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Post by cynical1 on Mar 28, 2013 13:56:59 GMT -5
Sustain is a matter of perfect fretwork, perfect nut, heavy bridge and ... MASS! These are deep waters you're treading in here. Don't make me get out the soapbox... While these are factors in "sustain", they are far from the only ones. Quality of construction, tightness of tolerances and precision of assembly are far more critical. With the advent of CNC in guitar building it is possible to achieve a tightness and precision in construction that rivals the old handmade guitars everyone drools over. I admit to being very impressed with the Ibanez Mikro bass's construction. After new tuners, nut, pickups and a replacement of the electronics I am very impressed with the tones this bass can achieve. Tone wood "MASS" can be a red herring. In an acoustic guitar you should be able to hear differences with an A-B test...this perception increases if you know what each guitar is made of, though... In an electric there are just too many factors involved in the final sound from the speaker to claim one wood superior to others. And again, I go back to the quality of construction and tightness of tolerances. You can take the same wood, give it to two difference builders and get two entirely different instruments back. From my experience, the age of the wood is more of a factor in the final tone than the species...probably why I haunt architectural salvage yards. The wood is stable, as dry as it's ever going to be and is as hard as it's ever going to get. The graining will also be tighter as a rule. Try 100 year old pine sometime... I think I've told the story of the 100 year old chestnut I scored once...that made some of the sweetest sounding instruments I ever made. Case in point regarding "MASS" on the bridge...when Badass came out with their replacement bridges for bass they were designed for the Fender Jazz and Precision basses. They were all the rage, until players began noticing that when you put them on certain types of basses the mass of the heavy brass bridge actually diminished the transfer of string vibration to the body and changed their tone in ways they hadn't expected. Finally, there is no "Holy Grail" for sustain. There are too many factors at work here from construction, materials and components used, quality of construction, amplification, stomp boxes and compressors, strings and the individual players technique. Anyone who claims to be the holder of the lost secret of sustain is probably also a good candidate to sell you a bridge in New York City. Long and short of it is this: Always play a new instrument on your rig to determine suitability to your style and desires. Advertising copy is. Marketing is. Damn, and I really wanted to leave the soapbox in the closet... Oh yeah, welcome to the Nutzhouse rockledge. Happy Trails Cynical One
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Post by Deleted on Mar 28, 2013 15:07:57 GMT -5
True about wood's age Cyn1. My old aria/kramer/carvin axes (all from the 90s) sustain much longer than my new ibby and the partscaster.
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rockledge
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Post by rockledge on Mar 31, 2013 23:12:30 GMT -5
Sustain is a matter of perfect fretwork, perfect nut, heavy bridge and ... MASS! These are deep waters you're treading in here. Don't make me get out the soapbox... etc................... Thanks for the welcome, and I'd like to add that sustain is not the holy grail that should be looked for. You can get sustain if you want, for days, a multitude of ways. The idea is to get sustain while retaining the guitars tone. Plexiglas guitars are as dense as you can get, and will sustain great, and are great for slide, but they suck for tone. When you increase a guitars mass using various means you are often sacrificing resonance to obtain sustain. I don't like brass nuts or saddles because they make guitars sound brittle, for example. I do like the Yamaha SG and SBG series guitars that have the brass block under the bridge, which gives them great sustain without a loss of tone. Leave it to the Japanese, that is one of the most clever designs I have seen in a guitar. That is why two humbuck guitars often have maple caps and ebony fretboards with mahogany bodies. The mahogany is very tonal and mellow, the maple cap adds some upper mids, and the ebony fretboard gives nice high end bite and sustain. Which is also why some prefer rosewood fretboards over maple or ebony. Rosewood is more mellow sounding, whereas ebony and maple are more dense and give more sustain, but are also quite a bit brighter. The old LP customs were very popular because they had the ebony/maple/mahogany configuration which gave them big tone with lots of nice high end bite that wasn't brittle. It has been my experience that Asian strats normally have nice sustain off the shelf. Whatever wood they use resonates nice. They also have very tight neck pockets, very precisely cut for a nice snug fit. Here is a trick to make a strat sustain better. With the strings on the guitar and the guitar in tune, loosen the neck screws slightly until you hear the neck creak. When it creaks, reseat the screws. When you loosen the screws the pressure from the strings pulls the neck further into the socket making better contact with the body. I like your tag also, fascism=corporatism indeed. Great quote.
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rockledge
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Post by rockledge on Mar 31, 2013 23:34:06 GMT -5
I have a Squier Strat here , an affinity that was made I think in 1996, in Indonesia. I bought it at a yard sale for 20 bucks, probably around 1998. It was a mess, very dirty, and I thought the truss rod was broke. I got it home and started tinkering with it, and took a hex to the truss to find out that the truss rod was indeed ok, it was just completely slack. I completely disassembled the guitar and cleaned it up. It had a deep red body. I reassembled it and set it up and it was great. I started gigging with it. I liked it so much that I yanked the frets and put jumbos in it and filed them down low ( something I always wanted to try with a strat. Some years later I added the David Gilmour active EMG setup. Fast forward.
Last week I bought a 2011 Chinese made Affinity with a very nice looking metalflake green body. I decided to swap out the neck and electronics on the old Indonesian one with it, only keeping the body to the Chinese one and the bridge. I cut the set screws for the Chinese strat off short ( something I always do, I incorporate a lot of fingerstyle playing into what I do and rest my hand on the bridge and hate the feel of the set screws sticking up) then proceeded to swap the necks and electronics. Now here is what blew me away. The neck from the Indonesian 1996 one fit VERY tight in the pocket. I had to move it around to get it out. When I put it on the 2011 Chinese body, it fit exactly the same. I had to tap it in with a plastic head hammer. It felt exactly the same going into the Chinese body as it did coming out of the Indo one. I finished assembling it and the next day strung it up and set it up, fully expecting to need to tweak the neck some. I set my action very low, and am very sensitive to how a guitar is set up, and desire it to have a certain feel. I didn't need to change a thing. It felt just exactly like the old one. The new body makes it sound a bit brighter , but other than that it is the same guitar with a new nicer finish.
My point being that one of the things I like about Asian guitars is how precise they are. That I can take a neck from a guitar made in 1996 and put it on one made in 2011 and it fits so perfectly that I didn't need to shim or tweak or adjust the truss is just amazing to me. I have had numerous similar situations with Asian made strats over the years. I would like to post pictures of it as it is now, if someone can tell me if I can post them from my puter or if I need to post them on a hosting site first.
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Post by newey on Apr 1, 2013 0:00:27 GMT -5
rl-
You need to use a picture hosting site, and not all of those "play well" with Proboards' software. Both Photobucket and Imageshack will work. Other ones are a bit of a crapshoot. Images must either be in .jpg, .gif, or .png formats to work right.
There is a thread on image posting in the Forum Information section.
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rockledge
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Post by rockledge on Apr 1, 2013 11:25:36 GMT -5
rl- You need to use a picture hosting site, and not all of those "play well" with Proboards' software. Both Photobucket and Imageshack will work. Other ones are a bit of a crapshoot. Images must either be in .jpg, .gif, or .png formats to work right. There is a thread on image posting in the Forum Information section. Thanks, I will give it a try. To recap, this is a neck from a 1996 Affinity Indonesian on a 2011 Chinese Affinity body. The neck has been refretted with jumbos that have been filed down. It has the David Gilmour EMG setup. I also added black tuning keys to mach the other stuff on the guitar. And the set screws for the saddles have been cut short so they do not protrude. I also used black screws on the pickguard. The original body was red.
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