Tonewoods myth

[Anonymous]

Once again, it's time for Scott Grove

 

[Dingleberries]

Fxxk it, my next guitar will be drywall.

 

[bulletproof_funk]

Or a 2x4

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=142472

 

[Vede]

Why doesn't every guitar with the same pups, strings, bridge, and nut sound the same?

Well, regardless of whether or not the conclusions drawn by the videos I linked to earlier are correct (and remember, I'm not saying they are, I'm merely saying the results are interesting and lead me to question some of my beliefs), here are some pretty logical reasons why every guitar with the "same" pups, strings, bridge, and nut could sound different that have nothing to do with wood:

- Pups are supposed to be exactly the same but perhaps aren't, some may be slightly under-wound or over-wound, and the magnet may differ slightly in strength
- Pup height isn't always the same and what sounds like tonal differences between guitars might just be slight volume differences
- Bridge is the same model and same type of metal, but not literally the same bridge as in the next guitar
- Nut is the same model and same type of material, but not literally the same nut as in the next guitar
- Strings are the same model and same type of metal, but not literally the same strings as on the next guitar
- Wires and capacitors and pots are the same type, but not literally the same wires and capacitors and pots as on the next guitar

Again, remember, I'm not saying the guy in these videos proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that wood doesn't matter. Personally, I'd need to see more tests done by more people in more controlled environments to really believe it. But the results are extremely interesting nonetheless, and with history as my guide, I know that at different times we have all KNOWN things to be true that were later proven untrue.

For example:

- Based on simple observation, the world looked totally flat so we all believed it was. For a really long time. But it wasn't.
- Based on simple observation, we thought the universe revolved around the Earth. I mean, just look up in the sky - obviously everything is spinning around us. Except it isn't.
- Based on simple observation, we thought the atom was the smallest particle in the universe. And now we know there are lots of sub-atomic particles.
- Based on simple observation, magic looks real. Except it isn't.
- Based on simple observation, optical illusions look like things they absolutely aren't. Or are moving when they aren't. Or are still when they're actually moving.
- Eyewitnesses routinely swear they know who committed a crime but then pick the wrong people out of police lineups. And most of these people aren't lying, it just turns out that our memories and the rest of our senses aren't always as reliable as we like to think. Test after test, in and out of laboratories, proves this.

In the face of all that, I think it's completely reasonable and healthy to question conventional wisdom, especially in the face of new data. Don't you?

 

[tripstan]

For the record this could be the stupidest topic on guitar forums and I don't know why I am replying.
Anyway. . . . I have 2 Suhr Moderns. Same everything : bridge, nut, pups, tuners, trem block. Accept one is mahogany/maple top, mahogany neck. Other is Basswood/maple all maple neck. THEY SOUND COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. Not slightly, I mean completely. Try for yourself and make you own judgement everyone's ears are different. I'll believe my own ear over some crusty old dude that's been blowing his ear drums out on full stacks for decades.

Btw: thank you Business for posting the Scott "dumb motherfucker" Grove guide to bigotry.

 

[Anonymous]

For the record this could be the stupidest topic on guitar forums and I don't know why I am replying.
Anyway. . . . I have 2 Suhr Moderns. Same everything : bridge, nut, pups, tuners, trem block. Accept one is mahogany/maple top, mahogany neck. Other is Basswood/maple all maple neck. THEY SOUND COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. Not slightly, I mean completely. Try for yourself and make you own judgement everyone's ears are different. I'll believe my own ear over some crusty old dude that's been blowing his ear drums out on full stacks for decades.

Btw: thank you Business for posting the Scott "dumb motherfucker" Grove guide to bigotry.

Can't help being entertained by that guy... no matter how wrong/idiotic he may be

 

[tripstan]

^I will agree with that!
Entertaining? Hell yes.
Valid opinion?

 

[jkkkjkhk]

I've owned many identical guitars with identical specs and they sound completely different. I've had 3 of the exact same guitar and all 3 sounded completely different. Even if wood doesn't make a measurable difference or a recorded difference I don't care. The vibrations going through my hands and body are the very first thing I listen to. Pickups can change, pots and caps can change, nut and bridge can change... the woods (to an extent) can't change so I listen to all guitars (especially electrics) acoustically first. I can't think of the last time I even plugged in a guitar before I bought it.

Now I've also played many guitars with completely different specs (floyded setneck mahogany... vs string thru bolton alder...) that sounded and felt the same, so I don't go by the rule of what each tonewood sounds like, they're more like a guideline to me.

 

[JimmyBlind]

I've played mahogany guitars with similar electronics that sounded really quite different from one another. I think it's down to the build of guitar & the piece of wood that was used rather than specifically the wood type.
The effect on string oscillation is such a subtle characteristic, that many other factors in the guitar's construction will equally affect the string vibration & sustain imo.
Over the years I've realised it's about finding a guitar that feels & sounds good. All guitars are unique in their own way. My custom Suhr plays & sounds quite different from what I expected, given how specific I was with my order & choice of woods.

 

[ke2]

Plenty of people are of the opinion that basswood is inferior as a tone wood, but it doesn't seem to stop Tom Anderson and John Suhr from building fairly expensive guitars from it, and managing to sell them as well

 

[Vede]

For the record this could be the stupidest topic on guitar forums and I don't know why I am replying.
Anyway. . . . I have 2 Suhr Moderns. Same everything : bridge, nut, pups, tuners, trem block. Accept one is mahogany/maple top, mahogany neck. Other is Basswood/maple all maple neck. THEY SOUND COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. Not slightly, I mean completely. Try for yourself and make you own judgement everyone's ears are different. I'll believe my own ear over some crusty old dude that's been blowing his ear drums out on full stacks for decades.

I also have two Suhr moderns - one basswood and one alder. Even when they shared most of the same make/model hardware, they always felt and sounded very different when amplified, so I know exactly what you're describing. Remember, I still haven't been convinced that wood doesn't matter. Far from it. But as a rational person, when faced with compelling test data that challenges my beliefs, knowing that perception and reality can sometimes be very different, I must concede that there are several things that could account for sonic differences between two "identical" guitars that have little or nothing to do with wood. Take your two Suhr Moderns for example. You say they're identical other than wood, but that's simply not true. Every pickup is a little different. Every pot is a little different. Every bridge is a little different. Every setup is a little different. And so on. Even though the parts may well be the same make and model.

And even with those differences, I have a hunch (could be totally wrong, but it's easy enough to test) that if we set up an experiment where someone other than you played and recorded your two Suhrs in random order through the same amp, on the same settings, playing the same songs or riffs, one after the other, over and over, you'd have a really difficult time picking one from the other based solely on the recording. I suspect you'd be surprised by how similar your "completely different sounding" guitars sound when you aren't holding them, when you can't feel them resonating, can't see them, and can't hear them acoustically. If you've got the time and the interest, run that test and share it in the thread. I'd try it myself but my Moderns no longer have the same model bridges, strings and pickups.

Lastly, the videos I posted weren't from Scott Grove. They were from some random guitar builder who ran some interesting tests over the last few months and got some really interesting results. By themselves, and without seeing if other people can reproduce his results or show why his tests were flawed or faked, they don't prove anything. But I think they raise some interesting questions.

 

[tripstan]

I've owned many identical guitars with identical specs and they sound completely different. I've had 3 of the exact same guitar and all 3 sounded completely different. Even if wood doesn't make a measurable difference or a recorded difference I don't care. The vibrations going through my hands and body are the very first thing I listen to. Pickups can change, pots and caps can change, nut and bridge can change... the woods (to an extent) can't change so I listen to all guitars (especially electrics) acoustically first. I can't think of the last time I even plugged in a guitar before I bought it.

Now I've also played many guitars with completely different specs (floyded setneck mahogany... vs string thru bolton alder...) that sounded and felt the same, so I don't go by the rule of what each tonewood sounds like, they're more like a guideline to me.

Thank you. Someone seemed to miss my point.

I also buy/keep guitars based on how they sound acoustically.

But I would say that once you reach a certain amount of gain most guitars sound confusingly similar.

 

[Reiep]

I thought it was all in the fingers ?

 

[Serratus]

I have been playing for over 20 years and I've owned more guitars than I'd care to admit (to my wife). In my youth, I even sold guitars "professionally" at retail. And I have always, ALWAYS believed that wood matters. I mean, how couldn't it? Different guitars, even with the same pickups, clearly sound different - a mahogany-bodied guitar obviously sounds different than a basswood-bodied guitar obviously sounds different than a maple-bodied guitar, and so on. We've all played many different guitars and know this to be true.

And yet...

There are videos starting to pop up where people have actually tested the assumption, and the data suggests that the things that really matter are the strings, contact points (bridge and nut) and the electronics.

In this video, a custom guitar builder plays and analyzes the sound coming from a nice strat-style guitar, then takes the neck, pickups, bridge and electronics out and installs them in a different body made of cheap particle board, and sonically the two guitars are indistinguishable:

In this next video, the same builder plays the same guitar before and after removing the ENTIRE FREAKING NECK and the tone and sustain seem to go unchanged:

Videos like these haven't made me a full-fledged believer that wood doesn't matter, but it's definitely made me question what I think I know and I'm now more curious than ever to see more data on both sides of the argument.

As of this moment, the only thing I can say for certain is that every guitar FEELS different to play, and I wonder how much of that "feel" difference translates into what we perceive as sound difference. Also, even in guitars with the same pickups, how do we know that each pickup has truly been wound exactly the same? And how do we know that the wires and pots and capacitors, etc. are *exactly* the same unless we swap all of those bits, too, when we swap pickups? Could a bunch of what we attribute to "wood" really be differences in electronics, pickups, bridges, strings and nuts? Many of you will say no. The data, which doesn't rely on human perception, is starting to suggest maybe. Very interesting stuff, I think.

Sorry but those two videos are completely un-scientific and prove absolutely nothing. Somebody strumming two guitars and looking at a fluctuating waveform on a screen, then telling you that they look roughly the same, and therefore that proves that there's no difference between them, is not scientific!
There is no serious analysis of the waveforms or of the impact to our ears of them. Ie, maybe small differences in those waves actually make the guitars sound quite different to our ears, etc. And there is no reliability to any results - they're not strumming in exactly the same place on the string, with the same intensity, etc, etc. And there's no way anyone can judge for any differences in tone from a youtube video probably taken with a cheap microphone, played back through laptop speakers!
In both videos we just have their opinion that there's no difference, which makes them no more valid than anyone else's 'opinion' (in my opinion, lol)

As far as I'm concerned, every part of a guitar makes a difference to the tone. And there are some general tone attributes that seem to apply to enough of a proportion of guitars to make me believe in the differences in tonewood. You can't ignore so much anecdotal evidence. Having said that, there are still exceptions - mahogany that sounds bright, etc. But I believe that if wood made no impact on tone then all guitars would sound much more similar.

 

[Vede]

I've owned many identical guitars with identical specs and they sound completely different. I've had 3 of the exact same guitar and all 3 sounded completely different. Even if wood doesn't make a measurable difference or a recorded difference I don't care. The vibrations going through my hands and body are the very first thing I listen to. Pickups can change, pots and caps can change, nut and bridge can change... the woods (to an extent) can't change so I listen to all guitars (especially electrics) acoustically first. I can't think of the last time I even plugged in a guitar before I bought it.

Now I've also played many guitars with completely different specs (floyded setneck mahogany... vs string thru bolton alder...) that sounded and felt the same, so I don't go by the rule of what each tonewood sounds like, they're more like a guideline to me.

Thank you. Someone seemed to miss my point.

I also buy/keep guitars based on how they sound acoustically.

But I would say that once you reach a certain amount of gain most guitars sound confusingly similar.

Sorry, I missed tripstan's post. It sounds like we agree (although we may differ on the degree) that wood may play a larger role in feel and acoustic sound than it does amplified sound. My favorite guitars all feel and sound great unamplified, and I definitely value acoustic sound when choosing new instruments. To be clear, my posts in this thread have been exclusively about amplified guitar tone. Acoustically, wood plays an undeniably large role in what we hear, and I don't think anyone would dispute that.

 

[Vede]

But I believe that if wood made no impact on tone then all guitars would sound much more similar.

But when amplified, all guitars do sound very similar. Generally speaking, on recordings, strats sound like strats, LPs sound like LPs, teles like teles. Take 10 identical teles straight off Fender's line, plug them in and have all of us play them, and we'd probably say that some were better than others, some because of feel, others because of tonal quality. And yet if you recorded all 10 of those guitars using the same player, same amp and settings, I'd wager that they'd all sound really, really similar, to the point where I'd be surprised if any of us could tell a difference.

And if that's true, why is true?

 

[bubbastain]

Or a 2x4

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=142472

I still have and play that guitar. Sounds as good as ANY guitar I have ever played.

 

[Rocksoff]

Putting it simply,

Hitting an object with a small hammer makes the object vibrate at it's natural vibrating frequencies and these can be recorded.

So a guitar can be hit with a small hammer and it's natural vibrations can be recorded and analysed.

http://www.acs.psu.edu/drussell/guitars/electric.html

It's called modal analysis (various modes of 3D vibrational movements), and it means that these natural vibrating frequencies of a guitar are influencing the string vibrations and the strength of the string vibrations frequencies (harmonics) because, the initial string vibration (when a string is struck) is acting like the small hammer and causing the object (guitar) to vibrate at it's natural frequencies ie the string vibration induces vibrations in the guitar just as the hammer did, and from this point on there are the guitars natural vibrating frequencies and the string vibration frequencies influencing each other over the lifetime of the note.

btw different guitars can have different natural vibrating frequencies.

So the guitars natural vibrations and the strings vibrations are linked together and have an effect on the sound.

So it's not a question of does the guitar wood have an effect, it's a question of how much effect it has.

How much the wood type would influence the sound would need a lot of testing, plus there are different cuts and densities of the same wood, so it wouldn't be easy to get an average unless a lot of wood was tested.

But the wood (whatever it is) does influence the sound because it influences how the strings end up vibrating, but how much is another thing, it might be around 10% or maybe 30%, who knows exactly.

 

[Spaceboy]

I don't believe in tone woods when it comes to modern high-gain rock/metal. I've had too many guitars loaded with the same pickups because I'm a big Duncan JB fan, and the differences are too small to worry about.

 

[Rocksoff]

I don't believe in tone woods when it comes to modern high-gain rock/metal. I've had too many guitars loaded with the same pickups because I'm a big Duncan JB fan, and the differences are too small to worry about.

Other things tend to dominate for high gain, like the high gain amp (and pedals) compressing the signal.