in electric guitars. Paul I think has debunked himself many times in his own clinics. Paul reed smith builds a fine guitar…. But this comparison is wild. I love them, but as you state a violin is an acoustic instrument. It makes no sense.
I don’t know about the science behind it but I for some reason my prs guitars have more sustain then a lot of my other guitars. Also I have 2 of the same exact guitars, identical. Same pick ups, strings and even down to the same color and finish but yet sound a bit different from each other. Wood might have something to do with it.
I play jazz. I have and have played a great number of archtops. Acoustically they are like night and day due to scalelength, bracing and plywood vs solid wood. But put same PU and pots in very acoustically different archtops and its very hard to hear the difference. And completely impossible when giggin. So tonewood. I doubt.
Yeah, it's interesting that many jazz people think archtop electrics will sound better electrically if they sound good acoustically, but the physics makes me skeptical. The acoustic sound comes mostly from relatively near the bridge, including a side-to-side twisting mode of the part between the f-holes, where one side is going down and up as the other side goes up and down, creating weird interference effects in different directions. (You don't want the guitar top pointed straight at you or a mic, because that's where the two mostly cancel out.) But the pickup is usually mounted near the neck, where things are very different. I suspect that's a good place to pick up the vibration of the strings, which is what matters most, but not a particularly good place to pick up the vibrations of the top.
Paul is trying to sell tonewood.... he lost all credibility there. that people pay 5K for his guitars is nuts. I'll never play anything with PRS on it.. snakeoil salesman. he is just taking your money folks
The material type and density of everything to string contacts matters a great deal. The nut, bridge, trem block, etc. Finally pickups that pick up the sound. The rest is the amp and effects. Any difference in sound because of wood can be eq’ed out.
Ok so , Paul Reed Smith has a vested interest in "tone woods" (granted , acoustic guitars are a different animal) so he didn't end the debate but you certainly went a long way in ending it. Thank You !!
What's funny is you can knock on several different guitar blanks from the same type of wood (not the same tree) and hear variances in the same species. So 2 guitars made of Alder..or Mahogany whatever may resonate differently creating a tonal variation, but its SOOOO minute and you can't hear the variation in the mix, the 2 guitars will sound exactly the same. Yes, some woods will sustain longer or produce slightly different frequencies better or worse....but the pickup is "hearing" how the string is vibrating...not "the wood".
The strings of a solid body are not held between more or less solid points.There is a path for the energy on the string to pass to the neck/ body via those points in proportion to the mechanical impedance match. The ADSR profile and harmonic content of the strings energy will be altered according to what passes to the body / neck . What is left is what will effect the pickups. Sure a solid body is designed to be less effected by the structure and it's acoustic environment but to assert that it isn't is silly and sad. Just think of the feedback situation. Would anyone assert that different guitars don't feedback in different ways? This is exactly analogous to different woods and guitars sounding different.
You are making the assumption that (for example ) every 46 gauge string tuned to E across 25.5" scale will vibrate exactly identically regardless what they are fixed to
There is very little disagreement among guitar players that the way the neck is mounted to the body has an impact on sustain. It is quite easy to verify that, e.g., a good Gibson Les Paul will have markedly longer sustain than a Fender Stratocaster. Now, how can the body have an effect on sustain if it does not have an effect on how the string vibrates? This can only mean that the body in fact does have an impact on the sound. This impact may be a relatively small impact, it may even be hardly audible. There may also be no reproducible characteristics of, e.g., mahogany vs. maple, but there is an impact. Most importantly, this is not even what counts the most. What really counts is how the guitar feels in the hands of the player. The vibration of the wood may not directly translate to what we hear from the speaker, but it certainly translates into how you interact with the instrument which then translates to the sound coming out of the speaker.
I only started investigating electric guitars 2 weeks ago. Electric guitars rely on magnetic fields ans the tiny differences in current a strung passing through those electric fields produce Show me a wood that produces a magnetic field, and you'll find a wood that impacts the tone of an electric guitar.
Actual woods aren't too important. In my personal experience, it has to do with overall density of the materials. You can group them together and be very similar. An all mahogany body vs swamp ash isn't gonna be too different with same pickups. However, I've had huge tone differences between my PRS and a novelty silicone resin guitar even after swapping out the same PUPS in both. I wouldn't trust a biased opinion from a guitar maker (favorite guitars, btw) because he has a vested interest in continuing tonewood to sell guitars. I'd still use better wood for the neck because cheap wood tends to warp or be knotted, but that's not for tone.
Your only partly correct about the action between the strings and the pickup, the other half or the facts, no one seems to want to talk about. Ive layed this out many times and never even gotten a response so ill try again! The string vibrates above the pickups. This disturbs the magnetic field creating the signal that is sent to the amplifier. Ok thats a fact! Another fact is that when the body of the guitar vibrates the pickup mounted in it vibrates too. This viibration of the magnetic field, beneath the string disturbs the field as well creating another tone. This is also a fact. Wrap a towel around the neck of your guitar so that the strings cant vibrate at all. Now vibrate the guitar either by tapping your fingers like a drom roll on the back of the guitar. You will hear it through your pickups even though there is no string vibration. The string moving within the field is the same as the field moving around the string. So if the body vibrates, which it does, then changing the wood will effect the tone. Its physically impossible for this not to be the case.
The strings are still vibrating in your towel scenario, muffled but vibrating. Thats still where the magnetic field disturbance is coming from when rapping the body of your plugged in guitar. Take all the strings off and try that
@@cimmerian100 i already have. Im working on a new experiment that shakes the pickup, on springs, beneath strings that are not attached to the same rig. I can tell you that the reason im building a rig is because the crude version of this experiment worked so well.
@@cimmerian100 forget what is attached to what. Break it down for me. Describe to me, scientifically, how the magnetic field can move around the strings without being disturbed. Its like saying you can stir water by moving a spoon around in the glass, but if you hold the spoon still and move the glass instead, the water will just stay still.
@@stevenpipes1555 I meant without any strings there would be nothing inducing current in the coils. I know the physics, I think I misunderstood your original question. I see you're talking about relative movement of something ferrous though the magnetic field. Either the string or the pickup relative to the string. Still though I think experiments of this kind have been done before that put the same rig through different wood species and no meaningful impact on tone has been observed. It would be interesting to see the results of your experiments nonetheless.
Doesn't the most expensive PRS guitars have special woodtops that looks spectacular? But from what Iv'e heard, the special exotic variants with birdseye, flamed , and burled wood, in fact have less tonal qualities than their regular types. Isnt that the reason why they mostly use those exotic woods as a thin layer on top of regular wood? Because a guitar made from just those exotic woods would sound inferior to the regular woods? I'd say that a lot of guitars are bought first and mostly for the looks of it and not for the tone in it...
Yes, but only on open strings/chords. 'Cuz frets and fingers get in the middle of the way of the string and the nut. Bridge and block material and thickness have a more relevant impact too in tone and sustain, because tone transfer and strings getting more time vibrating. But that tonewood stuff it's just meh. If wood affects so much in electric guitar tone, it would be maybe just the fretboard wood imo. Maple seems to sound bit brighter than ebony/rosewood. But I'm pretty sure that's just the feeling I get from it, not actual facts. Hahahaha So meh. Pickups, pedals, amp, speaker, pick, dynamics, tone and volume controls, gain, eq, mics and even cables and strings does affect the tone in a bigger way more than wood, IMHO. I've been playing for 15 years. Not flexin' or stpid sht. Just sharing my experience and thoughts.
@@jhonathanmoreno73 If the nut affects tone & it doessn't induce current in the magnetic pickups it's telling us there's more going on than these so called experts assert
@@nihilistlivesmatter5197 I mean, nut quality really has an impact on tunning stability and tone on open strings/chords. Specially on strat type guitars. But, well sht, if you play an A chord on 5th fret theres no way nut affects the tone, simply cuz strings are being held down with your fingers against frets and fretboard. So, yeah, nut does not affect the tone on these kinda chords. I get luthiers, techs and pro guitar players may have their ideas and different experiences, but come on. Hahaha. This vid and one of a guy actually testing this tonewood sht with methodology and evidence are pure gold. I get prettier guitars cost more. I get pro player guitars cost more. And it's ok, Cuz of components and quality control. But trying to justify stratospherical prices because: "Oh, yeah, dude, this wood gonna make your electric guitar sound much better. Because yeah, hear the ringing on the wood table." Its just too much.
@@jhonathanmoreno73 That isn't the point I'm making The point I'm making is if we agree nut & saddles affect tone & neither nut or saddle is in the magnetic field of yor pickup then this tells us there is more going on than just the pickups It's telling us that what the string is attached to infuences the mechanics of how the string behaves If you want to have a conversation about whether this influence is significant enough to be of value.....sure that's a conversation worth having but spoiler the answer is it's subjective........but people who say the material the string is attached to doesnt influence the perfomance of the instrument are at best ignorant & misinformed at worst guilty of what they accuse others of....peddling lies. Exotic woods put a small premium on the cost of a guitar, blaming a pretty maple cap for the high cost of a private stock PRS is like blaming the walnut dash for the high cost of a Bentley...
@@nihilistlivesmatter5197 Mmmmmm. Yeah, as I said in my first comment, tone on electric guitar is influenced and affected by lotta sht, man. Not just pups, nut, wood and saddles. Hahaha It's a lotta stuff going thru when you play electric guitar. I changed stock bridge of my strat for a floyd rose rail tail, and I noticed tunning stability improved so damn much (I'm someone who loves dive bombs and that kinda stuff), changed the nut too and now I can dive bomb all day and bend as much as I want and it does not goes out of tune, but, this brings another theme to the table, and it's: A lot of people doesn't know how to properly string a guitar. Hahaha. I learned to string a guitar the proper way after 3 years of playing, I didn't know there's techincs and small hacks that improve tunning stability just by stringing good a guitar. Also, lubricating nut, saddles and much more...hahaha So, the whole set of pieces, gear or call it as you want, actually does affect everything on electric guitar...tone, sustain, performance, comfort... And...yeah, as I said, it's ok to sell expensive sht, because you get what you pay for...but telling people that exotic woods affect that way the tone or sustain of a guitar...it's nonsense. Hahaha As I said, with expensive guitars you're paying components, materials and quality control, not magic or mojo. But hey, everybody's free to believe whatever they want and can do whatever they want with their money. And it's ok too.
It's the force of your hand that makes the sound or is it the thought going through your brain to control your hand or is the oxygen that carries the sound to your ear.
why does the same pick up i put in my parts strat sound different when i switch it to my les paul set at the same string height and same gauge and same length scale 24 3/4
Several other factors and principles contribute to the sound differences between electric guitars, aside from Faraday's law of electromagnetic induction. Some of these include: Newton's laws of motion: These laws govern the vibration of the guitar strings. When a string is plucked or strummed, it vibrates according to the principles of wave mechanics, producing sound waves that propagate through the air. Acoustics principles: The resonance and reverberation of sound within the guitar body are governed by principles of acoustics, such as the Helmholtz resonance and modes of vibration in solid bodies. Materials science: The properties of the materials used in constructing the guitar, including the type of wood, finish, and hardware, can significantly impact the instrument's sound. For example, different woods have varying densities, stiffness, and damping characteristics, which affect the resonance and tone of the guitar. Mechanical engineering principles: The design and construction of the guitar, including factors like body shape, size, bracing, neck construction, and hardware, influence the instrument's sound. For instance, the shape and thickness of the guitar body can affect the distribution of sound waves and the instrument's sustain. Electronic principles: The design and configuration of the pickups, wiring, and electronic components in the guitar's circuitry influence the signal output and tone shaping capabilities. Different pickup configurations (e.g., single-coil vs. humbucker) and wiring schemes can produce distinct tonal characteristics. Psychoacoustics: Human perception of sound is influenced by psychoacoustic factors such as frequency response, harmonic content, and spatial characteristics. These perceptual elements play a role in how we interpret and appreciate the sound of different guitars. Overall, the sound differences between electric guitars are the result of a complex interplay of physical, mechanical, and perceptual factors, encompassing principles from various scientific disciplines. While Faraday's law is essential in understanding the fundamental process of signal generation in electric guitars, it is just one piece of the puzzle in explaining the diversity of tones produced by different instruments.
For electric guitars... doesn’t mean shit... strings, pickup, amp, how you how play with your hand, how you pick, type of pick ... and the last thing possibly very very very little the wood but not even noticeable with your ear
It is funny that PRS comes with those statements because his company is selling special guitars that cost more than their regular ones. Apparently the biggest difference to the regular ones are the quality of the wood. If they all sound the same what is the point of buying the expensive one.🤔
I see a lot of comments saying the guitar companies have been ripping people off buy charging so much for their guitars. I disagree, tone wood debate aside, these companies aren’t charging you thousands for the fact they have used mahogany, maple, and/or rosewood. They are charging you for the craftsmanship of the instrument. Sure these companies charge a premium for the beauty of the instrument such as the highly flamed maple tops, but again, tone wood debate aside, wouldn’t you expect to pay more for a more visually appealing guitar? Anytime you see a budget guitar they still have the same bones as their more expensive counterpart. Epiphone Les Paul’s still have mahogany backs and necks with maple caps only the flamed top is replace with a plain top and then a veneer is added. I think guitar makers just follow the same recipe of making instruments but they aren’t charging you for the specific wood, they’re charging you for their craftsmanship. The only time you’ll pay for the specific wood is when the guitar is made with an exotic wood species like Brazilian Rosewood.
I don't get it, the electric guitar's "tone wood" is literally the speaker. Single coil or humbucker makes a difference, but after that, the biggest difference is going to be preamp/amp, which act like the bridge and soundpost in an acoustic instruments, and then the speaker, which is the freaking resonator, just like the tonewood in an acoustic instrument. How do people not understand that? Fender has made guitars out of pine and poplar, and people never realized it. Some of the earliest broadcasters that are worth a fortune now are made from pine.
Most hard materials exhibit resonance at a particular frequency. Holding a piece of neck wood or metal bar and banging it will produce a Resonance that is related to the wavelength of the material at that point most electric guitar bodies and necks will vibrate in sympathy to the note being played which will in effect reinforce or dampen the sounds at frequencies the softer the materials are the more high end frequencies will be attenuated. Check out Hermann Von Helmholz. Best regards . John.
But a microphone also works by having a magnetic field and a wire. And the wire moves because it is connected to a diaphram that is excited by the sound waves and thus a current is created. So why wouldn't the pattern of movement that the solid electric guitar body has - due to previously being excited by the strings - create a pattern of movement in the strings in turn that depends on the natural pattern of movement that the body material has? Like I genuinely don't really know
You are correct by saying microphones are driven by air movement, which in turn generates a disturbance of it's magnetic field. The amount of air moved by the guitar body, though, is completely negligible, not enough to influence the vibrating patterns of the strings.
@@phabi0 Im not talking about any air. Im talking about the wood which resonates which may transfer its resonance back to the strings since the strings rest on the bridge and nut which rest on the wood. You can clearly feel an electric guitar bodys vibration when you play so I'm wondering if the vivrating body wouldn't reexcite the strings through the bridge and nut at least in a small way and potentially in a way that depends on the body and neck material...
@@flosse1993You're right that the body vibrates and that it makes the pickup vibrate in return. But firstly in a good guitar you want the body and neck to vibrate as little as possible, because if they do vibrate they take energy away from the string and lessen the sustain. This energy transfer happens more easily if the body/neck resonates with the strings so you don't want them to do that (basicaly the wood can only take energy away from the strings not reexcite them.) Secondly, good wood for electric instruments should be very rigid, because you don't want unstable tuning or a neck that warps etc. The more rigid an object is, the more energy it takes to bend. So the amplitude of the guitar's body's movement will get smaller the better the wood is. So at any given frequency, a good guitar transmits almost no energy to its body, and the small amounts of energy that does manage to get through has a very small impact because wood is rigid. So really, the better the wood is, the less it plays a role on sound. Wood playing no influence on sound is a prerequisite of an electric instrument with long sustain and overall stability.
guitar builders are over a thousand..and they have to compete..the larger ones have contracts for certain amounts of certain types of wood..and they spend heavily on getting those woods, and then they store them for years before building a guitar..you can be sure that they want you to think that their guitars sound better in some way or the other than somebody who builds guitars from some piece of pine from the local lumber yard..well, there is a difference in sustain and brightness depending on the material that connects the nut and frets to the bridge..yes, i have seen the video where a guy put a guitar string on a piece of hard steel..but for the most part..any differences in sound can be edited with a few simple tools..compressor, equalizer pedal, etc..most of the tone is going to come from the pickups, the guitar wiring (resistors and capacitors), the pedals, and the amp, and the speaker..
You have focused on acoustics as an entirely different thing from electrics. So here's a question: I trust that you can discern the differences between, say, cedar-top and sitka-top acoustics. If you start increasing the thickness of the tops, Is there a certain thickness at which cedar and sitka will sound identical?
If all you play is power chords through a 5150''s lead channel then yes tonewood makes f&*^ck all difference. BUT if you play wailing blues stuff then you will find tone wood absolutlely does make a huge difference and then of course there is a grey area between the metal chuggers and the traditional wailer type players right?
Ok, explain why I do have two strats with same pick-ups, and almost similar hardware but they still sound so different. One is cheap and the other is mpre expensive, but still the important is not which is better than the other, the point is that they are different no matter how much I want them to sound similar using the same parts it is just different because the variables are just wood.
The vibration of the wood affects the vibration of the string, which will be picked up by the pickup. Watch the video from warmoth where he tests different bodies. Do it! You will hear a difference! When I find people who can’t believe wood makes a difference, I know they haven’t really experienced it. I have one guitar (a strat style with a mahogany & maple body) with a dry thick ebony fingerboard and it is so bright and hard sounding that I can’t stand it, no matter what pickups I use.
I watched that video seems to make a difference. How big of a difference or is it a tone difference, I don’t know. I’ll just buy what I like and call it a day.
On a solid body electric guitar, if the wood is resonating, it's stealing energy from the pickup and the pickup isn't resonating. This is Physics 101. On a solid body electric guitar, I would argue you want the wood that resonates the least... that sustains the least, to avoid stealing that energy from the pickups. Which is why in tests, when they have replaced the solid body of the electric guitar with a steel beam, it sustains forever. (Forever is an exaggeration, but much, much longer than a wooden body electric guitar). It's also why hollow body and semi-hollow-body electric guitars tend to have poor sustain.
PRS needs to justify those $14K private stock prices. The truth is, in the right hands, that $14k private stock guitar would sound no different then a similarly configured sub $1k guitar.
If there is someone who claims that his research and multiple tests allowed him to transform every component of a guitar to influence the tone, it’s Paul Reed Smith. PRS marketing capains beeing based of wood selection for their sonic values, he really ought to puts vids up front to prove it - he would certainly end the debate. I totally agree with your video Leon, Paul should provide evidences of his claims rather than saying “it’s nuts”…. Oh and by evidences, that is not to do a close micing of a guitar while he sweeps the strings to show that it vibrates (cause we only mic acoustic instruments that way ;) )… he should do like Jim Lill or Warmoth have done, a simple scientific approach :) Can you image if HE showed us tonewood doesn’T matter?!?!? It would end his business ;) Nb : I love PRS and find them as nice looking and playing as they are expensive😊
I make guitars and pickups for living. Since years. Well.... It's not that simple. Try to use the same pickups, same hardware and strings and all but changing the body from a solid one to a "thinline" one. And tell me. Another thing: pickups' are made of parts that, even if you don't want, vibrate itself due to mechanical obvious reasons. So, try to knock on a pickup. Then, imagine this pickup screwed directly or very close to the wood or other vibrating material.
Acoustic guitars are speakers. Electric guitars are inductors. The acoustic guitar is a vibrating box of air. The electric guitar is a set of vibrating strings modulating a magnetic field.
On an electric guitar, everything happens between the bridge and the nut. The voicing of a(n electric) guitar is dictated by the distance between the P.U. and the BRIDGE. Tonewood is a wood grade (fire wood, deck wood, furniture wood, construction wood, TOAN WOOD). Just like a diamond is graded. 1. It needs to be stable 2. It needs to be nice to work with (no a lot of oak guitars. Oak is one of the nicest looking types of wood, but I don't see them because it is a pain in the behind to work with. Tools dull easily etc. etc.). I know only 1 famous oak guitar (not personally) and that is Brian May's "Red Special"... Luthiers are on to something, I guess. 3. Has to look nice (ebony fretboards, yummy. flame maple tops, whooooo!!!! Burls etc. 4. Profit!!! People who go: "But the sustain, man". (while having their guitar cushoned by a big beerbelly and grabbing the neck with sausage fingers... Try ringing a tuningfork on a beerbelly). My Fernandes APG 80 has more sustain then my 2001 LP Std (honeyburst plaintop, 60's neck). 5 pc. Fernandes with a veneer top vs 1pc mahogany body with maple caps. more sustain. Anywho as a carpenter/joiner (in my spare time) I support wood grades. but there is no such thing as tonewood dictating tone (TAONWOULD).
It's silly. An acoustic instrument is way different form an electric one. I played violin for years and tried many different instruments. Sure there can be a huge (and I mean HUGE) difference between violins. But that's apples and oranges to an electric guitar. You can easily close your eyes and pick out which violin is being played, between a good an poor instrument. I have yet to see credible evidence that proves tone wood makes any real difference for an electric guitar. If it's so easy to prove, why hasn't anyone been able to do it yet.
The wood does impact the attack and sustain, the design of an electric it NOT to vibrate. The electric was designed to STOP feedback. Feedback was from the wood acting as an echo chamber to the pickups, and as the echo increases it feeds back. Electric guitars stopped this echo chamber. I agree, pickups are not microphones, and it's a bad thing when pickups are microphonic, thats why we wax pot them. The body impacts how the string vibrates, and thus how it vibrates through the magnetic field impacts the tone. A bolt on neck will reduce sustain, hollow body impacts the attack, scale length also impacts tone. too soft a wood, impacts how the string vibrates. Pick up a slab of 2" mahgany and tap on it. Yeah it's like a rock.
Everyone who says you're not hearing the piece of wood is partially right and also partially wrong. You even said it yourself sort of... as long as it's held firmly. The wood affects how the string vibrate as your bridge and your tuners/nut are all attached to it. Is it noticeable to an ear? Maybe or maybe not, but I've definitely personally played two identical guitars sans fretboard wood and they do sound substantially different even to my non caring ears. There's also no evidence of tonewood not being a thing FWIW. Funny you didn't point that out and yet you call him out on it, isnt it?
Honestly , after playing hundreds of guitars over the years , acoustic as well as electric. Obviously acoustic guitars are much clearer in hearing the difference because their very construction will project the physical sound waves that comes from them. However if you have the same electronics, same pickups & hardware , same everything in electric guitars , but different woods. A very highly trained ear can hear the difference in the sound. I know that’s not what people want to hear, but it’s true. Really expensive tone woods are mostly for aesthetic yes but a very good ear can hear thru the pickups of an electric guitar & tell the difference. It’s not a gimmick , not a lie , yes the difference is faint & sometimes vague but you can hear it. Just ask blues players why they love maple with swamp ash , cause it sounds best for their style . It’s all subjective .
If it's all subjective, than what is the actual difference? If there was a difference it wouldn't be subjective. Nobody says this about speakers or microphones. You get a frequency response chart and that's that. You might like one more than the other, but if you try to say this one is brighter than that one we can all just look at the charts. Nothing subjective about it.
@@methyod That's not how that works champ. Just because it is subjective doesnt mean it doesnt exist. People do indeed say this about microphones. Just because you can't hear it yourself doesn't mean there isn't a waveform difference coming out of the jack.
Do you have any scientific studies to back that up? One of the studies I'm familiar with (by Arthur Pate and others at the Sorbonne in Paris) says that the objective differences in the resonance properties of maple necks with rosewood fretboards vs. maple necks with maple fretboards are less than the differences among either type. There does not appear to be a distinctive maple sound vs. rosewood sound, because both maple and rosewood vary more than the difference between a typical piece of maple and a typical piece of rosewood. Different necks may sound a little different, but people are apparently wrong to assume that a maple neck sounds the way it does because it's made of maple. And that's for nominally "identical" necks (same make and model) made in the same factory. The thickness of the wood also matters more than small differences in the wood itself. The rigidity (and thus the resonance preoperties) of a piece of wood depend directly on the intrinsic stiffness of the wood itself, but they depend on the CUBE of the thickness of the wood. If you make the wood 26 percent thicker, for example, it will be TWICE AS STIFF, like an entirely different wood. That is useful to know, because if you want a nice stiff body but don't want all the weight, you can use a cheap wood and just make it thicker. That means that a Les Paul body has the resonance properties it does less because its made of mahogany and maple than because it's freaking thick, with a 1 3/4" slab of wood topped buy a 1/2" carved top. It also means that necks matter much more than bodies, because they're much narrower AND much thinner. For the puroses of most resonances that might possibly affect the electric sound in a noticeable way, the body is just a stiff weight that immobilizes the bridge and one end of the neck, while the other end of the neck wiggles around and therefore absorbs vibrations at various frequencies, decreasing sustain at those frequencies. Neck profiles are likely to matter, with thicker necks maybe being a little better, but manufacturers don't want you to know that, because they make their money off of the body woods, not undesirably thick necks (or carbon-reinforced necks). But given Pate et al's results, it appears that maple vs. rosewood is a red herring. If it matters at all, the density and flexibility of the particular piece of maple or rosewood matters more than which species of wood it is. And body woods are mostly bullshit, because all that matters about the body is its mass and overall stiffness, which depends primarily on its thickness, not being made of some expensive exotic wood.
The physics involved preclude tonewood making any difference in electric guitars. It will likely take a few more generations of people seeing UA-cam videos of guitars made out of epoxied jawbreakers, laminated paper, concrete etc etc to get in their head that it is an electrical instrument not an acoustic And to all those who *kinda* acknowledge this but still cling to nonsense by saying something like “well, it doesn’t make a HUGE difference, it just makes a very minor difference”-- how do you know? Admit that you are purely guessing or assuming that. You haven’t done any experiments to demonstrate the minor differences People hear with their eyes to a significant degree, and people generally don’t understand the difference and interaction between sensation and perception.
The difference is shown in a video on UA-cam somewhere. It’s so small that most human ears cannot tell a difference so they had a computer read the frequencies of alder, ash, and mahagony electric guitar bodies. The difference can be nullified by a slight adjustment in EQ. Paul Reed Smith is making a butt ton of money from the claim, “guitar body wood makes a difference.” Well sure Paul, probably because your expensive guitars with expensive pickups are in the Korina and mahagony bodies and your cheap, crappy pickups are in basswood or poplar bodies lol. Eddie Van Halen knew what he was doing when he put a Gibson pickup from a ‘62 ES-335 in a, at the time, cheap, northern ash boogie bodies “second” (throw away) guitar body. He wanted the Gibson sound in a Fender body and got it. The reason his tone was hugely mid range and high AF is because his ‘67 Marshall Super Lead was born with a 50k mid pot (not 25k like most), he put everything on 10, and he attacked the crap out of strings. Try a Fender medium gauge pick on your guitar and play super heavily…attack your strings as if they slept with your mama. A lot of that bass response fades into the background as the mids and highs are in the foreground. Grant it, Eddie did say he didn’t like the tone of his Ibanez Destroyer after cutting a chunk into it, making it the shark, or his Bumblebee because of the tone (even though it too was northern ash and Destroyer Sen Ash). I bet almost anything that Eddie, as he was known to do switched pickups as well when he took the chunk out and didn’t like the bumble bee because he psychologically knew Charvel made it and not himself; he claimed because the pickup was backloaded, it had a bad tone. Well then, front load it Ed! So my point is, he used to think that wood had an affect on tone. Later though, he used basswood in the Music Man and forever onward. I think he realized it didn’t matter.
How come I can watch videos, listening through high quality monitors, where the host says tone-woods don't make a difference, but I can clearly hear a difference? Furthermore, in those comparisons, I can clearly hear, and identify, mahogany vs alder (or ash, or whatever)?
You are not probably not comparing apples to apples, instead evidently comparing different guitars - you can't know if the difference you're hearing is caused by the wood of the guitar, or some other factor. This host is more saying that PRS doesn't prove his conclusion or end the discussion on the topic, is all.
Never ever trust something that sounds like marketing. Just say your instrument is good, don't compare apples to oranges. What do violins have to do with electric guitars? you can make a plank sound good with the right pick-up and a refined neck. It's a shame that guitars go the road of making huge stacks of money from false advertising.
an electric guitar IS an acoustic guitar. I know the NAME says electric but anyone who has owned a couple of electric guitars and chagned a couple of pickups knows that an electric guitar has a sound unplugged that is just picked up by the pickups and then amplified. If you don't really notice the subtle differencecs it just means your ears are not trained.
I quote: as long as the string is helf firmly….“ well define firmly! I am disappointed in how far this debate went. There seems only to be the „all rubbish“ and the „all is magic“ people. As far as physics go, the part that holds the string in place - and in you words „how firmly“ this is, has an impact on how the string vibrates and gets dampened. The mass / stiffness of a material changes the character. This is just physics and has nothing to do with magic or voodoo. BUT: the amount how big the influence of this on an actual instriment is, may be not so much as some claim it to be. Why do we make such a fuzz about the term „Tonewood“? Zhis word implements voodoo. Tonewood for me is simple wood that has been chosen to be dry, hard, stiff. Thats all - no voodoo. But a century before, where it was harder to do reserch and computer based measurements, probably the ability to make wood decisions was crucial. But no longer today. I agree a 100% what Paul claims contributes nothing to end this debate. As I already said: we shouldn‘t longer debate about IF it affects tone - it‘s more about how relevant it is. How relevant is tonewood? That should be the point!
A guitar pickup is just a form of a flat microphone. If you take a high output pickup into a high gain amplifier, you can hear your voice coming from the amplifier speaker if you yell into the guitar pickup.
I'd argue that's your voice vibrating the strings and causing sympathetic resonance. Take your strings off and it shouldn't happen unless you have "faulty" microphonic pickups.
@@johnbach2380You guys realize "microphonic" pickups are just unpotted pickups right??? All the most coveted vintage PAFs are microphonic. There's nothing wrong unless you play loud high gain amps. Pickups are very much microphones by definition. They actually do generate a little voltage from large changes in air pressure. It's physics and static charge.
@@davidfaustino4476 Yeah, and a lot of people... I'd say most do not want microphonic pickups. My main reason for selling my r9 was because of the microphonic and shit pickups for my own usage. There's better vintage PAFs being done by Lollar or Haussel and Bare Knuckle... and PRS anyway. They are not microphonic.
Well then Paul I’ll make sure my next Casio keyboard is made of AAAAA maple. I’m sure it will make a difference. I say this ridiculous statement as a PRS fan and S2 (see profile pick) owner and fellow Marylander.
LOL, the dumbness of humans 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 The fly on the wall changes the sound more than the body wood. IT'S JUST A MARKETING TOOL THAT TOOK A LIFE OF ITS OWN!!!!
Agree that Paul's argument isn't valid here. However, it's too reductive to say that wood doesn't matter. The pickup voicing is probably the biggest contributing factor to an electric guitars tone. But other elements also have an effect. In Leon's video he says, "as long as those strings are attached to something pretty solid at both ends..." However, wood isn't as solid as you think. Each piece of wood will have it's own resonant frequency, which in turn allows different vibration frequencies to persist stronger in the strings. Which do get "felt" by the pick ups. In addition, a badly made guitar can dampen the energy and suck the tone. So everything matters, but not necessarily in the same proportions.
I would imagine that violins are a different ball game, but when it comes to electric guitars it would appear that pickups and particularly pickup height are a major factor. I've just had my mind kinda blown by this video... ua-cam.com/video/n02tImce3AE/v-deo.html
It’s not like a pickup picks up ONLY the magnetic field. It DOES pick up the „surroundings“ as well. Or how do you explain the FACT that one can speak trough a pickup? My voice is not magnetic. So at least there is evidence that a PU picks up more than just the magnetic field.
Gute Ohren und Erfahrung belegen doch, dass das Holz bei einer E-Gitarre zum sound beiträgt, einer von mehreren Faktoren. Ausserdem kommt noch hinzu was am Ende der Kette steht. Wenn du deine Gitarre voll verzerrt durch irgendeine digitale Sch... spielst, dann ist eh alles egal.
A tonewood seller saying tonewood is important, very legit
Yes, who has worked with it his whole life. How does the vibration of everything but the wood matter to you?
Exactly..the fact people can't see this is unreal
@@HunnysPlaylistswhat?
@@Jeremya74 you heard me.
@@HunnysPlaylists I didn't hear anything..duh..I saw what you typed but I didn't understand what you were trying to communicate...but if your saying P R Smith is right about wood effecting tone on electric guitars then 😂
I wonder what high end violin luthiers have to say about PRS buying up the good tonewoods that they really want for their craft, only to watch him build solid body electric guitars with the lot. I think they would say, "That's nuts!"
Lol
And they're charging thousands extra for that "tonewood" the violin cost that much because of the work and craftsmanship. PRS is cutting em out on cnc machines so...yea that is nuts! Tip buy a nice chunk of "tonewood" and make your own. that 7000 dollar prs all of the sudden costs about 600 and some work. And it's not 6400 dollars worth of work I promise. That 6400 dollars would buy the cnc machine you need to make tons more at little cost.
He can pay for it, they probably own a few too.
@@doknox Tonewood is real, wood vibrates differently.
@@doknox PRS' cnc machines are also designed to mimic human hands to make perfect replicas of the 80's bodies and necks.
Most guitar / drum companies have been talking how the wood is a huge tone element. They will never say- 'we were wrong'.
You got my subscription!
From the University of Paraná “On string-body coupling in electric guitars and its relationship with the instrument's timbre”
Conclusions were : Summary
9 electric guitar bodies were built in the Telecaster model by the author RMP, these were assembled using the same set of arm and pickup. Once each body was assembled, the mechanical excitation of two electric guitar strings was performed, the sound obtained directly from the musical instrument was recorded for later analysis. A musical excerpt played with each electric guitar was also recorded. For these sounds, a treatment was carried out in order to obtain the harmonics that form them via Fourier transform, these harmonics are responsible for the timbre of the instrument. The harmonic spectra of each guitar are compared to each other and there are no significant differences between them. Thus, the timbre variations of electric guitars, according to the results obtained here, depend on factors other than the body wood itself, a fact that stems from the non-existence of a significant coupling between the string and the body of the instrument. A proposal for modeling the string-body coupling is also made, which shows that only a negligible amount of energy from the vibrating string reaches the body of the instrument and that an even smaller amount returns to the string.
Love it man. That's amazing! Will you please send me the link to that research?
@@leonbrownmusic of course
econtents.bc.unicamp.br/inpec/index.php/physicae/article/view/13384/8764
econtents.bc.unicamp.br/inpec/index.php/physicae/article/view/13384
Why compare telecaster shaped guitars only? why nok compare tele and strat types and also Les pauls... Shurely they sounds different, if not by the wood, then by the type of bridge and body shape... If that comparison/theory is right, the sound should be pretty identical, even if the body shape is different...
@@gjenferd because all the variables have to be the same except the one you want to test.
in this case the type of wood
@@gjenferdpickups, bro. Totally different pickups are used on those models.
He has to say that or he would have.to admit he's been ripping people off for decades
With all my respect, Paul makes great guitars but his argument doesn’t make any sense.
I believe that we can’t be naïf and assume that he is illiterate about it. The guy makes some of the best electric guitars out there and his company has a R&D department. He could easily backup his statement with evidence.
However, why would he do that if he can sell more expensive guitars made from “better tonewood”? PRS even has a private stock of selected pieces of wood that you can personally select for your one of a kind super expensive guitar.
Telling that tonewood matters is simply better for his business.
I can back it up with observations. The entirety of History. Also just cmmn snse.
Wood matters, each vibrates differantly, it's what 90% of the guitar is made out of.
@@HunnysPlaylistsfirst of all, what types of guitar you talking about? Electric or accoustic? 😊
@@fluxxpiee I am clearly speaking about electric guitars.
@@HunnysPlaylists woods make a difference but it's very minor. If pickups fail to pick up minor fret buzz there's just no way tone from wood makes any substantial difference once EQ, reverb, distortion, amp, speakers, cables, vocals, drums, bass, etc all enter the equation in a mix
I don't have a dog in the tonewood fight, but there must be something wrong with the argument here that it *couldn't* matter because of Faraday's laws. Hollowbody electrics sound different from solid bodies, presumably because the wooden structure affects the *way* the string vibrates (which is why using a solid center block makes a difference, etc.). I don't know whether wood species makes an audible difference in solid bodies, but the fact that it's all about electromagnetic induction doesn't mean it couldn't.
that´s the right point to put our here I think
It does make a difference though. The magnets only perceive disturbances in magnetic field. That comes from vibration.
They don't sound different because of the wood. There are ways of making either the same guitar sound different or 2 guitars sound different from each other. The argument isn't that all guitars sound the same. It's that the wood is either not contributing to any difference at all or it has such a small difference that no one can tell. And not only has that been demonstrated by removing wood on a guitar it's been demonstrated time and again in double blind tests. The only way to get an audience to hear a difference is to show them a difference. Like if you see a blue guitar and a red guitar then you hear some difference that magically disappears when you hear an audio clips and you're asked when the blue guitar is playing and when the red guitar is. This has been proven true when people have used the same audio clip but changed the video shown and then people have claimed they hear a different tone between the 2 clips of identical audio. One aspect is that you might get more sustain and thus hollowbody or an amplified acoustic gets more feedback - but this is typically an undesirable thing and sustain isn't tone.
Another thing to consider is piezo pickups or hearing the guitar's sound when you strum it when it's not plugged into an amp - this sound is going to vary based on the wood in the way that acoustic guitars sound different.
@@michael1 Fine, then that's the argument, not the argument from Faraday's laws. I'm probably with you on the conclusion; I just don't think you get there from Faraday's laws.
@@michael1 Wood has a notable difference.
How does one measure how long a "knock" will ring? Milliseconds?
The principle by which an electric guitar pickup works is somewhat different than what you described. The string does not change the constant magnetic field of a permanent magnet. The string is magnetized because it is ferromagnetic (iron, cobalt, nickel). The magnetized string itself is a magnet; when it oscillates, it induces an alternating current in the copper coil that is in the pickups, at the frequency with which it oscillates.
Honest question, if the resonance from the wood isn't picked up by the magnetic field of the pick up then why does a chambered body sound different from a solid body when all other things are equal?
Does it? Has anyone produced any repeatable, quantifiable evidence? Or is that just what manufacturers are telling the public and amplified by hear say? But try this. Put a magnet on a tree. If it sticks then wood can affect the magnetic field. If it doesn't it can't.
@Leon Brown Music it does. It's nowhere near as noticeable as on an acoustic guitar obviously but there are a ton of videos on here of different custom shops showing the differences, some of them claiming they notice no difference when you can clearly hear one is brighter or crisper than the other. And since they are custom shops they use the same hardware, pick ups, neck, strings, wood, everything is the same aside from the fact that one body is chambered and one isn't. It's far more subtle than an acoustic like I said because the wood makes the sound there, but it is noticeable.
@@leonbrownmusicdude LOLOL are you being serious??? Just play them.. they sound radically different amplified. Maybe your hearing is crap or you don't own enough guitars..
@@leonbrownmusic check it out genius.. pick your guitar up and strum the open strings.. now place it on a table while ringing.. where do you think the energy to vibrate the table comes from???
Don't you think guitar woods soak up certain frequencies from the strings differently resulting in THE STRINGS THEMSELVES sounding/vibrating differently?
@@leonbrownmusictake the strings off your guitar. Plug it into an amp. Scream into a pickup. Why are you hearing yourself through the amp???? 🤔
What about hollow body electric though? Seems to affect the sound.
Paul Reed Smith is the same guy that just released new tuner "buttons" for his most expensive line of guitars and claimed in a Guitar World article that excess weight on the headstock by metal tuning buttons (knobs) "robs the guitar of midrange". I took a lot of heat from PRS lovers for a video I did calling the new tuners a SCAM. I also did a video testing his claim. I played two different electric guitars through a spectrum analyzer plugin, then added a few C clamps to the headstock of each guitar and played them again. There was almost no difference (imperceptible to my ear). I liken Paul to PT Barnum! He's a showman and a salesman. But all your arguments are spot on. I tried to explain this in my video about the PRS tuners and had all kinds of arguments in the comments. I had one commenter say that the guitar is a "circle of vibration" and that the vibrations started at the pickup, ran up the neck, over the headstock, around the back, and back to the pickup (you can't make this stuff up!). Not sure why people get so worked up over "tonewood" anyway. I guess to help justify the cost of their USA made Gibson or Fender.
To PRS, I would've asked "when have you ever recorded an electric guitar with a microphone?"
Lots of people don't understand basics and electronics. Acoustic instruments: Yes. Electrics plugged in through an amp: No. Microphonic pickups: Yes. Electric guitar unplugged" Yes. Guitar vibration through your hands and body: Yes.
Fun recap you have here!
I've watched/re-watched the PRS interview video then I stumbled across your recap.
I found the same points you reference to be a bit... fishy.
The focus seemed to range from stating wood as a big deal, to saying nut & saddle/bridge are most important, to discussing finding "the sound" by dissecting some vintage pickups and reverse engineering that "sound". Sooo, ...what?
I thought there was some anger management issues in that interview that needed to be touched on, LOL.
Great video!
After they knock on the block of wood they take it home and cut it all up into smaller pieces and coat them in lacquer.
I don't understand how PRS can draw the comparison between a violin and an electric guitar. He knows the difference but continues to use the argument. I love my electric guitars that have a nice acoustic resonance, like my ES-335 and Duo Jet, they are nice to play unplugged. But, once I plug them in and crank the amp I can't hear the acoustics anymore.
Just a traveling electromagnetic technician here. Good on ya for going back to Faradays Laws of Induction! Wood is electromagnetically inert. You are 100% correct that wood has zero practical/measurable effect on the tone of an electric guitar.
That said, the construction of the neck, the fretboard material, the nut & bridge material all have subtle effects on the tone but that can be said for all guitars.
Does the wood that resonates more help the strings vibrate longer? “Sustain”?.
According to physics, the less the body moves, the more energy stays in the string. Whether a musician actually wants that is another question altogether.
Paul is a one of a kind! I'll concede it makes a difference but the difference is so small that it doesn't matter. That's the question in my opinion - not does it exist but does it really matter.
It may exist, but as you said is so small it doesn't matter. The thing is you don't play an electric guitar unplugged, you plug it to an amp so you can modified the tone as you want, so at the end it doesn't matter at all
Only matters acoustically so for an electric instrument who cares. I made a guit out of pine. It's super light and plays and sounds great.
@@doknox False, it's fine to not understand the effect the wood has on the vibration of the bridge and nut. It's cool you made a guitar out of pine but that isn't evidence of anything other than you made a guitar out of pine that sounds good. I really wish public schools taught science to people because they clearly failed you here.
@@StupidGuitar isnt the point to have a instrument that plays and sounds good? I've built guitars out of cherry, oak, walnut, pine. What it does prove is the difference is minuscule and what sounds better is subjective. When using high gain it's nearly impossible to tell the difference. You can say otherwise but you are wrong. I dont care what wood it's made out of if it looks nice and plays nice it's a good guitar.😉 pretty sure danelectro was building guitars out of fiberboard and no one says a word. Lol. I'll build you a guitar outta plywood that plays and holds tune better than any gibson out there. But hey to each his own. Ps. Your public schools and science argument is hilarious. I can repair fix or build just about anything. The next time any of your appliances go out have fun spending hundreds getting it fixed or buying new. Lol. Most problems dont cost anymore than 20 bucks to fix but because you dont know anything we charge you 20 times the amount. Public schools...You must own a gibson.😂😂😂😂😂
@@StupidGuitar name checks out
I might be being paranoid here but to me it always seems like the people who sell things made from "tonewood" always say it makes a difference and the people who say it doesn't make a difference aren't selling guitars and so don't stand to lose anything from the opinion.
the people who say it doesn't are "kids who read" looking for "dunks" and "secret knowledge."
If you dampen the strings over the pickup so that they dont ring, and then knocks on the back ov the body of the guitar, don't you get some signal from the pickups? Isn't that knock the sound of strings and wood resonating, fed back to the strings via the bridge, even if the pickups supposedly just picks up the strings movement in the magnetic field?
Do you strum and knock on your guitar at the same time?
Long time ago I had my looper pedal turn on and talk over the guitar pick ups. Once played back, I heard my voice through the amp.
Yea you would do. The sound from your voice makes the strings vibrate and the pickups do their thing.
FACTS!
"Tonewood" in a solid-body electric guitar is a myth. End of story. Smith is just fighting for prestige at this point.
Tonewood is real. Do you not know how vibration works?
@@HunnysPlaylistsTonewood is myth ,do you not know how pickups/electronics works?
@@fluxxpiee I do, you do not,
@@fluxxpiee wood vibrates differently, some do to recognizable notes.
@@fluxxpiee pickups project an electrical field via a copper wire solenoid created from the input signal of your guitar. this is projected upwards through the slugs/screws in your pickups and is magnetic due to a magnet under the solenoid. the strings cause vibrations into the body and back to the strings, and the electrical field now detects disturbances into the projected magnetic field. this changes the signal that moves back as your output signal to complete the circuit.
I'm aware that the tonewood case is weak on electric guitars, but what would you answer to someone saying that you can knock your guitar wood, and the pickups are able to pick up that sound, being audible on the speakers? Implying that the pickup not only picks the strings vibrating but the wood too.
I would say than knocking on the guitar makes the strings vibrate and the pickup detects it. Just the same as it will detect your voice if you get close and shout into it. Take the strings and bridge off. Remove any metal that might be able to vibrate and then try it.
@@leonbrownmusic Knocking vibrates the pickup relative to the strings, creating a relative motion between their magnetic field and the strings, which they pick up. Presumably in normal playing a little energy from the strings vibrates the body and those body vibrations ARE picked up by the pickups, but that signal is very, very faint compared to the direct effect of the strings vibrating over the pickup, and usually entirely inaudible. (See my longer comment about physics and psychophysics above.)
You get a much bigger effect from the nut material and the saddle material because the strings come into direct contact with these parts of the guitar. There is going to be a small influence from the wood because the nut and saddles are mounted into the neck wood and body wood and that will effect the vibrations of the system as a whole. However, the overwhelming quality of your sound is the shaping of the signal by your pick-ups and then passed to your amplifier. You can also achieve much greater tonal variations by things such as the type of strings, picking nearer or further from the bridge, the pick that you use and how hard you pick than you will ever hear from different types of wood.
So the nut & saddle just float over the guitar & are fixed by magic?
@@nihilistlivesmatter5197 Try reading what I wrote before posting a stupid comment or go ahead and waste your time and money by jumping down the 'tonewood' rabbit-hole. PRS has a bunch of very expensive pretty guitars for disciples of tonewood.
@@jjjddd231 I did read it & the tone of your answer says everything about where the stupidity lies in this exchange
@@nihilistlivesmatter5197 If you did read it then your English comprehension is woefully inadequate.
The only argument I could ever possibly concede here (and you did kind of touch on this when you mentioned the strings being held firmly between two points) is IF the resonance of the guitar body/neck, can "feedback" and interfere with, or in another way influence the vibration of the string, in a manner significant enough to alter the vibration characteristics of that string, AND perhaps more importantly, in a way that can be audibly detected. Given the forces at work in a naturally vibrating string, the weakness of any such external vibratory feedback, and the ability of the human ear to detect it, I'm inclined to dismiss any such argument.
PRS’ take on tone woods is not surprising. He’s made a literal fortune by convincing people to pay THOUSANDS of dollars for a guitar with tone woods. Don’t get me wrong the custom PRS instruments are truly phenomenal ! However if he took and made a guitar out of Bass wood and poplar in the same way and also gave it the exact same level of care that he would a $10,000 custom. There would be virtually no difference in to tone. There might be a difference in sustain. But tone itself would be no different.
Can someone tell Mr. PRS that ELECTRIC Violins barely have any wood since they don't need wood at all to function? (Aside from structural purposes)
One clue is that you often see electric violins made of composite materials, or ones that have no real body and are just the apparatus to bow and finger the strings. Electric violin makers seem to know about this, so why not guitar makers?
Well, its Mr Smith's job to sell you high priced guitars made from exotic woods with fancy finishes!
Not that that's a bad thing though, if a guitar looks and feels great to play generally you will 'sound' better playing it.
Not the best analogy, though I agree PRS is just lying for money. Electric violins are usually acoustic-electric, using a piezo or other vibration-sensing pickup at the bridge, not magnetic pickups like an electric guitar's. (Or they were last time I paid much attention to them.) And they sound pretty nasty until you EQ and otherwise process the sound to make up for the lack of filtering effects that an acoustic violin body provides. (Often EQ, Chorus & reverb.) An electric guitar is a very different kind of thing, although it also depends on a bit of implicit EQ in the pickup and amp/speaker frequency response to sound nice.
Your last comment is true. Your connection to the guitar is an emotional connection, and while I failed the class in university where we were taught how to evaluate intangibles, I understand that intangibles can be important. I would go so far as to speculate that intangibles are the most important factor for very high-end guitars.
@@peterwilson8039 Agreed. Out if interest , how does one go about 'evaluating' intangibles when it seems to be a deeply individual thing?
@@cimmerian100 A lot depends on what you mean by intangible. (One of the meanings is "incapable of being perceived." Another is just "not well-defined.") I'd like to see some really good experiments where several guitars are made in different ways and the differences are obscured, for example (1) lightweight cheap wood bodies weighted to weigh the same as expensive "tonewood" bodies, (2) all guitars played in total darkness so the players can't see the differences, (3) players not allowed to touch the headstock or other revealing features of the guitar, (4) swapping necks of bolt-ons to see whether the perceived sound depends more on neck wood than body wood (or neither, or a weird function of both), etc. (5) lots of objective measurements using a mechanical picking/strumming machine for consistency, to see what actual features people are noticing or preferring, and what they're calling them. (For example, does "warmer" usually just mean "less trebly"? Do people notice the same things listening to someone else as they do playing? How do people's preferences change with modest changes in the EQ curve?)
You could do this much better than it's been done to date, in the usual ways people do good psych experiments: control for a bunch variables, blind the subjects AND the experimenter telling them what to do (the experimenter handing a guitar to the player should not know which guitar it is, either, so the player can't pick up on the experimenter's tells), and have enough subjects and enough trials that you get statistically significant results. Unfortunately all that costs time, effort and money. Doing good, convincing science is kind of a pain in the ass. It's a lot easier to measure the resonant frequencies of a guitar with open strings suspened by bungie cords than to figure out how they affect the sound in actual playing circumstances.
@@cimmerian100 It's a joke. Intangibles are intangibles because they can't be evaluated. Also if you like a particular guitar because it is relic'ed, obviously in a dark room you wouldn't know it was relic'ed so the affect of the relic'ing would be eliminated.
Tonewood is bullshit in electric guitars.
Paul I think has debunked himself many times in his own clinics.
Paul reed smith builds a fine guitar…. But this comparison is wild. I love them, but as you state a violin is an acoustic instrument. It makes no sense.
Tonewood is easy real.
@@HunnysPlaylists aa real as the Easter bunny hunny 🤣
@@johnbach2380 As Real As The Blessed Virgin Mary? Sure why not.
@@HunnysPlaylists whatever gets the point across. 🤣
@@johnbach2380 you don't understand.
I don’t know about the science behind it but I for some reason my prs guitars have more sustain then a lot of my other guitars. Also I have 2 of the same exact guitars, identical. Same pick ups, strings and even down to the same color and finish but yet sound a bit different from each other. Wood might have something to do with it.
Your tone pots have 10% tolerance, your tone cap has 20%.
Preach!
I love fancy wood because it looks nice.
Pickups are where the sound is.
I play jazz. I have and have played a great number of archtops. Acoustically they are like night and day due to scalelength, bracing and plywood vs solid wood. But put same PU and pots in very acoustically different archtops and its very hard to hear the difference. And completely impossible when giggin. So tonewood. I doubt.
Yeah, it's interesting that many jazz people think archtop electrics will sound better electrically if they sound good acoustically, but the physics makes me skeptical. The acoustic sound comes mostly from relatively near the bridge, including a side-to-side twisting mode of the part between the f-holes, where one side is going down and up as the other side goes up and down, creating weird interference effects in different directions. (You don't want the guitar top pointed straight at you or a mic, because that's where the two mostly cancel out.)
But the pickup is usually mounted near the neck, where things are very different. I suspect that's a good place to pick up the vibration of the strings, which is what matters most, but not a particularly good place to pick up the vibrations of the top.
Paul is trying to sell tonewood.... he lost all credibility there. that people pay 5K for his guitars is nuts. I'll never play anything with PRS on it.. snakeoil salesman. he is just taking your money folks
He has to sell his exotic woods for the dads out there so he can pay for the building he has em at. He is a businessman first, a guitar player second.
Show me a single.time where he claims the more rare expensive woods he upcharges for sound better.. I'll wait.
Pickups are also microphones. They are. Not in a strict way, but they are. And not so "unidirectional".
Then why is it that muting the strings and tapping the guitar gets amplified?
The material type and density of everything to string contacts matters a great deal. The nut, bridge, trem block, etc. Finally pickups that pick up the sound. The rest is the amp and effects. Any difference in sound because of wood can be eq’ed out.
Ok so , Paul Reed Smith has a vested interest in "tone woods" (granted , acoustic guitars are a different animal) so he didn't end the debate but you certainly went a long way in ending it. Thank You !!
What's funny is you can knock on several different guitar blanks from the same type of wood (not the same tree) and hear variances in the same species. So 2 guitars made of Alder..or Mahogany whatever may resonate differently creating a tonal variation, but its SOOOO minute and you can't hear the variation in the mix, the 2 guitars will sound exactly the same. Yes, some woods will sustain longer or produce slightly different frequencies better or worse....but the pickup is "hearing" how the string is vibrating...not "the wood".
The strings of a solid body are not held between more or less solid points.There is a path for the energy on the string to pass to the neck/ body via those points in proportion to the mechanical impedance match. The ADSR profile and harmonic content of the strings energy will be altered according to what passes to the body / neck . What is left is what will effect the pickups.
Sure a solid body is designed to be less effected by the structure and it's acoustic environment but to assert that it isn't is silly and sad.
Just think of the feedback situation. Would anyone assert that different guitars don't feedback in different ways? This is exactly analogous to different woods and guitars sounding different.
You are making the assumption that (for example ) every 46 gauge string tuned to E across 25.5" scale will vibrate exactly identically regardless what they are fixed to
I like the feeling of a resonant and light electric guitar. I call them Good vibes... :)
There is very little disagreement among guitar players that the way the neck is mounted to the body has an impact on sustain. It is quite easy to verify that, e.g., a good Gibson Les Paul will have markedly longer sustain than a Fender Stratocaster.
Now, how can the body have an effect on sustain if it does not have an effect on how the string vibrates? This can only mean that the body in fact does have an impact on the sound.
This impact may be a relatively small impact, it may even be hardly audible. There may also be no reproducible characteristics of, e.g., mahogany vs. maple, but there is an impact.
Most importantly, this is not even what counts the most. What really counts is how the guitar feels in the hands of the player. The vibration of the wood may not directly translate to what we hear from the speaker, but it certainly translates into how you interact with the instrument which then translates to the sound coming out of the speaker.
I only started investigating electric guitars 2 weeks ago.
Electric guitars rely on magnetic fields ans the tiny differences in current a strung passing through those electric fields produce
Show me a wood that produces a magnetic field, and you'll find a wood that impacts the tone of an electric guitar.
Actual woods aren't too important. In my personal experience, it has to do with overall density of the materials. You can group them together and be very similar. An all mahogany body vs swamp ash isn't gonna be too different with same pickups. However, I've had huge tone differences between my PRS and a novelty silicone resin guitar even after swapping out the same PUPS in both. I wouldn't trust a biased opinion from a guitar maker (favorite guitars, btw) because he has a vested interest in continuing tonewood to sell guitars. I'd still use better wood for the neck because cheap wood tends to warp or be knotted, but that's not for tone.
Your only partly correct about the action between the strings and the pickup, the other half or the facts, no one seems to want to talk about. Ive layed this out many times and never even gotten a response so ill try again! The string vibrates above the pickups. This disturbs the magnetic field creating the signal that is sent to the amplifier. Ok thats a fact! Another fact is that when the body of the guitar vibrates the pickup mounted in it vibrates too. This viibration of the magnetic field, beneath the string disturbs the field as well creating another tone. This is also a fact. Wrap a towel around the neck of your guitar so that the strings cant vibrate at all. Now vibrate the guitar either by tapping your fingers like a drom roll on the back of the guitar. You will hear it through your pickups even though there is no string vibration. The string moving within the field is the same as the field moving around the string. So if the body vibrates, which it does, then changing the wood will effect the tone. Its physically impossible for this not to be the case.
the second you put that through a cable into an amp all the wood disappears.
The strings are still vibrating in your towel scenario, muffled but vibrating. Thats still where the magnetic field disturbance is coming from when rapping the body of your plugged in guitar. Take all the strings off and try that
@@cimmerian100 i already have. Im working on a new experiment that shakes the pickup, on springs, beneath strings that are not attached to the same rig. I can tell you that the reason im building a rig is because the crude version of this experiment worked so well.
@@cimmerian100 forget what is attached to what. Break it down for me. Describe to me, scientifically, how the magnetic field can move around the strings without being disturbed. Its like saying you can stir water by moving a spoon around in the glass, but if you hold the spoon still and move the glass instead, the water will just stay still.
@@stevenpipes1555 I meant without any strings there would be nothing inducing current in the coils. I know the physics, I think I misunderstood your original question.
I see you're talking about relative movement of something ferrous though the magnetic field. Either the string or the pickup relative to the string.
Still though I think experiments of this kind have been done before that put the same rig through different wood species and no meaningful impact on tone has been observed. It would be interesting to see the results of your experiments nonetheless.
Doesn't the most expensive PRS guitars have special woodtops that looks spectacular? But from what Iv'e heard, the special exotic variants with birdseye, flamed , and burled wood, in fact have less tonal qualities than their regular types. Isnt that the reason why they mostly use those exotic woods as a thin layer on top of regular wood? Because a guitar made from just those exotic woods would sound inferior to the regular woods? I'd say that a lot of guitars are bought first and mostly for the looks of it and not for the tone in it...
Does nut material affect tone?
Yes, but only on open strings/chords. 'Cuz frets and fingers get in the middle of the way of the string and the nut.
Bridge and block material and thickness have a more relevant impact too in tone and sustain, because tone transfer and strings getting more time vibrating.
But that tonewood stuff it's just meh. If wood affects so much in electric guitar tone, it would be maybe just the fretboard wood imo.
Maple seems to sound bit brighter than ebony/rosewood. But I'm pretty sure that's just the feeling I get from it, not actual facts. Hahahaha
So meh. Pickups, pedals, amp, speaker, pick, dynamics, tone and volume controls, gain, eq, mics and even cables and strings does affect the tone in a bigger way more than wood, IMHO. I've been playing for 15 years. Not flexin' or stpid sht. Just sharing my experience and thoughts.
@@jhonathanmoreno73 If the nut affects tone & it doessn't induce current in the magnetic pickups it's telling us there's more going on than these so called experts assert
@@nihilistlivesmatter5197 I mean, nut quality really has an impact on tunning stability and tone on open strings/chords. Specially on strat type guitars.
But, well sht, if you play an A chord on 5th fret theres no way nut affects the tone, simply cuz strings are being held down with your fingers against frets and fretboard.
So, yeah, nut does not affect the tone on these kinda chords.
I get luthiers, techs and pro guitar players may have their ideas and different experiences, but come on. Hahaha.
This vid and one of a guy actually testing this tonewood sht with methodology and evidence are pure gold.
I get prettier guitars cost more. I get pro player guitars cost more. And it's ok, Cuz of components and quality control.
But trying to justify stratospherical prices because: "Oh, yeah, dude, this wood gonna make your electric guitar sound much better. Because yeah, hear the ringing on the wood table."
Its just too much.
@@jhonathanmoreno73 That isn't the point I'm making
The point I'm making is if we agree nut & saddles affect tone & neither nut or saddle is in the magnetic field of yor pickup then this tells us there is more going on than just the pickups
It's telling us that what the string is attached to infuences the mechanics of how the string behaves
If you want to have a conversation about whether this influence is significant enough to be of value.....sure that's a conversation worth having but spoiler the answer is it's subjective........but people who say the material the string is attached to doesnt influence the perfomance of the instrument are at best ignorant & misinformed at worst guilty of what they accuse others of....peddling lies.
Exotic woods put a small premium on the cost of a guitar, blaming a pretty maple cap for the high cost of a private stock PRS is like blaming the walnut dash for the high cost of a Bentley...
@@nihilistlivesmatter5197 Mmmmmm.
Yeah, as I said in my first comment, tone on electric guitar is influenced and affected by lotta sht, man. Not just pups, nut, wood and saddles. Hahaha
It's a lotta stuff going thru when you play electric guitar.
I changed stock bridge of my strat for a floyd rose rail tail, and I noticed tunning stability improved so damn much (I'm someone who loves dive bombs and that kinda stuff), changed the nut too and now I can dive bomb all day and bend as much as I want and it does not goes out of tune, but, this brings another theme to the table, and it's: A lot of people doesn't know how to properly string a guitar. Hahaha. I learned to string a guitar the proper way after 3 years of playing, I didn't know there's techincs and small hacks that improve tunning stability just by stringing good a guitar. Also, lubricating nut, saddles and much more...hahaha
So, the whole set of pieces, gear or call it as you want, actually does affect everything on electric guitar...tone, sustain, performance, comfort...
And...yeah, as I said, it's ok to sell expensive sht, because you get what you pay for...but telling people that exotic woods affect that way the tone or sustain of a guitar...it's nonsense. Hahaha
As I said, with expensive guitars you're paying components, materials and quality control, not magic or mojo.
But hey, everybody's free to believe whatever they want and can do whatever they want with their money.
And it's ok too.
It's the force of your hand that makes the sound or is it the thought going through your brain to control your hand or is the oxygen that carries the sound to your ear.
why does the same pick up i put in my parts strat sound different when i switch it to my les paul set at the same string height and same gauge and same length scale 24 3/4
Different string spacing, scale length and a tremolo bridge..
Several other factors and principles contribute to the sound differences between electric guitars, aside from Faraday's law of electromagnetic induction. Some of these include:
Newton's laws of motion: These laws govern the vibration of the guitar strings. When a string is plucked or strummed, it vibrates according to the principles of wave mechanics, producing sound waves that propagate through the air.
Acoustics principles: The resonance and reverberation of sound within the guitar body are governed by principles of acoustics, such as the Helmholtz resonance and modes of vibration in solid bodies.
Materials science: The properties of the materials used in constructing the guitar, including the type of wood, finish, and hardware, can significantly impact the instrument's sound. For example, different woods have varying densities, stiffness, and damping characteristics, which affect the resonance and tone of the guitar.
Mechanical engineering principles: The design and construction of the guitar, including factors like body shape, size, bracing, neck construction, and hardware, influence the instrument's sound. For instance, the shape and thickness of the guitar body can affect the distribution of sound waves and the instrument's sustain.
Electronic principles: The design and configuration of the pickups, wiring, and electronic components in the guitar's circuitry influence the signal output and tone shaping capabilities. Different pickup configurations (e.g., single-coil vs. humbucker) and wiring schemes can produce distinct tonal characteristics.
Psychoacoustics: Human perception of sound is influenced by psychoacoustic factors such as frequency response, harmonic content, and spatial characteristics. These perceptual elements play a role in how we interpret and appreciate the sound of different guitars.
Overall, the sound differences between electric guitars are the result of a complex interplay of physical, mechanical, and perceptual factors, encompassing principles from various scientific disciplines. While Faraday's law is essential in understanding the fundamental process of signal generation in electric guitars, it is just one piece of the puzzle in explaining the diversity of tones produced by different instruments.
For electric guitars... doesn’t mean shit... strings, pickup, amp, how you how play with your hand, how you pick, type of pick ... and the last thing possibly very very very little the wood but not even noticeable with your ear
It is funny that PRS comes with those statements because his company is selling special guitars that cost more than their regular ones. Apparently the biggest difference to the regular ones are the quality of the wood. If they all sound the same what is the point of buying the expensive one.🤔
where are the resin guitars then?
Heavy
I see a lot of comments saying the guitar companies have been ripping people off buy charging so much for their guitars. I disagree, tone wood debate aside, these companies aren’t charging you thousands for the fact they have used mahogany, maple, and/or rosewood. They are charging you for the craftsmanship of the instrument. Sure these companies charge a premium for the beauty of the instrument such as the highly flamed maple tops, but again, tone wood debate aside, wouldn’t you expect to pay more for a more visually appealing guitar? Anytime you see a budget guitar they still have the same bones as their more expensive counterpart. Epiphone Les Paul’s still have mahogany backs and necks with maple caps only the flamed top is replace with a plain top and then a veneer is added. I think guitar makers just follow the same recipe of making instruments but they aren’t charging you for the specific wood, they’re charging you for their craftsmanship. The only time you’ll pay for the specific wood is when the guitar is made with an exotic wood species like Brazilian Rosewood.
Let's all remember, regardless of our opinions, to just play our guitars and enjoy them.
Best argument: if the wood woodn't matter, then why so often dead notes on a PRS? :-) (btw, I am a PRS fan, had about 7 of them)
I don't get it, the electric guitar's "tone wood" is literally the speaker. Single coil or humbucker makes a difference, but after that, the biggest difference is going to be preamp/amp, which act like the bridge and soundpost in an acoustic instruments, and then the speaker, which is the freaking resonator, just like the tonewood in an acoustic instrument.
How do people not understand that? Fender has made guitars out of pine and poplar, and people never realized it. Some of the earliest broadcasters that are worth a fortune now are made from pine.
Most hard materials exhibit resonance at a particular frequency. Holding a piece of neck wood or metal bar and banging it will produce a Resonance that is related to the wavelength of the material at that point most electric guitar bodies and necks will vibrate in sympathy to the note being played which will in effect reinforce or dampen the sounds at frequencies the softer the materials are the more high end frequencies will be attenuated. Check out Hermann Von Helmholz. Best regards . John.
But a microphone also works by having a magnetic field and a wire. And the wire moves because it is connected to a diaphram that is excited by the sound waves and thus a current is created. So why wouldn't the pattern of movement that the solid electric guitar body has - due to previously being excited by the strings - create a pattern of movement in the strings in turn that depends on the natural pattern of movement that the body material has? Like I genuinely don't really know
You are correct by saying microphones are driven by air movement, which in turn generates a disturbance of it's magnetic field. The amount of air moved by the guitar body, though, is completely negligible, not enough to influence the vibrating patterns of the strings.
@@phabi0 Im not talking about any air.
Im talking about the wood which resonates which may transfer its resonance back to the strings since the strings rest on the bridge and nut which rest on the wood. You can clearly feel an electric guitar bodys vibration when you play so I'm wondering if the vivrating body wouldn't reexcite the strings through the bridge and nut at least in a small way and potentially in a way that depends on the body and neck material...
@@flosse1993You're right that the body vibrates and that it makes the pickup vibrate in return.
But firstly in a good guitar you want the body and neck to vibrate as little as possible, because if they do vibrate they take energy away from the string and lessen the sustain. This energy transfer happens more easily if the body/neck resonates with the strings so you don't want them to do that (basicaly the wood can only take energy away from the strings not reexcite them.)
Secondly, good wood for electric instruments should be very rigid, because you don't want unstable tuning or a neck that warps etc. The more rigid an object is, the more energy it takes to bend. So the amplitude of the guitar's body's movement will get smaller the better the wood is.
So at any given frequency, a good guitar transmits almost no energy to its body, and the small amounts of energy that does manage to get through has a very small impact because wood is rigid.
So really, the better the wood is, the less it plays a role on sound. Wood playing no influence on sound is a prerequisite of an electric instrument with long sustain and overall stability.
guitar builders are over a thousand..and they have to compete..the larger ones have contracts for certain amounts of certain types of wood..and they spend heavily on getting those woods, and then they store them for years before building a guitar..you can be sure that they want you to think that their guitars sound better in some way or the other than somebody who builds guitars from some piece of pine from the local lumber yard..well, there is a difference in sustain and brightness depending on the material that connects the nut and frets to the bridge..yes, i have seen the video where a guy put a guitar string on a piece of hard steel..but for the most part..any differences in sound can be edited with a few simple tools..compressor, equalizer pedal, etc..most of the tone is going to come from the pickups, the guitar wiring (resistors and capacitors), the pedals, and the amp, and the speaker..
Change your picks thats whats matter in terms of tones i think
You have focused on acoustics as an entirely different thing from electrics. So here's a question:
I trust that you can discern the differences between, say, cedar-top and sitka-top acoustics.
If you start increasing the thickness of the tops, Is there a certain thickness at which cedar and sitka will sound identical?
If all you play is power chords through a 5150''s lead channel then yes tonewood makes f&*^ck all difference. BUT if you play wailing blues stuff then you will find tone wood absolutlely does make a huge difference and then of course there is a grey area between the metal chuggers and the traditional wailer type players right?
Ok, explain why I do have two strats with same pick-ups, and almost similar hardware but they still sound so different. One is cheap and the other is mpre expensive, but still the important is not which is better than the other, the point is that they are different no matter how much I want them to sound similar using the same parts it is just different because the variables are just wood.
Probably something with the *almost* similar hardware
The vibration of the wood affects the vibration of the string, which will be picked up by the pickup. Watch the video from warmoth where he tests different bodies. Do it! You will hear a difference!
When I find people who can’t believe wood makes a difference, I know they haven’t really experienced it. I have one guitar (a strat style with a mahogany & maple body) with a dry thick ebony fingerboard and it is so bright and hard sounding that I can’t stand it, no matter what pickups I use.
I watched that video seems to make a difference. How big of a difference or is it a tone difference, I don’t know. I’ll just buy what I like and call it a day.
Was he plugged in ?
On a solid body electric guitar, if the wood is resonating, it's stealing energy from the pickup and the pickup isn't resonating. This is Physics 101.
On a solid body electric guitar, I would argue you want the wood that resonates the least... that sustains the least, to avoid stealing that energy from the pickups.
Which is why in tests, when they have replaced the solid body of the electric guitar with a steel beam, it sustains forever.
(Forever is an exaggeration, but much, much longer than a wooden body electric guitar).
It's also why hollow body and semi-hollow-body electric guitars tend to have poor sustain.
PRS needs to justify those $14K private stock prices. The truth is, in the right hands, that $14k private stock guitar would sound no different then a similarly configured sub $1k guitar.
If there is someone who claims that his research and multiple tests allowed him to transform every component of a guitar to influence the tone, it’s Paul Reed Smith. PRS marketing capains beeing based of wood selection for their sonic values, he really ought to puts vids up front to prove it - he would certainly end the debate.
I totally agree with your video Leon, Paul should provide evidences of his claims rather than saying “it’s nuts”…. Oh and by evidences, that is not to do a close micing of a guitar while he sweeps the strings to show that it vibrates (cause we only mic acoustic instruments that way ;) )… he should do like Jim Lill or Warmoth have done, a simple scientific approach :)
Can you image if HE showed us tonewood doesn’T matter?!?!? It would end his business ;)
Nb : I love PRS and find them as nice looking and playing as they are expensive😊
I make guitars and pickups for living. Since years. Well.... It's not that simple. Try to use the same pickups, same hardware and strings and all but changing the body from a solid one to a "thinline" one. And tell me. Another thing: pickups' are made of parts that, even if you don't want, vibrate itself due to mechanical obvious reasons. So, try to knock on a pickup. Then, imagine this pickup screwed directly or very close to the wood or other vibrating material.
Acoustic guitars are speakers. Electric guitars are inductors. The acoustic guitar is a vibrating box of air. The electric guitar is a set of vibrating strings modulating a magnetic field.
I think the same pickups in a hollow body and in a les Paul would sound different.. so that's not the hollow body being miked up
Man, those tuners sure do make a colossal difference. Lol
On an electric guitar, everything happens between the bridge and the nut.
The voicing of a(n electric) guitar is dictated by the distance between the P.U. and the BRIDGE.
Tonewood is a wood grade (fire wood, deck wood, furniture wood, construction wood, TOAN WOOD). Just like a diamond is graded.
1. It needs to be stable
2. It needs to be nice to work with (no a lot of oak guitars. Oak is one of the nicest looking types of wood, but I don't see them because it is a pain in the behind to work with. Tools dull easily etc. etc.). I know only 1 famous oak guitar (not personally) and that is Brian May's "Red Special"... Luthiers are on to something, I guess.
3. Has to look nice (ebony fretboards, yummy. flame maple tops, whooooo!!!! Burls etc.
4. Profit!!!
People who go: "But the sustain, man". (while having their guitar cushoned by a big beerbelly and grabbing the neck with sausage fingers... Try ringing a tuningfork on a beerbelly). My Fernandes APG 80 has more sustain then my 2001 LP Std (honeyburst plaintop, 60's neck). 5 pc. Fernandes with a veneer top vs 1pc mahogany body with maple caps. more sustain.
Anywho as a carpenter/joiner (in my spare time) I support wood grades. but there is no such thing as tonewood dictating tone (TAONWOULD).
It's silly. An acoustic instrument is way different form an electric one. I played violin for years and tried many different instruments. Sure there can be a huge (and I mean HUGE) difference between violins. But that's apples and oranges to an electric guitar. You can easily close your eyes and pick out which violin is being played, between a good an poor instrument. I have yet to see credible evidence that proves tone wood makes any real difference for an electric guitar. If it's so easy to prove, why hasn't anyone been able to do it yet.
The wood affects how the string vibrates.
The wood does impact the attack and sustain, the design of an electric it NOT to vibrate. The electric was designed to STOP feedback. Feedback was from the wood acting as an echo chamber to the pickups, and as the echo increases it feeds back. Electric guitars stopped this echo chamber. I agree, pickups are not microphones, and it's a bad thing when pickups are microphonic, thats why we wax pot them. The body impacts how the string vibrates, and thus how it vibrates through the magnetic field impacts the tone. A bolt on neck will reduce sustain, hollow body impacts the attack, scale length also impacts tone. too soft a wood, impacts how the string vibrates. Pick up a slab of 2" mahgany and tap on it. Yeah it's like a rock.
Paul Reed needs to look at this UA-cam video: Tested: Where Does The Tone Come From In An Electric Guitar?
Everyone who says you're not hearing the piece of wood is partially right and also partially wrong. You even said it yourself sort of... as long as it's held firmly. The wood affects how the string vibrate as your bridge and your tuners/nut are all attached to it. Is it noticeable to an ear? Maybe or maybe not, but I've definitely personally played two identical guitars sans fretboard wood and they do sound substantially different even to my non caring ears. There's also no evidence of tonewood not being a thing FWIW. Funny you didn't point that out and yet you call him out on it, isnt it?
Honestly , after playing hundreds of guitars over the years , acoustic as well as electric. Obviously acoustic guitars are much clearer in hearing the difference because their very construction will project the physical sound waves that comes from them. However if you have the same electronics, same pickups & hardware , same everything in electric guitars , but different woods. A very highly trained ear can hear the difference in the sound. I know that’s not what people want to hear, but it’s true. Really expensive tone woods are mostly for aesthetic yes but a very good ear can hear thru the pickups of an electric guitar & tell the difference. It’s not a gimmick , not a lie , yes the difference is faint & sometimes vague but you can hear it. Just ask blues players why they love maple with swamp ash , cause it sounds best for their style . It’s all subjective .
If it's all subjective, than what is the actual difference? If there was a difference it wouldn't be subjective.
Nobody says this about speakers or microphones. You get a frequency response chart and that's that. You might like one more than the other, but if you try to say this one is brighter than that one we can all just look at the charts. Nothing subjective about it.
@@methyod That's not how that works champ. Just because it is subjective doesnt mean it doesnt exist. People do indeed say this about microphones. Just because you can't hear it yourself doesn't mean there isn't a waveform difference coming out of the jack.
Do you have any scientific studies to back that up? One of the studies I'm familiar with (by Arthur Pate and others at the Sorbonne in Paris) says that the objective differences in the resonance properties of maple necks with rosewood fretboards vs. maple necks with maple fretboards are less than the differences among either type. There does not appear to be a distinctive maple sound vs. rosewood sound, because both maple and rosewood vary more than the difference between a typical piece of maple and a typical piece of rosewood. Different necks may sound a little different, but people are apparently wrong to assume that a maple neck sounds the way it does because it's made of maple. And that's for nominally "identical" necks (same make and model) made in the same factory.
The thickness of the wood also matters more than small differences in the wood itself. The rigidity (and thus the resonance preoperties) of a piece of wood depend directly on the intrinsic stiffness of the wood itself, but they depend on the CUBE of the thickness of the wood. If you make the wood 26 percent thicker, for example, it will be TWICE AS STIFF, like an entirely different wood.
That is useful to know, because if you want a nice stiff body but don't want all the weight, you can use a cheap wood and just make it thicker.
That means that a Les Paul body has the resonance properties it does less because its made of mahogany and maple than because it's freaking thick, with a 1 3/4" slab of wood topped buy a 1/2" carved top.
It also means that necks matter much more than bodies, because they're much narrower AND much thinner. For the puroses of most resonances that might possibly affect the electric sound in a noticeable way, the body is just a stiff weight that immobilizes the bridge and one end of the neck, while the other end of the neck wiggles around and therefore absorbs vibrations at various frequencies, decreasing sustain at those frequencies.
Neck profiles are likely to matter, with thicker necks maybe being a little better, but manufacturers don't want you to know that, because they make their money off of the body woods, not undesirably thick necks (or carbon-reinforced necks).
But given Pate et al's results, it appears that maple vs. rosewood is a red herring. If it matters at all, the density and flexibility of the particular piece of maple or rosewood matters more than which species of wood it is.
And body woods are mostly bullshit, because all that matters about the body is its mass and overall stiffness, which depends primarily on its thickness, not being made of some expensive exotic wood.
Everyone has a “very highly trained ear” until you make a blind test 🤷🏻
The physics involved preclude tonewood making any difference in electric guitars. It will likely take a few more generations of people seeing UA-cam videos of guitars made out of epoxied jawbreakers, laminated paper, concrete etc etc to get in their head that it is an electrical instrument not an acoustic
And to all those who *kinda* acknowledge this but still cling to nonsense by saying something like “well, it doesn’t make a HUGE difference, it just makes a very minor difference”-- how do you know? Admit that you are purely guessing or assuming that. You haven’t done any experiments to demonstrate the minor differences
People hear with their eyes to a significant degree, and people generally don’t understand the difference and interaction between sensation and perception.
The difference is shown in a video on UA-cam somewhere. It’s so small that most human ears cannot tell a difference so they had a computer read the frequencies of alder, ash, and mahagony electric guitar bodies. The difference can be nullified by a slight adjustment in EQ. Paul Reed Smith is making a butt ton of money from the claim, “guitar body wood makes a difference.” Well sure Paul, probably because your expensive guitars with expensive pickups are in the Korina and mahagony bodies and your cheap, crappy pickups are in basswood or poplar bodies lol. Eddie Van Halen knew what he was doing when he put a Gibson pickup from a ‘62 ES-335 in a, at the time, cheap, northern ash boogie bodies “second” (throw away) guitar body. He wanted the Gibson sound in a Fender body and got it. The reason his tone was hugely mid range and high AF is because his ‘67 Marshall Super Lead was born with a 50k mid pot (not 25k like most), he put everything on 10, and he attacked the crap out of strings. Try a Fender medium gauge pick on your guitar and play super heavily…attack your strings as if they slept with your mama. A lot of that bass response fades into the background as the mids and highs are in the foreground. Grant it, Eddie did say he didn’t like the tone of his Ibanez Destroyer after cutting a chunk into it, making it the shark, or his Bumblebee because of the tone (even though it too was northern ash and Destroyer Sen Ash). I bet almost anything that Eddie, as he was known to do switched pickups as well when he took the chunk out and didn’t like the bumble bee because he psychologically knew Charvel made it and not himself; he claimed because the pickup was backloaded, it had a bad tone. Well then, front load it Ed! So my point is, he used to think that wood had an affect on tone. Later though, he used basswood in the Music Man and forever onward. I think he realized it didn’t matter.
How come I can watch videos, listening through high quality monitors, where the host says tone-woods don't make a difference, but I can clearly hear a difference? Furthermore, in those comparisons, I can clearly hear, and identify, mahogany vs alder (or ash, or whatever)?
Because you´re suffering from BCS - Bias Confirmation Syndrome.
You are not probably not comparing apples to apples, instead evidently comparing different guitars - you can't know if the difference you're hearing is caused by the wood of the guitar, or some other factor. This host is more saying that PRS doesn't prove his conclusion or end the discussion on the topic, is all.
🤣🤣🤣🤣 It's like asking the innkeeper if the wine is good!!
So you are saying that hollow bodies and solid bodies sound the same ? Hum.
Never ever trust something that sounds like marketing. Just say your instrument is good, don't compare apples to oranges. What do violins have to do with electric guitars? you can make a plank sound good with the right pick-up and a refined neck.
It's a shame that guitars go the road of making huge stacks of money from false advertising.
Internet Buffoons: "Nothing matters LOL"
an electric guitar IS an acoustic guitar. I know the NAME says electric but anyone who has owned a couple of electric guitars and chagned a couple of pickups knows that an electric guitar has a sound unplugged that is just picked up by the pickups and then amplified.
If you don't really notice the subtle differencecs it just means your ears are not trained.
I think this guy might have an incentive to say expensive tonewoods matter. Just a hunch!
I quote: as long as the string is helf firmly….“ well define firmly!
I am disappointed in how far this debate went. There seems only to be the „all rubbish“ and the „all is magic“ people. As far as physics go, the part that holds the string in place - and in you words „how firmly“ this is, has an impact on how the string vibrates and gets dampened. The mass / stiffness of a material changes the character. This is just physics and has nothing to do with magic or voodoo. BUT: the amount how big the influence of this on an actual instriment is, may be not so much as some claim it to be.
Why do we make such a fuzz about the term „Tonewood“? Zhis word implements voodoo. Tonewood for me is simple wood that has been chosen to be dry, hard, stiff. Thats all - no voodoo. But a century before, where it was harder to do reserch and computer based measurements, probably the ability to make wood decisions was crucial. But no longer today.
I agree a 100% what Paul claims contributes nothing to end this debate. As I already said: we shouldn‘t longer debate about IF it affects tone - it‘s more about how relevant it is. How relevant is tonewood? That should be the point!
Here's Carl Verheyen on testing off-the-shelf guitars:
ua-cam.com/video/1ZnQt9yiBMg/v-deo.html
A guitar pickup is just a form of a flat microphone. If you take a high output pickup into a high gain amplifier, you can hear your voice coming from the amplifier speaker if you yell into the guitar pickup.
Uh… you shouldn’t hear that unless your pickup is microphonic… which is horrible.
I'd argue that's your voice vibrating the strings and causing sympathetic resonance. Take your strings off and it shouldn't happen unless you have "faulty" microphonic pickups.
@@johnbach2380You guys realize "microphonic" pickups are just unpotted pickups right??? All the most coveted vintage PAFs are microphonic. There's nothing wrong unless you play loud high gain amps. Pickups are very much microphones by definition. They actually do generate a little voltage from large changes in air pressure. It's physics and static charge.
@@davidfaustino4476 Yeah, and a lot of people... I'd say most do not want microphonic pickups. My main reason for selling my r9 was because of the microphonic and shit pickups for my own usage. There's better vintage PAFs being done by Lollar or Haussel and Bare Knuckle... and PRS anyway. They are not microphonic.
Well then Paul I’ll make sure my next Casio keyboard is made of AAAAA maple. I’m sure it will make a difference. I say this ridiculous statement as a PRS fan and S2 (see profile pick) owner and fellow Marylander.
LOL, the dumbness of humans 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
The fly on the wall changes the sound more than the body wood. IT'S JUST A MARKETING TOOL THAT TOOK A LIFE OF ITS OWN!!!!
Agree that Paul's argument isn't valid here. However, it's too reductive to say that wood doesn't matter. The pickup voicing is probably the biggest contributing factor to an electric guitars tone. But other elements also have an effect.
In Leon's video he says, "as long as those strings are attached to something pretty solid at both ends..."
However, wood isn't as solid as you think. Each piece of wood will have it's own resonant frequency, which in turn allows different vibration frequencies to persist stronger in the strings. Which do get "felt" by the pick ups. In addition, a badly made guitar can dampen the energy and suck the tone.
So everything matters, but not necessarily in the same proportions.
I would imagine that violins are a different ball game, but when it comes to electric guitars it would appear that pickups and particularly pickup height are a major factor. I've just had my mind kinda blown by this video...
ua-cam.com/video/n02tImce3AE/v-deo.html
Just shows how intelligence doesn’t protect you from belief
It’s not like a pickup picks up ONLY the magnetic field. It DOES pick up the „surroundings“ as well. Or how do you explain the FACT that one can speak trough a pickup? My voice is not magnetic. So at least there is evidence that a PU picks up more than just the magnetic field.
When you shout at your guitar you make the strings vibrate.....
Gute Ohren und Erfahrung belegen doch, dass das Holz bei einer E-Gitarre zum sound beiträgt, einer von mehreren Faktoren. Ausserdem kommt noch hinzu was am Ende der Kette steht. Wenn du deine Gitarre voll verzerrt durch irgendeine digitale Sch... spielst, dann ist eh alles egal.