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Post by blademaster2 on May 23, 2017 11:23:16 GMT -5
My rotary switch only covered the bridge position(s). In that location I have two single coil pickups sitting within a humbucker cover, back to back (I undercut the body slightly to accommodate them).
You are correct, Sumgai, that the phase reversal on this switch is intended for blending it (in parallel) with the neck pickup, which is another single coil pickup potted within a humbucker cover. I actually also used inline connectors in the guitar cavity, so I could change which position is 'reversed' compared to the other but I would never change it now after all of these years. The whole approach (experimental, as I said, and bringing a few surprises along with it) was to alter the bridge 'pickup' as a single entity and then blend it in parallel with the neck pickup.
In the bridge tone circuit I used a 1000 mH inductor in a fairly unusual 'fatness' control
In addition to all of this I used isolation resistors in series with the pickups signals before they are combined, and then also added a tiny switch to bypass one of them (the bridge one) so that it would have maximum signal strength and also act as a master volume for the combined pickup triplet. This little switch allows me to get a different balance between the two sets of controls, and is especially different when the bridge pair is out of phase and sounds quite thin but then combines with the neck pickup to add its crisp attack to the more mellow neck signal.
The whole thing sounds more complex to operate than it is, but I am very pleased with the variety of 'personalities' I can get from the set up and I still find new sounds even after decades of using it. Fortunately, Mr. Murphy has stayed away from this one and I enjoy this guitar for its tonal range and flexibility - possibly more than any others of my collection of 15 instruments including a SSS Strat.
If anyone got this far before falling asleep and is curious, I could probably find a schematic of this guitar to post.
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Post by blademaster2 on May 17, 2017 10:06:53 GMT -5
I have two guitars with rotary switches.
One is a Framus Nashville guitar, with a 6-position rotary switch that does the following:
1. Bridge and Neck humbuckers 2. Neck humbucker 3. Inner coils of both pickups 4. Bridge humbucker 5. Outer neck coil and Inner bridge coil 6. Both humbuckers out of phase
Not all of the combinations sound pleasing to me, and there are only the six settings available.
I like a rotary as an approach to setting up a single pickup's "personality" before it is mixed with another pickup, but I have not been so keen on my Framus having the rotary switch being the only switch available on the instrument when used to select pickups, since it is harder to feel where its setting is without looking at it.
[Apologies if this now goes outside of your original thread:]
As a result when I built my own custom SSS guitar (that looks like a HH) I designed it with the following on the "bridge pickup" pair:
1. Bridge, both coils, series in phase 2. Bridge, both coils, parallel in phase 3. Bridge pair, out of phase 4. Bridge inner coil 5. Bridge outer coil 6. Bridge outer coil reverse phase
As an experimental guitar I have found it to be very useful in changing the personality of the 'bridge' pickups, and it (along with the switching approach that acts separately from this rotary switch) offers far more variety in tone compared to any other passive guitar circuitry I have tried (including Strats). The rotary switch part itself was not expensive at all at the time, but it did take some thinking to get all of the combinations I wanted from it.
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Post by blademaster2 on May 12, 2017 9:30:30 GMT -5
I am behind on this news, but this is very sad indeed.
Eddie Van Halen always called Allan Holdsworth his idol (even saying in early interviews that Holdsworth was the best guitarist).
Man! I feel like for the past few years all of my favourite and most influential musicians for me are in a shooting gallery, and I brace myself for the next casualty.
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Post by blademaster2 on Feb 10, 2017 13:00:36 GMT -5
I perhaps did not express the action of a shield well enough earlier. An electric field will be zero within a conductively enclosed volume, so if that conductor is shielded and the shield is grounded (to the amplifier ground, which is often earth ground but not always) then any electric field directed at the conductor will not be able to induce a voltage inside of it (shielded from it) and it will ground out the value to zero. It is also true that the voltage will be taken to zero whether or not it is connected to earth ground. Either way it will cause a reflection of the electromagnetic energy and cause that electric field to propagate in the reverse direction and create standing waves as it interferes with the incident electromagnetic waves. The directionality of electromagnetic emissions, their propagation and these multipath reflections from conductive materials, creates standing waves with peaks and nulls throughout our environment. That is why it changes if the guitar is moved or rotated (and why Steve Morse says he will 'map out' the stage before a concert to see where and how he needs to hold his guitar to minimize noise and he will go there for quiet passages of the music).
So yes, a conductive shield shorts out the voltage portion of a electromagnetic wave - but not necessarily to ground (grounding it helps since you can separate grounded conductive materials and they can all still have the same potential on them). It also prevents that electric field from being formed within it. However a shield does not do the same for the magnetic field component of the electromagnetic wave and that is why some systems (not guitars) also add twisting of balanced conductors to cancel out magnetically-induced noise.
Understanding something vs being able to clearly explain it are sometimes not the same thing for me.
[Sorry, sumgai, for giving people even more reasons to take Excedrin..... I am curious which points you would debate, and I freely admit to not being an expert in all things electromagnetic]
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Post by blademaster2 on Feb 9, 2017 14:58:05 GMT -5
Hello all,
I must confess that am not entirely clear on the relationship between the human body and noise being increased or reduced when touching the guitar shield. What I *am* clear on is that electrostatics deals with static electricity (not changing over time) like the charge built up before getting a shock after walking across a carpet and touching a doorknob or other metal. (Oddly enough, I *do* get some noise from electrostatic discharge in the Canadian winter when I slide my hand up the neck and it causes tiny discharges from my skin along the lacquer finish that, somehow, couple into the strings and produce a crackling sound through the amplifier).
However, having studied electrical engineering I can say that electromagnetic fields consist of both a magnetic field component and an electric field component. Both can cause interference in different ways, and for that reason to propagate low level signals and keep them from picking up radiated noise is usually accomplished using twisted/shielded pair cable and driving them from a balanced source (where the impedance to ground on the positive and negative lines of the twisted wire are the same). In that type of system, different from a guitar where it is unbalanced, the shielding prevents pickup of voltages from electric field interference (measured in volts/metre) by preventing it from penetrating into the shielded location - effectively shorting it to ground - and the twisting cancels out the magnetic field (measured in amperes/metre) that each of the twisted wires picks up by ensuring that they both have the same induced signal on them and therefore can be rejected by a balanced receiver (same impedance to ground on both signal inputs). A perfectly twisted wire, i.e. with perfectly even twisting, will reject frequencies up to a limit represented by half of the electromagnetic wavelength of the dimension of the apertures formed along the length of the twisted wires.
Here is how I apply the above to the electric guitar as a system:
Electric guitars are unbalanced, high-impedance 'single-ended' signal sources feeding a high-impedance input of a guitar amplifier through the unbalanced, shielded guitar/amplifier cable. A non-zero resistance of the shield (nothing is perfect) will permit the electric field noise from appliances and lights to create noise in the signal. Magnetic fields, just like the fields that are rejected by the twisting of twisted/shielded pair cables, cannot be shielded out and instead are canceled by creating a balanced signal source at least at the guitar end of the set up - which gives us the humbucker pickups. Those pickups will receive magnetic field interference (usually a 60Hz 'hum') on each of the two coils, but they have reversed directions in their windings and therefore the hum from one is canceled by the negative version of the same hum from the other when they add together. The signal from the strings, however, is generated by the string dragging around the magnetic fields of the permanent magnetics of the pickups, so when the magnets are reversed from one coil to the next it causes the voltage of the desired signal to be reversed a second time and instead reinforces the signal rather than canceling it (humbuckers have more - roughly double - signal strength compared to single coil pickups). The downside is that, as a signal source, humbuckers have double the inductance and resistance and will lose higher frequencies through the cable and (lesser extent) amplifier input capacitance. They also have a wider area to sense the string and also lose high frequency tone by the averaging of the vibrations across this wider aperture.
So in essence, a humbucker-equipped guitar addresses magnetic field interference only at the pickup itself and is thereafter treated as a high-impedance single-ended signal source from the output jack to the amplifier. As such, for the frequencies of interest a guitar is not bad, in theory, for generating reasonably noise-free signals. (Microphones, on the other hand, mostly produce balanced signals with low impedance and are carried on twisted/shielded pair cable ((called microphone cable)) into a balanced XLR input rather than a single-ended guitar jack input).
I apologize if this lengthy post is boring .....
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Post by blademaster2 on Jan 13, 2017 16:20:33 GMT -5
BTW all of the wiring mods/switching arrangements we have all tried over the years should still be valid with this approach but I prefer to use volume controls after the buffer and, I have no (or vary little) use for passive tone controls as a pot, any more after doing this and hearing the results. -Charlie In all of my homemade guitars instead of a regular tone control I implemented what I call 'fatness' control, which is all passive. My passive circuit uses a large-value inductor of 1H (that is not a typo) in conjunction with a capacitor and forms a tank circuit to scoop out the mids to a variable extent depending on the rotation of the knob. I simulated it using old-fashioned SPICE many years ago. It allows the guitar tone to be 'thinned' but still preserve the clarity of the attack, and as a result it totally changes the character of the pickup (makes the bridge pick become more 'gentle' than the neck pickup when set to the lowest 'fatness' level). I have never yet used it on the bridge pickup - since those large-value inductors were expensive components - but I might try swapping the bridge and neck tone controls sometime to see how it sounds. Mixing pickups with this control in place adds another dimension to the variety of tone settings it can achieve, and I am still discovering new ways to set it that I never tried before. I was never comfortable with using batteries in my guitars, so my goal was to arrive at a passive tone control solution that would have a stronger effect than conventional controls do. IMHO my design achieved that.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jan 11, 2017 12:47:06 GMT -5
Thanks, sumgai, for the title explanation.
I think my wife would assign me the "Certified Guitar Nut" title for sure, but I am happy with the existing criteria for normal progression through the ranks. :-) Just curious.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jan 10, 2017 12:26:37 GMT -5
" I ask myself, what would a Rookie Solder Flinger think when he compares that to what's under is own hood... and that's where my dander starts rising." How does one get these 'titles' on this site?
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Post by blademaster2 on Dec 23, 2016 13:10:44 GMT -5
That is a good question. I am afraid that I do not know very much about them, except that Piezo are stiffer but might require very different drive signal from an audio amplifier expecting to drive an 8 ohm speaker. Their displacement would be tiny, but if stiff enough in its movement it may be a good excitation to guitar body material.
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Post by blademaster2 on Dec 22, 2016 23:06:56 GMT -5
Initially I was thinking of a piezoelectric speaker element, so magnetic feedback would not be as likely from it. A voicecoil will, of course, need to be kept away from the pickups to eliminate direct feedback and squeal.
For the cable feedback problem, I would try twisting (even twisting and shielding) the feed/return of the speak signal to eliminate/reduce EMI emissions. If that was already tried and it did not work then it is a more difficult problem and might need more separation and/or differing orientation (if directionality is pronounced on the pickup).
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Post by blademaster2 on Dec 22, 2016 11:05:19 GMT -5
This would be great to try, and of course nobody wants to carve up a good guitar or damage its finish just to try it out.
As I implied before, my first suggestion would be to fasten an exciter directly to the wood within the electronics cavity (if there is room for it) and hope that its mechanical impedance can couple the energy reasonably well into the body from there. Since it is designed for that type of coupling, such as furniture, then it might already be well suited. Then an amplified version of the signal from the guitar could be fed to the device either with the plate removed - for experimentation - or by adding a connector to the plate to which the amplifier output cable can mate.
Modeling this would be great, but I have my doubts as to how it could be done accurately so I would rely instead on experimentation and testing. Qualitative testing is easy - just listen to the guitar as the amplified signal fed to the exciter device is varied from zero to full (as much as the exciter can tolerate).
If the results warranted, then selection of the best placement of the device on the guitar might be the next step - if someone really thinks it improves the guitar tone enough to take that step. I would expect that nearest to the pickups or bridge might be best, but to optimize it some form of mechanical impedance matching might be required where other features would be needed on the guitar body design.
I wish I could conduct this type of research in my day job!
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Post by blademaster2 on Dec 20, 2016 14:14:05 GMT -5
I used DiMarzio "Dual Sound" humbuckers for my first guitar I built, where they essentially included a DPDT switch in a Super Distortion pickup design with a coil tap.
I was expecting night and day difference: double the signal/inductance for series, half the signal/inductance with parallel. I know now why I was slightly disappointed (I was a teenager then and I wondered why they sounded so similar), the signal strength change is small on a db scale, and the inductance difference is audible but not profound especially for a tube amp input impedance and a good low-capacitance cable.
I do appreciate the difference now, but I have had much more variation in a more recent guitar where I selected single coil versus humbucker (on that axe I have a six-way rotary switch so I get series, parallel, out of phase, single1, single2, and single2 phase-inverted).
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Post by blademaster2 on Dec 20, 2016 13:26:36 GMT -5
Thanks for the link!
That exciter, or a product like it, has been on my mind for years. I would be interested to fasten it somewhere on the guitar body material (within the electronics cavity) and drive it with an amplifier. I do not know how its structural impedance would be best matched to the wood, possibly using a wooden protrusion in the cavity to absorb and pass along the vibrations.
Maybe it would only be annoying, but imagine if it could introduce that 'woody' tone to the guitar even at low volumes, or improve sustain? I would love to hear how it would work even if only as an experiment.
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Post by blademaster2 on Dec 20, 2016 12:33:56 GMT -5
stratotarts said:
"John's 6-component pickup circuit model does manage to track measured results to fractions of a decibel. There are also some interesting models in Zoeller's work, yet untranslated to English. So there is a lot more hope for it than you suggest...."
I feel like I was misinterpreted here. I am indeed impressed at how well we can match the measured response in simulation using these models and it certainly is useful. My point was that the complexity of the full end-to-end system would only include that response as a part of it, and that the louder you go starts to lessen its dominance. It also seems evident that other parasitics like eddy currents and distributed capacitance versus lumped capacitance might not play a huge role in this response (and since currents are low, this seems reasonable).
sumgai: I have a Teisco that has its own voice, and as you said it can sound beautiful especially when cranked through a nice amplifier like my VOX. In some ways I feel like I was influenced more by marketing than my own ears when I concluded as a teenager that it was a 'bad sounding' guitar, and I am glad I kept it. To the point I think we both have made, when the amplified volume begins to excite the body material of any guitar to become part of the overall tone we get the benefit of that material's own resonant properties added to the intrinsic sound that we had from the guitar before the amplification.
Louder is better, and not only for the amplifier itself but also the guitar.
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Post by blademaster2 on Dec 19, 2016 18:24:34 GMT -5
I have been scanning this thread with great interest, as I myself performed some spice modeling of my own guitar circuitry many years ago during university (electrical engineering).
While it impresses me, I like to bear in mind that like any simulation the results are only as good as the model. The characteristics of pickups and other guitar electronic components are simplified to linear mathematical models of inductance, capacitance and resistance by using inductors, capacitors and resistors. As Antigua indicated, these are often distributed things and not really fully correct when lumped (it would be terribly complex to even begin to model them as distributed components, so I am not suggesting we ever try).
Still, getting a sense of the overall frequency response and the resonant peaks has value to us all in understanding why we hear what we hear and it gets us pretty far down the road.
The notoriously difficult part of the electric guitar when viewed as a system, often completely ignored, is the effect of the volume of the amplified sound in the room. My wife would complain if I employed this to get the tone that I love (I wait until she is out), but for recordings and live performances it is probably not realistic to ignore it as an important part of the resulting tonal quality. Consider Jimmy Page's solo on "Ramble On" where the guitar feeds back the notes to more resemble a keyboard than a guitar (he does it using a few overdubs in this song and I love that sound). That was made possible by the volume feeding back the acoustic signal through the guitar body - not via the strings or electronics. To model this would involve including another signal source, with another gain factor, and coupling this signal additively into the overall guitar signal through a resonant and frequency/phase-response altering body material (yes, I say again that the body material influences this especially when the volume goes way up).
Of course, much smaller would be the filtering effect of the body material properties on the initial generated signal itself, as we have all debated countless time before, which is independent of amplifier volume.
Thanks so much - I love to see this simulation stuff, as it helps me better understand that portion of the beautiful system formed by the electric guitar and amplifier. I would like to hear how someone can find a way to add the acoustic aspects of the system to make it even more complete.
[One final note: When I met Steve Morse I was impressed by his working knowledge of electricity, signals and EMI. He was not schooled as an electrical engineer but he made a point of recognizing directionality of EMI noise sources, non-idealities of buffer amplifiers, and gave me an interesting and practical interpretation of them from a musician's perspective.]
Sorry for being so long winded, I love this topic ......
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Post by blademaster2 on Dec 15, 2016 17:10:39 GMT -5
Fascinating. I must say that although I am not in the habit of looking for unusual components, the confirmation of the mere existence of this configuration of switch is very intriguing - and clearly surprising not only to me.
I have never encountered anything like it before in my field, but we spacecraft-design types do not usually use anything but the most boring varieties of parts - and most switching in space is done by semiconductors.
I feel tempted now to dream up interesting ways to use it in my own guitars. Thanks col!
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Post by blademaster2 on Sept 5, 2016 8:29:51 GMT -5
I moved the lever back and forth a little and it reduced the scratchiness, so I will leave the Condor as it is for now and focus on the Hagstrom II switches.
This is my third time at that Hagstrom II switch noise and it always returns (or never improves in the first place), so I might need to see if I can get hold of some replacement switches.
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Post by blademaster2 on Sept 4, 2016 17:02:41 GMT -5
Thanks man,
I am loving the tone of this thing on the M setting (that one has no caps, as you said). Perhaps I will not fiddle with the caps after all since it sounds so good as it is like that. I prefer to keep it as vintage as possible, and right now there are no mods on it at all.
I also discovered that the pup switches can be depressed with more than one pup on at a time if they are pressed gently together (the switch bank is nominally designed to pop up the other switches as one is pressed), giving a Strat-combination tone. That is another very nice tone for this thing.
Which vintage Hagstroms do you have?
I also have a 1967 HII 12-string. It needs its switches cleaned (again) to restore its full function. For that one I find that the switches seem to get intermittent fairly often. I will get onto that, but it is a real nuisance ...
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Post by blademaster2 on Sept 2, 2016 10:01:24 GMT -5
I bought a vintage 1967 Hagstrom Condor a few weeks ago. I love its workmanship, unusual controls and retro look (plus it sounds great and plays extremely well). Not surprisingly, the volume pots are a little scratchy so I was eager to open it up to clean them. I have opened up many guitars in my time, but I never saw one like this (I have removed the brass shielding plate for the photo - it sits directly on top of the wiring PCB): I quickly decided to abandon my servicing activity, for now, as I can live with it and I do not play live. The clean electrical design is impressive and it has fairly complete shielding. My only problem with it is the difficulty I will have in actually getting to the pots (and switches) to clean them. As I see it, I will need to carefully remove the entire electronics system possibly including the pups (maybe not) in order to access these devices. All of that handling risks wire breakage, and while I am fully capable of rewiring the entire thing I prefer to simply enjoy it as it is for the time being. [While I am at it, if I do get it apart I might change out the tone capacitors for some different values. The "low" setting is too muddy and muffled, and the "high" setting is lacking the low frequencies too much, but the 'mid' setting sounds amazing for all three pups.] Attachments:
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 17, 2016 9:19:53 GMT -5
I certainly concur that moisture content in any wood will impact is resonant properties and may well dominate some of the differences between species.
Dry wood seems to have more resonance, and less absorption of vibration. I notice that on violins that I have played, too, and any acoustic guitar I have played as they appear to be louder and richer in harmonics. Drier wood seems to mean less weight but equal stiffness, and vibrations seem to travel more readily and rapidly. Of course I have no controlled experimental test results to support these assertions.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 13, 2016 9:39:09 GMT -5
If something is heavy but not rigid, like a silicon gel, then I imagine sustain would be almost gone despite the overall weight.
However, it is hard to separate the weight from the stiffness of a structure in some cases as the two can be related. In aircraft and spacecraft, structural pieces are made stiffer by cutting round holes in them (stiffer against their own weight) and this raises their resonant frequencies, which is very desirable for launching on rockets and needing natural frequencies to be well above the rocket's vibrations so that none of them are excited and amplified by resonance.
Carbon fiber is used to make stiff yet light structures (and some guitar necks have had carbon fiber in them for that purpose but I do not see it much any more in literature, so stiffness can be achieved in a manner that is less dependent on mass depending on the material.
Since an acoustic guitar is really a mechanical impedance-matching transformer (string impedance to air impedance), the weight-to-stiffness and resonance achieved by the bracing becomes a whole new topic. In those guitars the structure needs to be light, stiff and strong all at the same time.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 9, 2016 19:39:29 GMT -5
I checked out the concrete guitar video. Interesting - To me it illustrates how well an extremely stiff and dense body maximizes the natural sustain of the vibrating string. It would never win any beauty contests .....
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 9, 2016 19:26:33 GMT -5
The video of Love Hurts in the clip below is terrible (does not even show him playing with a slide), but the solo has notes sustained indefinitely via acoustic-body feedback:
If you give it a listen, at 2:40 it is definitely feedback and not only a slide technique.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 9, 2016 18:25:30 GMT -5
[Thanks, I am enjoying this thread and the exchange of ideas and theories!]
To me, the single note example that shows body influence on the tone would be an infinitely-sustained note that you can play indefinitely when a guitar is cranked up loud. Brian May does this a lot, and I have also myself (when I knew no one nearby was going to be bothered too much by the volume). That is the amplifier sound in the air, causing the body to resonate with it, which in turn continues to excite the string and keep it playing. The fact that it will not work on *all* notes played indicates that it is the body and not the strings picking up the sound in the air (the slide guitar solo on Nazareth's Love Hurts is an excellent example of this).
On the topic of stiffness and resonance, I still maintain that a stiffer material will resonate at a higher natural frequency (like a lead crystal glass compared to a glass one). A very stiff metal body (steel is much stiffer than aluminum for the same thickness), or perhaps a concrete slab with a string stretched between to anchor points, will create more sustain and resonate less than a wooden body with the same string. I will give up on this point now, as I have not done this myself (yet ;-) ).
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 9, 2016 12:43:33 GMT -5
Good points, and I agree with all of those for which I have formed an opinion myself (some are new to me).
I think the body, if infinitely stiff, would attenuate no frequencies and maximize sustain (I imagine a bar of iron as the body for this). With no influence to consider, I expect it would sound cold and 'metallic', with very crisp attack. So the wood, by adding its (admittedly subtle) frequency response would alter that and add 'warmth'.
One thing that no one has mentioned yet in this thread (including me) is the influence of the sound coming back from the amplifier and causing the body (and strings) to resonate from that, thereby adding to (or detracting from) the harmonic content. Solidbody guitars will therefore sound different when played loud (even if the amplifier remains clean). When guitars can feedback a note partially it adds to the sustain, and when the volume and the note his a body-matched resonance it permits infinite sustain of the note. This is the body's influence on the resonance of the note, not just the string itself (otherwise all notes would feedback equally well). If it can do this, then there must be a lot of harmonic content added to the guitar tone as a result of the acoustic feedback from the amplifier, even when it is not feeding back infinitely.
With that in mind, an electric guitar as a system (guitar and amp), with feedback built in, uses the solid body to attenuate (but not completely eliminate) the resonance of the body's material - as opposed to an acoustic guitar - and instead introduces the amplifier to increase the volume. Sufficiently increased, the solid body's acoustic properties - albeit greatly attenuated - become excited and introduces its harmonic content back into the sound. Louder is better, of course. If we consider this phenomenon, then a chambered body may well have less sustain at low volumes or unplugged, but the increased resonance could give it *more* sustain at the same amplifier volume when you bring the amplifier back into the system.
This effect is exemplified well by Brian May's Red Special guitar, with resonant chambers that he claims (and demonstrates) will actually promote feedback sustain. I am sure that nobody would be able to convince Brian May that the body, its wood, and its construction, have little impact on tone - especially when amplifiers are brought into the picture.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 9, 2016 10:53:29 GMT -5
blademaster2, I definitely agree that the pickup isn't the only thing that affects the timbre. I'm also a believer in some factors not everyone agrees with, like ferrous bridge plates on telecasters. I definitely believe that electronics, cables, the electromagnetic waves where you are, and the weight of a guitar matter. I guess for the record now I can say I managed to notice the difference between acrylic and wood in 9/10(feel free to doubt) of the strumming rig tests by listening to how soon the chords resolved to fundamentals and lower order harmonics. I bet if other Nutz followed the same strategy they could get it right. But honestly, I'm still not going to use that as a musician. I'll keep buying light guitars for comfort. I'll probably convince myself that lighter guitars sound better, even though I don't think I can actually make that judgement by ear. I'm just gonna go on preferring what's convenient for me, because this factor is so small that mere convenience and peace of mind outweighs the musical value. And one of these days I'm gonna actually buy a sustainer pedal. ... Tonewood schmonewood. Ferrous metal plate in proximity to the pickups influencing the response. Now *that* is a fascinating thing that never occurred to me before. It would certainly redirect the magnetic field lines to a small degree, and how that would subsequently couple into and alter the frequency response and sensitivity of the pickup when a string vibrates near it is quite possible. I never heard that theory before. As an experiment it is an easier comparison to make than many others. I might try it sometime.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 8, 2016 17:11:35 GMT -5
To be rigid about definitions, the entire guitar note is transient since it changes from attack to decay and then fades to nothing.
Within the time that the plucked note sounds, there is the very active picking and brief 'shock wave' on the string and instrument that we call the attack (and this is what I call the transient response), and then after that the note rings and has a different balance in the harmonics, and this is called the sustain (I would call this the continuous wave) followed by decay.
[In mechanical systems the "shock response spectrum" is nonlinear and difficult - likely impossible - to accurately model mathematically so if Roland has done it then it is more likely from experimentation rather than predictive math.]
I think, to be fair to those of us who honestly attribute some of the tonal qualities of a solid body guitar to the body material, I would only expect to detect the differences if it was *me* playing it. That way I would know *how* I was picking the string and what response I would normally expect from that in order to compare. To expect to hear and compare different guitars played by others in a blind test - where I do not have that sensory knowledge of what excitation the string was given when it was played - seems unrealistic.
In my case I did once play a Fender guitar before I changed out its pickups (done for a customer in a store where I worked), and I took the old pickup home and for fun fastened it beneath the strings of another guitar I had and connected it to my amplifier (an AMPEG V4, which are fairly clean and hi-fidelity). It was interesting to hear the difference - clearly some difference due to the different amplifier, but there was a definite lack of the 'plastic' tone from the Fender pickguard in the attack that I could hear as I played. Similarly when I purchased a Stratocaster pickup for a solid maple-bodied guitar that I build I found that it bore little resemblance to the sound of a Strat through the same amplifier. Same pickup (more or less), same position, but quite different tone especially on the "attack".
That is a snippet of my own experience .
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 8, 2016 15:29:31 GMT -5
sumgaiI have tried a modeling effect unit (not Roland, Vox if I recall correctly) and while it did provide good tones on many settings I could not use it due to the latency, which was very noticeable to me. It might have been 100ms to 150ms, but whatever it was I could not tolerate it. Have you seen that in other brands? If I correctly understood Cyn1, he did say that the body material properties does create a noticeable difference in the tone of instruments he has built. While I have only built three myself, I still believe that the material influenced the tone of mine (mostly on the attack, or "transient response"). I believe Cyn1 and I also were in agreement that the difference due to body material alone is subtle and can be swamped by many other factors. I will close in saying that I am not influenced by price, cork-sniffers, or by pseudo-science - only my own senses and my technical experience acquired from my day job and education. I have nothing to prove to anyone. I appreciate the tone of this discussion having been respectful and informative (your quote of "tonewood schmonewood" notwithstanding ;-) ) as I find this a fascinating and enjoyable topic. I love the guitar and enjoy conversing with others who share that.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 7, 2016 14:39:43 GMT -5
Acknowledged.
"Gain" for a transducer such as a pickup is still the term that is commonly used, passive or not.
Strictly speaking it perhaps should really be termed "response" or "sensitivity", which would be the relationship between the mechanical energy of the string versus the resulting electrical output (in this case, voltage) generated by the pickup in response to that. "Gain" is really the ratio of output to input where the units are the same (i.e. voltage), which is dimensionless, whereas the pickup performs a conversion.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 7, 2016 13:29:01 GMT -5
No measurements or experiments can tell me what I know I hear. Just like a chemical analysis will not distinguish a fine wine from a cheap wine. Human senses are needed.
Guitar tone lies mostly in the transient response of the string and body/bridge/fret interaction, and what this phenomenon does when the pups detect the signal and the amplifier amplifies it. This must be at least partly influenced by the stiffness of the body material, which will vary as a function of frequency. Night and Day difference? No, but audible enough between types in guitar bodies even with the same pickups.
More weight means more inertia, and that leads to more stiffness to vibration across all (most) frequencies where the same material is used - hence more sustain. Change the material stiffness, however, and it all changes again.
A guitar body made of tire rubber, however heavy, would never exhibit the same stiffness and sustain as one made of stiffer material like wood. Different woods will present different stiffness to vibration, varying across frequencies, which will colour the tone. Most people can hear this if the material changes enough, but for wood to wood it is a narrower range of difference. Beyond a certain point where the body material is suitably stiff (i.e. no tire rubber or silicon gel), different species of wood will not have a night and day impact on tone and it starts to get muddled up with other factors, not the least of which is the pups themselves (in fact they are hugely influential, as they have their own frequency responses and gain) and the amplifier. Additionally, given that most of the tone is evident in the transient response, the attack of picking of the string itself will make a big difference as we all know.
So in my opinion (and I can never prove this, either), "tonewood" refers to woods that are stiff enough across the frequencies of interest to respond well for guitar applications. No one uses balsa wood for a guitar - and yet it could be made strong enough with a little ingenuity. Their stiffness and the structural homogeneity (such as the neck joint, which introduces a discontinuity that impacts coupling of these vibrations across this interface), will be subtly audible - albeit not measurable - in a guitar. Some are VERY subtle, I know, and I could never reliably tell one from another blindfolded either.
No one can prove any of this with measurements, so the "why tonewood" debate will rage on.....
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