Why Wood Matters | Rules of Tone: Episode 1 | PRS Guitars

Wood doesn't affect tone.
Pickups don't affect tone.
Amps don't matter, just the speakers.

Some of my reactions to these derpworthy statements, depending on my mood:

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damn face palm-shake-my-head.gif


whats wrong with you cornbread hell old man.gif


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BlueParfait said:
Addendum:

These heuristics never failed me in other matters, so I suspect they also hold here.

- Does it seem to go against tradition for the main reason of """SCIENCE""" ? [Theoretically: something whose understanding of can change wildly by the decades. See also: understanding of dinosaurs] [Realistically: something heavily influenced by establishment dogma. See also: archaeology, biology]

- Does it seem to benefit no one except people who can reduce costs of production, service, or overheads, giving you lower quality for higher margins?

- Does it seem to reduce quality of service or of life for the average person?

If the answer is yes, it might as well be bullshit.

Decades ago, nobody held beliefs like "the materials and construction don't matter". Literally nobody up until recently held beliefs like "the pickups don't matter". Even a few years ago, people who say the wood didn't matter would say "pickups matter"

And the goalposts for this is always moveable. If you say you hear a difference, they call you a liar. If you show that there's a difference analyzing the frequencies, they say "oh this all disappears in the mix"

They will also say some bullshit like "oh but companies have incentives to say there's a difference to market that difference". Nobody who has ever worked i sells products or services would ever say this because we know customer segmentation exists, market mix exists. And the small demographic who are swayed by marketing of "this is different from this" will be swayed by any marketing that lets them set them apart from "other people", and they usually have more money anyways but that's a different story.

This is a zero sum fake-and-gay argument that in the end serves nothing but to reduce the average person into accepting shittier and shittier things in their lives.
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If you're saying no companies will state in their marketing materials as well on as any applicable patent applications that it is not the raw materials utilized in their products, but instead some proprietary process(es) that differentiate them from their competitors even when said process(es) end up being practically the same, then I would say you don't understand corporate thinking as well as you believe.
 
JohnnyGtar said:
Wood doesn't affect tone.
Pickups don't affect tone.
Amps don't matter, just the speakers.

Some of my reactions to these derpworthy statements, depending on my mood:
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Seriously, pretty soon there won’t be anything left according to these “experts”
 
I’m honestly shocked that in four pages some nitwit hasn’t posted that dickhead with the shovel guitar and the old hubcap guitar stating wood doesn’t matter :ROFLMAO:
 
pipelineaudio said:
This would be extremely easy to measure and show. I wonder why YouTube channels would take longer to write about it than to just test it
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And I wonder why if Jim Lill's work is so solid, why isn't he rich from making and selling guitars with plywood bodies and laminated pine necks?

In fact, I ask the "wood doesn't matter" crowd the same question.

And Jim really should grace with with his solid state copies of tubes amp since they perform equally.
 
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SpiderWars said:
Then something is wrong with the measurements.
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A caveat: your hearing (including the perception aspect) counts as a measurement too, and is also not free from scrutiny. Both that, and whatever more "science-y" measurements would have to be equally critiqued to evaluate reliability, accuracy, etc. But, my understanding is that when proper hearing tests free of perceptual pitfalls are conducted then whatever differences are heard line up with the scientific measurements and models.

Also, I can't speak for @pipelineaudio, but I'm guessing he was talking about solid body electric guitars when he replied to you. Either that, or he was alluding to it not being the wood species that matters for acoustic instruments, but the specific mechanical properties of the piece of wood (which likely vary a good bit inside a species). Since the whole idea of an acoustic guitar is that the strings vibrate the wood which vibrates the air, the properties of the wood (like how it flexes, uniformity, how it's braced, etc.) make a fairly big difference. Or at least that's my cursory understanding. Solid body guitars are completely different structures than acoustics, so body wood affecting them is not a foregone conclusion. There is a gradient from acoustic to electric though, e.g. jazz boxes are in-between and should be more susceptible to wood properties.
 
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pipelineaudio said:
That's why our ears are unreliable and worse than unreliable as measurement devices. Your state of mind, the food you ate, the color of your walls, and so manyu billions of things affect what your brain thinks you hear as the McGurk Effect shows so clearly
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Got any clips of your rig? What kind of tones do you go for?


pipelineaudio said:
Glenn definitely did some videos where he shows that at higher gains the differences between pickups gets vanishingly small. I think that he didn't say you couldn't tell which pickup was which but rather you couldn't tell when one pickup was switched for another which sounds the same but is pretty different. But for all I know, its Glenn Fricker and he said exactly what you said he did.

There's a close parallel in mic preamps, where the sommeliers pretend they can totally easily tell even under the worst circumstances how much better a neve mic pre is from anything else, and then when actually tested, pick Mackies and ARTs as the best in some cases and in others cannot even tell IF mic pres had been switched beyond the 33% random chance would predict

To me, pickups have measurable resonant frequencies, and thus should be distinguishable at least measurably predictably, even if we can't or would have trouble hearing it, regardless of the gain as I can't think of any way that a multiband distortion model of gain nonlinearities could somehow even that out, but I think I remember the video you are talking about and it really did seem hard to tell.

And in my own experiments: I SWEAR that an EMG81 sounds like an icepick to the brain with its ceramic pickup, compared to an Alnico 87. I could hear it from a mile off...But when I tried, with two different guitars, thru a pretty high gain amp sound, I couldn't ABX between them

I'm very confused on pickups
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If you can't hear the difference between alnico and ceramic pickups, I daresay it makes a lot of sense that all of your anti-tonewood arguments are based on whatever random dataset you arbitrarily choose to represent the effect tonewood makes :dunno:

I'm of the view that wood of the same species varies enough to where there isn't a gigantic difference that's going to be consistent, but not that there's no difference at all.

The vast majority of the time, when people make the standard "I Fucking LoVe ScIeNce!" arguments about tonewood, it's because they don't have a ton of experience playing and recording expensive guitars, and pretend that their limited understanding of the physics is a replacement for it.

This is an art. We make art. It's very possible we don't know everything that's going on, physics wise, thats going to have an auditory effect.

I personally think PRS is overstating his case - I don't believe i can "hear" the difference between two different types of wood reliably... but at the same time, the "here's the science bro" argument is a fast track to getting everyone to roll their eyes at you and disregard your opinion, because there are a lot of players and engineers with massive, lengthy resumes at RT.
 
7704A said:
Either that, or he was alluding to it not being the wood species that matters for acoustic instruments, but the specific mechanical properties of the piece of wood (which likely vary a good bit inside a species). Since the whole idea of an acoustic guitar is that the strings vibrate the wood which vibrates the air, the properties of the wood (like how it flexes, uniformity, how it's braced, etc.) make a fairly big difference. Or at least that's my cursory understanding. Solid body guitars are completely different structures than acoustics, so body wood affecting them is not a foregone conclusion. There is a gradient from acoustic to electric though, e.g. jazz boxes are in-between and should be more susceptible to wood properties.
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Yep, all of that was what I was getting at. If we can't agree on the Rosewood vs Mahogany acoustic guitars (otherwise made identical and lots of examples/samples not just two), which I know sound different and consistently so, then we can't even get to the solidbody discussion. It makes me doubt the validity of anything said after that, the testing/everything. If the testing can't 'hear' that then wtf kind of of testing is it? That's low hanging fruit.
 
JohnnyGtar said:
Because I felt like it.

"Wood doesn't affect tone" is such laughable bullshit that it's astounding.
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So you brought it up because you felt like it and when I responded with basically "Me too", you have a coniption about how it doesn't fucking matter.

You okay Johnny ?
 


Floyd Eye said:
So you brought it up because you felt like it and when I responded with basically "Me too", you have a coniption about how it doesn't fucking matter.

You okay Johnny ?
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No conniption here. How about you focus on something that's important? As for me, that's what I'm doing: something important. I'm rearranging my studio and sat down for a few puffs of weed, so you get a reply.

I'm doin' great bro. Happy as a clam all day and I hope the same for you and yours.
 
JohnnyGtar said:
No conniption here. How about you focus on something that's important? As for me, that's what I'm doing: something important. I'm rearranging my studio and sat down for a few puffs of weed, so you get a reply.

I'm doin' great bro. Happy as a clam all day.
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Aight man. Just checkin. Enjoy your Sunday bro.
 
SpiderWars said:
Then something is wrong with the measurements.
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Which measurements?

SpiderWars said:
The differences between Rosewood back and sides vs Mahogany in acoustic guitars are clear and consistent.
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We aren't talking about acoustic guitars. But for acoustic guitar the claim that species of wood matters would be easy to test. Why has nobody been able to show that? Because it would be dendrochronology denial

SpiderWars said:
If we can't even agree on that then we just can't proceed to electrics. We just disagree.
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A pickup system, which is an electromechanical generator is quite a different thing than a mic on an acoustic guitar
 
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