it's all electric, right?

[dedidio]

Hi,

This is probably a stupid question for those of you who know more about guitars than me - I'm posting it in this forum as it didn't seem to belong elsewhere ...

I have an electric guitar which I am currently ripping apart and putting back together. Going through this process I can't help but think that the difference between sounds basically involves adding a cap here and there. So how come there's all this focus on materials and designs? This isn't acoustic, so unless I am wrong isn't a bit of plywood going to do the same job as a bit of maple (or similar expensive wood)?

What really justifies a difference in a price of an electric guitar if not the components used? (besides aesthetic).

To sumarise: is physical design, and non-electric materials used, relevant to the sound a guitar makes?

Cheers,
DedIdio

P.S. I know I'm missing something here which is why I'm asking - I know it's not just a circuit, I just don't know why.

[sumgai]

dedidio said:

Hi,

This is probably a stupid question for those of you who know more about guitars than me - I'm posting it in this forum as it didn't seem to belong elsewhere ...

I have an electric guitar which I am currently ripping apart and putting back together. Going through this process I can't help but think that the difference between sounds basically involves adding a cap here and there. So how come there's all this focus on materials and designs? This isn't acoustic, so unless I am wrong isn't a bit of plywood going to do the same job as a bit of maple (or similar expensive wood)?

What really justifies a difference in a price of an electric guitar if not the components used? (besides aesthetic).

To sumarise: is physical design, and non-electric materials used, relevant to the sound a guitar makes?

Cheers,
DedIdio

P.S. I know I'm missing something here which is why I'm asking - I know it's not just a circuit, I just don't know why.

Paging unklmickey! Paging unklmickey! Explanations needed in Aisle 3, please. Thank you.

Let's hope The Unkster shows up before I find that other bottle of funny little pills, and start writing a book. Unk, Chris, John, Doug, anyone? Please?


sumgai

[Runewalker]

dedidio said:

Hi,

This is probably a stupid question for those of you who know more about guitars than me - I'm posting it in this forum as it didn't seem to belong elsewhere ...

I have an electric guitar which I am currently ripping apart and putting back together. Going through this process I can't help but think that the difference between sounds basically involves adding a cap here and there. So how come there's all this focus on materials and designs? This isn't acoustic, so unless I am wrong isn't a bit of plywood going to do the same job as a bit of maple (or similar expensive wood)?

What really justifies a difference in a price of an electric guitar if not the components used? (besides aesthetic).

To sumarise: is physical design, and non-electric materials used, relevant to the sound a guitar makes?

Cheers,
DedIdio

P.S. I know I'm missing something here which is why I'm asking - I know it's not just a circuit, I just don't know why.

Here's an old thread on this topic. I'll try hard to stand down before I start my "tonewood is a heresy" inspirational. This topic tends to reach religious proportions.

guitarnuts2.proboards45.com/index.cgi?board=coffee&action=display&thread=1119075399&page=1

It's 3 forum pages long and takes a while but gets to your question.

This was pre-sumgai, so there may be more illumination ahead.

[ChrisK]

I do think that the physical properties of all components in an electric guitar have some effect.

I'm certain of the effects of neck and fretboard wood, and their width and thickness.

Body wood, thickness, chambering, and finish also all have effect.

So do the frets, bridge, tuners, pickups, pots, etc.

All of these are to varying degrees, and are not completely predictable.

Specific things have general tendencies (not absolutes).

I choose a particular guitar based on neck build quality and acoustic (unplugged) tone. The other stuff can be changed if desired.


Enough folks have bought enough electric guitars for enough years now that if it wasn't so, we'd know.


There is a lot of hype out there, and also a lot of empirical truth.

[sumgai]

Chris,

Thank the Good Lord Harry for your insight! I am firmly in your camp, if there was anything at all to the rumor about how nothing matters except the pickups and the strings, then we'd know it for a fact by now, it wouldn't be a rumor.

Witness the Steinberger and The Stick for two of the more outlandish executions of that idea. Less content (skimpy or no body), yet costs more, and doesn't sound any better. If it did, don't you think that the vast majority of all "guitar heroes" would have tumbled to the fact by now? I mean, even Eric Johnson has heard of those things, and look what he's still playing! ;D


Rune,

Thanks for digging up that thread, it looks well reasoned out to me, there's nothing I can say that would add any value to it. Although if I had been here at the time, that statement probably wouldn't be true.

Although at one point, bam offered up 'stainless steel' as an alternative material. Ibanez almost did that back in the 70's - they brought a solid brass guitar to the NAMM show one year, weighed 70 lbs! I'll bet that thing is still sustaining a note hit back then.

And I gotta agree with bam, you give good Yoda!


dedidio,

Just because that thread "seems" to be languishing doesn't mean that you can't ask questions! It wasn't the be-all, end-all answer, no thread here ever is. If something catches your fancy, and you wanna know more, just ask!


sumgai

[ChrisK]

"It's hard to fool all of the people all of the time."

Yamaha is yet again trying to market a plastic guitar.

I have a Kramer XB-9 Aluminium neck (UK spelling) bass (and the bad back to prove it). The truss rod is a bear to adjust..... In the interest of the user's back, the body is walnut.... I use the tripod from my Browning .50 cal..... I never lie.....


We like familiar things. Wood-based solid electrics are familiar to us. (But not to all, the president of Gretsch once remarked upon the initial marketing of Fender guitars, "Great, now anybody with a bandsaw and router can make electric guitars".)

If anything (aside from many ludicrous clearance sale prices), I love GC for the WALL(long) mart of many instances of guitars. Wow, I can try 20 Gib$on SG faded's within a week, within the 150 mile weekly trek that I do for money (job). And, I occasionally find a gem.

When I try any guitar, I go hide in the acoustic room within the acoustic room, and listen AND feel the acoustic response. I have a standard set of octave-related chords (you won't find them in normal chord books) that go to resonance and inter-modulation "feel". I use a slide to find the body resonance(s) (yeah!). I also find the occasional truss rod, wiring buzz, and other issues that many louder venues hide.


And I gots 30 days to be sure. Yep, the same PA system is used to test every one (wide response is). For one that I return, the "free in-home 30 day trial" only costs 1 point. (I use a card since the store seems to think that when I use cash, I then want to lend them money at no interest in the form of "store credit".)

[dedidio]

Maybe I wasn't missing something afterall - there appear to be a few people who view the guitars as an electric circuit with appearance and non-electrical materials having no affect on the electrical signal that comes out of them.

From a physics standpoint I can just about (but not really I have to confess) accept that the density of the guitars body can affect the tone.

I would love to get a rig which I could string some strings across, place a few pickups under and hook into a computer and then adjust the 'solidity' of the rig to see how much 'wobbliness' I have to introduce to affect the tone by what amount.

For me, without that (potentially) mythbusting rig to hand, I have to put myself into the category of "if it feels good then it is good, who cares what it's made of". Afterall we're trying to put an artists tool into a scientists domain - maybe some of what we hear is coming from how the instruments make their players feel?

Thanks for the comments, and link to previous thread), I think I've now formed my opinion on the subject (at least I have one now!)

[UnklMickey]

dedidio said:

...Thanks for the comments, and link to previous thread), I think I've now formed my opinion on the subject (at least I have one now!)

that's good, now let's make sure it's the right opinion!

LSHIASMP

seriously though,


at the risk of re-opening the tonewood debate, i think the bottom line is:

material choice in a solid body has a slight effect on tone.




construction techniques have more to do with it.

IMHO, the absence of material (swimming pool routes, etc) makes a larger difference than the type of material.

but still, pickups have a much greater effect on a solid body.



and don't confuse sustain with tone.

they are 2 totally different commodities.

many things with effect both of them, but they ARE different.

here are a couple more threads that deal with some of those sorts of thoughts:

guitarnuts2.proboards45.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=coffee&thread=1122652479&page=1

guitarnuts2.proboards45.com/index.cgi?board=coffee&action=display&thread=1123282363&page=1




unk

[mlrpa]

Uhhh, CrisK? Aluminum (my spelling) neck Kramer. Trussrod? Que Pasa? I've got a DMZ6000B, which kills my back and fingertips, and there ain't no truss rod. Ahh! The rod in your truss for your back! Gotcha. ;D

And unk, we agree to disagree on the "tonewoods" debate.

[sumgai]

unk in particular, anyone else in no particular order,

The whole bit about how much wood can be removed from some "holy" rout pattern is so much hogwash. I've got a friend in Delta, BC that did a lot of testing on this topic, with the idea in mind that he needed to hog out some material to install his Ghost piezo saddle system. The results he found, after about a year of testing (on several bodies), was that it didn't make any difference at all if you took out something on the order of an additional 10% of wood from the total body weight. The only assumption here is that you'd do that underneath the pickguard, for obvious reasons.

No matter where he routed, in the end, he got the same tones out of the chunk of wood as when he started. After he got wild and removed about 25% of the total wood, then things got real undesireable. In between is a land of personal preference. But that part of 10% or so is definite, you simply can't hear any differences, nor can you see them on the scope. (He rigged up a piezo microphone and a sort of sustainer-like device that fed amplified sine waves into a speaker clamped to the body at the neck pocket.)

Thus, it has been proven to my mind that one can remove material as needed for just about any mod we're ever likely to see here on this forum. Perhaps there will come along one day a truly outlandish project that requires so much removal that the result would be unacceptable, but until then, I will state for the record that you can do what you want with your router, within the confines of what I said just above.


sumgai

[UnklMickey]

sumgai said:

...is so much hogwash. ...

great, i like it! clean hogs are better than dirty ones.

[ChrisK]

mirpa,

As always, peel slowly and "see".

[RandomHero]

Heya ChrisK, just to let you know, if they won't give you at least a check for your store credit, they're not doing something right. I always offer a check to customers with returns for the initial amount paid even if it is a card, for two reasons:

Money put back onto a card (Debit or credit) can hurt your credit.

It usually takes banks a few days to procress a credit to your account, whereas with a check you can cash it at your leisure.

Usually Guitar Center doesn't carry the kind of cash in registers to refund the purchase of a Gib$on directly. We offer store credit in the vain hope that people returning stuff are planning on trying something else, instead of taking money back out of our pockets (and food out of our mouths) as salesmen.

[Ripper]

I know this is not a new thread but...

Aluminum necks would expand and cotract much quicker and probably to a greater degree then a good ol' woody....No?

I also think, keeping that in mind that keeping it in tune would be a nightmare.

[ChrisK]

Abso'posi'tutely NOT.

Wood is hygroscopic (water absorption) and is sensitive to temperature effect much more than aluminum.

An interesting "factoid" is that we used to use aluminum mirror blanks in prototyping military optics designs due to their weight and expansion similarity to certain optic glasses while testing servo loop responses. (This firm had ground the Subaru telescope (Japanese for seven sisters, the Pleiads) primary mirror, and one doesn't risk such things.)

However, aluminum has a much lower "theta J" (coefficient of heat transfer/speed) so it heats up and cools down much faster.

[sumgai]

deep,

chrisk said:

.....
However, aluminum has a much lower "theta J" (coefficient of heat transfer/speed) so it heats up and cools down much faster.

To finish Chris's factoid..... because the heat transfers through aluminum very quickly, no part of it is hot in relation to any other part for very long, hence, no warpage (at least, not visibly so). OTOH, wood can't do that.... any heat applied is not transferred to another point, it is instead contained right there at the point of contact, and effectively isolated from other parts for some time (it eventually does transfer, but it is slow). It is this "some parts are hot while other parts are not" scenario that causes visible warpage.

Sadly, aluminum, while it could be made light enough, does not have the "feel" demanded by guitar players. Can't say as I blame them, I don't like it either. Perhaps a thin veneer over an aluminum base might be worth investigating......


sumgai

[ChrisK]

Sadly, aluminum, while it could be made light enough, does not have the "feel" demanded by guitar players. Can't say as I blame them, I don't like it either. Perhaps a thin veneer over an aluminum base might be worth investigating......

Aluminum has the wrong "feel" because of its thermal characteristics. It's ALWAYS COLD because it transfers heat so rapidly. A few years back someone was marketing a meat defroster that required no energy source. It was (only) a big aluminum heatsink, period. The excellent convection of aluminum, in conduction w/ a mass, brings said mass to ambient temperature rapidly.

I have an aluminum heatsink of 24" by 8" by 3". It is huge, has been the basis of many thermionic (Peltier) experiments over the years, and thaws meat rapidly. (There's just something about the taste of silicon grease and Angus beef....)

My Kramer bass has plastic inserts on both sides of the back of the neck. It's still cold. Along w/ the aluminum neck, it has a walnut body, so the last note I played on it two years ago is still ringing.....



AND, BTW, when I got the Kramer XB-9, the inductor (active/stereo Varitone-like) was missing. Might anyone know the part number and value of same??