Fart Ripper
New member
Plug your guitar into an amp. Turn it up. Dampen the strings with one hand. Knock around on the body with the other one. What do you hear coming out of the amplifier?
TheBiggestJerk
Well-known member
Nonsense! That’s not a test or a generation of any data set, or even remotely scientific.
Fart Ripper
New member
TheBiggestJerk
Well-known member
You’re gonna get slaughtered in here.
Fart Ripper
New member
tallcoolone
Well-known member
Yes, exactly.
While I appreciate your tenacity, this just isn’t something you discover from reading a book. I’ve owned well over a hundred bolt on guitars—I know how they should sustain and, alternatively, ring when played acoustically. In my experience you can usually tell whether a guitar is a good one by playing it unplugged. A good piece of wood will vibrate—I can literally feel it in my balls when I strum a chord (I wear the guitar low lol). The guitars that don’t do this don’t sustain as well. Which is why I said earlier you can mask some of this with a pickup change but in the end a dead piece of wood is just a dead piece of wood. Yes, a couple times I went through the hassle of trying a different neck on the rejected bodies—no improvement. So yeah I sell them and cut my losses.
I’m not dealing with used necks and bodies here—these are CNC cut brand new pieces that fit perfectly. If they didn’t I wouldn’t accept them.
TheBiggestJerk
Well-known member
You and CharvelDan will get along great!
7704A
Well-known member
No of course not, which is why experiments are performed and data is collected on the matter, which is then stuck in a book. Like you how you just summed up your experience in a post. Perhaps you meant that you think whatever stuff in books of compiled data contradicts your experience, and in that sense the books aren't useful for learning?
Leaving aside questions of the validity of the data set, whether it's free of biases like overestimating occurrences of something or perceptual distortions and just taking it at face value, it doesn't have to be the quality of the wood causing that. An explanation that may be more in line with the physics could be that if you don't feel the guitar vibrate, it's because too much vibrational energy (in the frequency bands we can feel) is lost to a non-ideal neck joint changing how the neck absorbs energy, bridge configuration, etc. If you can feel the guitar vibrate, it's because less energy is getting sapped by sources like these and so the fraction that gets lost to body vibrations is larger, enough for you to feel it.
I'm not trying to say you didn't notice some correlations between things, or felt the body vibrate, or heard differences. Those are interesting and valuable bits of information that, like you said, (initially) comes from experience with the physical systems themselves. What I am saying is that it appears that physicists have heard these differences and noticed these trends too, and taken the time to investigate through experiments and such and pin down why these phenomena happen, and the measured data strongly points to it not being the body wood causing it but other factors.
This is an interesting observation for sure, and reminds me of some of the work I've seen related to dead spots. Apparently it's possible to have dead spots that seem like they follow a body even though dead spots are caused by the neck absorbing sound energy at the dead note's frequency. My guess is that it's gonna be something to do with how the neck is mated to the body, but like I said I need to read deeper into that area of literature to see what's been tested.
Of course, but what's the tolerance on "perfect"? You said you're using Warmoth parts right? A quick snoop through the (un)official forums turns up people saying that they have neck pockets accurate to the spec'd dimensions to ±3 thousandths of an inch. I didn't see any flatness measurements, but if we assume something similar for the evenness of the bottom of the pocket then we could get up to about ±0.66mm of deviation up or down at the tip of the head stock, and around ±0.16mm of deviation in saddle height at the bridge for a given action height. Assuming I did the trigonometry mental math right, of course; I haven't diagrammed that out yet. This is assuming 6 in from heel to bridge, 24in from heel to tip of headstock, and a 3 in long neck pocket.
These numbers are on the same order as other guitar parameters, like string height. My MusicNomad Fret Rocker+ has marks 0.25mm apart to measure string height with, for example. Given that, it doesn't seem that far out to ask what the effect of a thousandth of an inch here or there is. To be clear, I'm saying the deviations I mentioned are the reason for the discussed phenomenons, I'm just using it as an example of how we might actually be concerned about fairly small physical differences.
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7704A
Well-known member
Except, we don't usually hammer on our guitars to play them and the energy you're delivering to the guitar body by knocking on it would seem to be much larger than is realistic for an actual playing scenario where you're not whacking the guitar.
Fart Ripper
New member
It’s only to be able to identify that the body resonates. If someone was inclined they could measure the frequency characteristics of the body prior to assembly. The body is directly coupled to the neck, bridge, and pickups, and then to anything attached to these….
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tallcoolone
Well-known member
How many bolt on guitars have you spent months getting to know? Any book that tells you body wood makes zero difference in an electric guitar is a waste of your time. But you do you man.
If the books you are reading are telling you that the wood an electric guitar is made of has no affect on tone then yes, I am saying those books are incorrect. Rather than doing your research in the library, maybe ask accomplished players here on this forum like @DanTravis62 what they think. I would trust that answer more
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tallcoolone
Well-known member
These guys don’t seem to believe in the term ‘resonate’
TheBiggestJerk
Well-known member
That’s the logical fallacy appeal to authority.
DanTravis62
Moderator
Informal fallacies are only fallacies if they are irrelevant.
citing that he values my opinion isn't an appeal to authority because neither he nor I claimed any authority except relevance
but i can't pretend im suprised youre too fucking dense to understand the difference, biggest cuck lol
maybe you should be cautious about throwing around what you think are logical fallacies
DanTravis62
Moderator
This is the problem with midwits getting ahold of a 10 year old angelfire website logical fallacy list
they throw these terms around without actually understanding anything because they think it makes them sound intelligent
no dude you just made yourself sound very, very, unintelligent
they throw these terms around without actually understanding anything because they think it makes them sound intelligent
no dude you just made yourself sound very, very, unintelligent
TheBiggestJerk
Well-known member
So does that mean the 2x4’s in my wall make different shades of light because the electrical outlet is nailed to it??? Of course not!
That’s the same fucking stupid logic!
dead-pan
Well-known member
tallcoolone
Well-known member
Dan beat me to it, but exactly what authority does he have again?
V
VonBonfire
Well-known member
If you play guitar more, wood matters less. SCIENCE.
TheBiggestJerk
Well-known member
He doesn’t. I was talking about YOU appealing to him as an authority. Whether he is or he isn’t is irrelevant. He likes to get his ego stroked so keep going.