Official Luthiers Forum!

"whisperer", your big mistake was using the Alembic issue. Having designed and built the very first Alembic bass and then tooling up the factories in Cotati and participating hands and ears on in making over 1250 of them...before being involved in another 3,500 instruments...I do know something about this.

For one thing, in my days at Alembic, the pickups (which I designed...) had a self resonance in excess 25 k Hz, and so I got a chance to hear the strings of the instruments un-affected by coil inductance and resonance. I got to play around with other factors like pickup aperture and placement a lot without being burdened by normal high Z pickup frequency response...which is what you are spending your time listening to.

While I am not a big believer in absolute recipes, I can tell you that when I changed woods for necks; there were major changes in tone and sustain. In acoustic guitar building, when I go from cedar to spruce to redwood for acoustic guitar tops, there are differences. When I use Adirondack spruce for a guitar top instead of Engelmann, there are differences. Have you built any acoustics? It's very informative to electric building... And when I make a Model 1 with a mahogany neck, it sounds different from one made with a maple/purpleheard laminated neck. And when I build a J-45 style slope shouldered dreadnaught with a laminated maple/walnut neck, it sounds different from one with a mahogany neck.

I have an advantage in this fray, and that is having been in it for a very long time and having thousands and thousands of guitars pass under my hands. Yes, I know that a good luthier can compensate one way or another for differences between woods. I know that pickups shade the tone of the guitar. I also know that when you have a very neutral pickup...one that does not have major frequency anomalies within the audible band, you can hear wood differences even more distinctly than with your garden variety Strat or Les Paul. You are used to listening to guitars through a major muffler. Try putting a set of relatively uncolored pickups in a guitar. Try piezos properly buffered. Try low impedance pickups that have a self resonance above about 25 K Hertz. You might just hear some interesting things that are masked by your prejudices and pre-conceived notions.

And, yes, different designs have signature tones, too. But you cannot dismiss any element at all as you are trying to do with this specious "wood doesn't matter" stance. Design matters, wood matters, carbon fiber matters, metal matters, and then...OK, pickups matter...mainly because of what they don't pass through on the one hand and by what they emphasize on the other.

You can't judge wood without knowing what the most neutral pickups you can find will reveal. You're listening through tinted...or worse, dirty "windows".

And, by the way...you can wind classic pickups to low impedance specs to get rid of the masking of coil filtration and then start to hear really interesting factors in how the strings react to the magnetic field of a particular pickup design. Suffice it to say that I've wound all the classics using Litz wire to reveal an underlying signature tone that each pickup style owns that is independent of coil filtration and group delay characteristics. All I'm going to say is that "coil filter" tone is just a part of the sound of a pickup. Take that coil filter sound away, and you reveal the soul of the pickup in it's relationship to the strings and the guitar.

But that's a whole 'nuther discussion that I don't particularly want to get into here.

and i repeat: most- nay, virtually ALL of the world's most cherished and esteemed solidbody guitar/bass recordings and performances were made with cheap instruments made with run-of-the-mill wood. Alembic was(maybe still is?haven't really heard them spoken about since the early '80s)is definitely part of the elitest cork sniffing crowd.

From your above quote, it seems like we might actually agree, if you would rank the order of importance of the different design elements you have listed and also consider scale length and string composition as well. I would put it as, from most important to least important:

Electronics, Scale length, string composition, Bridge Material, wood composition including carbon fiber lams.

Changing pickup type makes a more noticeable difference than changing scale length, which is more noticeable than changing string brand, etc.

Then I would clarify that ten identically built guitars would all sound different from one another while retaining the defining characteristics of the model, so that it's difficult if not impossible to assign characteristics to wood species rather than simply differences in individual pieces of wood.

Your mistake is that you're ignoring my actual argument.

My contention is NOT that wood doesn't matter at all, but rather that the design elements make more profound differences in tone than specific wood species do. In extreme cases, such as the pickup mounted onto an acoustic example, wood choice matters EVEN LESS.

Your examples aren't relevant to the question. You are simply saying that wood makes a difference, without quantifying the difference as a proportion to to other design elements.

A strat with a mahogany neck sounds like a Strat, as does one with a maple neck.

You don't find that to be true?

In the 70's Les Pauls were made with laminated Maple necks, they still sound like Les Pauls!

My friend's Purpleheart/Figured Soft Maple Further sounded nearly identical to my Padouk/rd Birdseye maple (Neck lams too) Custom Made Further.

Perhaps you would have noticed Profound differences in the tone but I only noticed minor differences, that I'm sure, after having built a large quantity of electrics, would have been there for another identically built Further.

Now, swap out the ELECTRONICS packages, say, remove the active humbuckers and tone filters and replace them with passive single coils with 250K pots and .047mf caps, and the difference would be EVEN MORE profound.

You haven't directly addressed the issue of which makes a BIGGER difference, swapping out electronics or changing wood species.
Are you saying that all the Alembics you made with the same necks sounded identical? If not, then how can you specifically attribute the minor differences you notice between guitars to species, rather than just the different pieces of wood? So then how can you say the SPECIES makes a specific difference?

You haven't addressed the notion, that YOU brought up initially, that a Les Paul and a D35 with a humbucker sound different because of DESIGN elements rather than WOOD SPECIES, because even if you made the dreadnaught out of the same materials as the Les Paul, they would sound HUGELY different.

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Old growth, shmold growth!

And a D-18 sounds like a D-28 to your ears? Virtually the same design. Different back and sides. Different sound...

Just try getting past pickups and listen to the guitars.

The end.

Thanks for the discussion!

I was really hoping to see how you would rank the design elements though.

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Old growth, shmold growth!

Are you talking about yourself in the third person?

Interesting insight into your mental state.

However, I'm afraid I have to agree with you again.

To say that you can really only hear how an electric guitar sounds by putting ultra-flat/tansparent low-Z pickups on it so you can hear the wood, is in fact circular reasoning. It's like saying that if you remove the pickups from the equation, then you can see that the wood makes a huge difference in the tone of the instrument.

But that's also what my heirarchy says!

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Old growth, shmold growth!

Well, sometimes people have to just agree to agree.

It's unfortunate, but that's just the way it is sometimes.

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Old growth, shmold growth!

I'd add that since the actual "difference" in tone when using different woods will ALWAYS be subjective...the mysticism surrounding wood choice will ALWAYS exist...and I'll ALWAYS judge those who speak empirically on the subject that haven't taken steps to test their assumptions....no matter what their experience. Unless one devises a test that isolates the variables and then executes that test, their opinion is based on a subjective conclusion. I certainly do venerate experience, RT...I really do...but unless you can say YOU'VE built six, and then four, and then another four identical guitars with the only variable being the wood choice, then I HAVE to differ to my own testing to form my conclusion. I simply don't accept opinion in the face of my fair test of this VERY issue.

My testing has left me with an empirical conclusion: Wood choice matters. Pickup choice matters more. ...and I most certainly have more to learn on this subject.

Hehe...not that mine will be the final conclusion on this. I hope only to speak with some authority to customers that are overwhelmed by opinions.

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I read Emerson on the can. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...true...but a consistent reading of Emerson has its uses nevertheless.

StuMusic

I don't think the wood choice is "funky" or understand why you think it's an "oddball" combination... but I don't need to know either.

I'd be more concerned with design, balance, weight, scale length and hardware choices....and I just don't know what "Mortal tone sin" is.

I agree with fillipo although this is common discussion in any musical instrument forum.

Just a bit of advice though to Anyone who might read this later. I have had pretty good luck listening to musicians and cork sniffers. You will too if you try to keep your ego in check. Discussing musical instruments In terms of simple combinations of woods, both acoustic and electric, is THE most common and important way to communicate.


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Ken

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Ken

i don't understand how acoustic guitar comparisons crept in to the discussion: acoustic guitars move air, mechanically; solid body electrics move strings over a magnet to produce a few hundred milliwatts of electricity which then goes through a complicated electrical network, that is ultimately pumped through speakers...totally different animals, and no parallels are valid, in my opinion.

http://www.thegearpage.net/board/showth ... ?t=1375407


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Ken

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Ken

Ken, all that thread really establishes is that the wood has a slight effect on the quality of the final tone of the instrument without going into specifics of why a Strat sounds like a Strat no matter what wood is used, and a Les Paul sounds like a Les Paul no matter what wood is used, or why a humbucker installed on a Les Paul and an Acoustic made out of mahogany would sound vastly different from one another.

Any discussion of wood is really meaningless without discussing the rest of the design elements that affect the tone, and it seems to me that wood worshippers don't get that.

Wood is important yes, but it is not EVERTHING, IT IS NOT ALL! as some have purported. It is one element in an overall design.

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Old growth, shmold growth!

I can't disagree with anything you wrote. I am sure I would like your guitars or most makers who participated in this thread. I love all well built guitars. The point I seem to be emphasizing is that if a player perceives something I tend to believe them.


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Ken

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Ken

If "luthiers" here cannot see how acoustic guitars relate to electric guitars in terms of how strings react to what they're attached to, I'm afraid I'm in the wrong place for intelligent discussion of how guitars work. And if I'm to understand the argument presented against me here, then at least one "luthier" here is making an argument that would have D-18's sound just like D-28's.

Wood matters.

Pickups are just tone controls that have little bearing on how a particular string vibrates. Yes, they affect tone. So does the wood.

I am truly sorry to have gotten into any kind of discussion here. Some of you may catch my thoughts elsewhere.

As a new builder and long time player I have to say this thread hasn't really changed my mind about any opinions I have on the subject, which I think could be said for nearly everyone here. No matter where this discussion is had I see people hold fast to their position with a dogmatic fervor that seems to grow bolder the longer the conversation goes on. Specious, fallacious reasoning abounds with either side pointing the finger squarely at the other while never seeming to apply any of that criticism towards themselves. I personally find this discussion about as compelling as an online religious discussion or a politics discussion taking place as a response to a YouTube video or something. I'll probably never make enough guitars to analyze them to the point where there is enough scientifically controlled evidence for one side or the other. With that said though, I will then be no better off accepting anecdotal or experiential knowledge from anybody here and then allowing that to form and control a belief I have about what is really happening. To do that is the same as saying, "I don't understand something, therefor whatever I make up is just as acceptable an answer as any".

Just like religion, everyone is entitled to their belief. When they try and make a statement of fact or truth about that belief as it pertains to ANYBODY ELSE, that is where it all goes to heck. If people want to believe they're right, fine, hold onto that for yourself. But realize it's not necessary for everyone else to validate your position by unanimous ascension. If it is, then maybe you should be looking at yourself for the answers as to why.

Who said that strings don't react to what they're attached too?

Who said that a D-18 should sound just like a D-28?

I can see how you might be too busy to really read through and analyze long posts, but why be sorry?

Nobody was rude to you or belittling, we just have our own thoughts based on our own experiences.

Maybe you can appreciate that none of us are sycophants and genuinely want to engage the entire subject?

Or maybe you prefer the sycophants....

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Old growth, shmold growth!

It's strange to me that so much focus as been given to the wood when the OP listed woods that are
commonly used...
... and then mixing in acoustic guitars with electrics...?

Surely we may agree that wood matters and to different degrees...?....and with the woods the OP will be uising aren't
the other aspects of the electric guitar more important since the wood choices have been made? Sure they are. It's an electric and no different than changing the sounds of an acoustic when choosing electronic hardware, not to mention other changes that can be made that effect the tonal characteristics and playablity.

Isn't it much simplier to answer the OP with, "your wood choices are fine" ? If not maybe it's time to recommend an aluminum body... would be very cool polished up nicely.

To try to address the original question: Ash plus koa plus ebony could make a very nice guitar. The Ash and koa are in the medium density warm department and the ebony is in the definite clear elegant cold arena. If you had to compare it to anything, think about the mid fifties Les Paul customs. Most (all?) of them had three pickups and were black. The bodies and necks were mahogony with no maple top. Gibson balanced those warm woods with an ebony board. The attack is more relaxed than LP's with maple tops.

If you put together any reasonable woods that have a nice relaxed ring to them when you knock them with your knuckles, and you don't build stress into the guitar, you will get something that has some pleasing qualities.

On the other hand, if what you really want is a Strat or a Les Paul, it is best to follow the reliable recipe. Those guitars are famous because of their expressive and versitile character. There is no shame in trying to make a really good copy of the best of either of them.

Good luck, and have fun.

Woods, magnets, scale lenght etc... they all afect how a guitar sounds thats a fact.

I electric guitars i gess you all know the physics behind the magnetic pickups. If not try and plug one direct to your amp and move it aroud really fast or remove the strings from the guitar and knock on it, did you hear anything? no, cranck the volume to 10, nothing or just a slight buzz.
Now if you have a tunner with a clip try the same but plug the clip to the body or neck and knock on it guess you hear something.

If you wanto to hear the diference between diferent woods get a pick up that listens to the wood not the strings, its true that vibrating strings will make wood vibrate and diferent woods must have a diferent response to them. But no normal magnetic pick up will translate that into sound.
I prefer spending time with tools and building tham wondering wich wood combo to use.

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The sharpest the tool, the fastest it will find its way to my hands :p
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