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Post subject: Re: Tone Wood Wars!
Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 1:00 pm
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Martian wrote:
Fender Strat Brat wrote:
spacewolf wrote:
"Ah, that sounds like ash!" :wink:


Only a dumb ash wood say that. :lol:


"He said, "ash", heh, heh, heh!"

I did? Well...


:lol:

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Post subject: Re: Tone Wood Wars!
Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 6:32 pm
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So what about hollow and semi-hollow body guitars like a Gretsch? If it was all in the pickups then they would sound different when played unplugged yet the same as a solid body as soon as you amplified them.

Ash wood grain is open while alder is a closed-pore wood. I'm thinking that with the exact same pickups and hardware there could be a slight difference in tone when playing clean but with high gain and equalization the difference wouldn't be enough to notice. One of my Teles has had a lot of chambering and it seems to have a pretty major effect on tone through a clean channel. Start adding gain and that difference starts going away. Less Chet Atkins and more Slash.

Maybe that is part of the disagreements over whether wood plays a part in the sound? Maybe both positions are correct to a point - the type of wood can make a difference in tone when clean but when played through a high-gain amp the tubes color the sound so much that the type of wood becomes a non-issue?

Just a theory though. Someone who knows more can likely blow it out of the water.


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Post subject: Re: Tone Wood Wars!
Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 11:41 pm
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Martian wrote:
BMW-KTM wrote:
Now we're talking about hands and pickups again. The debate is wood.


I guess it's a human nature thing: Anytime there is a lengthy thread concerning virtually any topic, it inevitably strays from the prime subject (just like I'm doing now). Notwithstanding, I must compliment and congratulate all the participants herein for keeping it a civil, truly thoughtful and interesting discussion.


Yeah, I'm disappointed too. :D


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Post subject: Re: Tone Wood Wars!
Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 10:24 am
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In addition to the select "tone wood" in my guitar, I also wear "tone sneakers" and my favorite "tone shirt" when I play. :D

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Post subject: Re: Tone Wood Wars!
Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 8:56 pm
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Actually, I want to elaborate on what I was getting at Saturday. I realize now I was probably being way too brief.

Any time a wave travels to a new medium that is 'denser' or 'less dense' than the one it was traveling in, part of it will refract at an angle into the new medium, and part of it will be reflected (usually at a different angle) back into the original medium. For electromagnetic waves in non-conducting (dielectric) media, 'density' equates to the dielectric constant (or the closely-related index of refraction). For a guitar, change in medium would occur, for example, wherever there is a wood-air interface, such as at its surfaces.

So, woods with different dielectric constants would refract energy at different angles, and with different amounts of energy being split into the refracted components and the reflected components. This could affect the spatial distribution of power in the strings' (and pickup's?) electromagnetic field, via the usual mechanism of wave interference. That would in turn affect the current distribution induced on the pickup's coil by the field. If that effect was pronounced enough to affect the waveforms output by the pickup, it could conceivably make a difference in tone.

But, I have no idea if using woods with different dielectric constants, which are probably not radically different from one another, could affect the field significantly enough to actually alter the tone. I just don't know enough about pickups. It could be that the power is distributed too uniformly for any noticeable difference to be made by what may be minor differences in reflection and refraction due to minor differences in the dielectric constants of the various woods used to make guitars. Or, it could be that certain pickups have field distributions for which this could make a noticeable affect, and others don't. (A computer model would be helpful.)

I hope this provides some food for thought. There have been some interesting questions raised in this thread, and I hope it will continue.

3/7/2015 - Forget the above, I was way off base. I think all we are doing is mechanically vibrating a coil around a magnet, and inducing a current on the coil by Faraday's Law, just like with a microphone. So how the wood affects the vibrations could conceivable affect the tone.

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Last edited by spacewolf on Sat Mar 07, 2015 8:32 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Post subject: Re: Tone Wood Wars!
Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 10:43 pm
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That is food for thought spacewolf. As for the wood, it is part of a resonant system of the guitar, and it seems obvious that the type of wood (or other material) would have an affect on the vibrations of the strings, as in sustain for example, and therefore would have some affect on the sound produced. All subtleties and nuances of the guitar add to the tone, no matter how slight. I think that it is the subtle differences that can set two otherwise identical guitars apart.

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Post subject: Re: Tone Wood Wars!
Posted: Tue Mar 03, 2015 9:22 am
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shimmilou wrote:
That is food for thought spacewolf. As for the wood, it is part of a resonant system of the guitar, and it seems obvious that the type of wood (or other material) would have an affect on the vibrations of the strings, as in sustain for example, and therefore would have some affect on the sound produced. All subtleties and nuances of the guitar add to the tone, no matter how slight. I think that it is the subtle differences that can set two otherwise identical guitars apart.

Thanks, shimmilou. Guitars are certainly very complicated electro-mechanical systems, and examining the components in situ is probably the more productive approach. Which has me back to wondering about the interaction of the mechanical vibrations with the pickups...

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Suppose I have two antennas. If I transmit a signal from one, and shake the receiving antenna mechanically at the same frequency as the signal, what will the effect be? (Part of the answer would undoubtedly depend on the direction I shake it, relative to the polarization.)

fenderfan wrote:
So what about hollow and semi-hollow body guitars like a Gretsch? If it was all in the pickups then they would sound different when played unplugged yet the same as a solid body as soon as you amplified them. ...One of my Teles has had a lot of chambering and it seems to have a pretty major effect on tone through a clean channel.
Good question.

BMW-KTM wrote:
Well, let's also not forget that the likelihood of two pieces of Alder having exactly the same grain and density and knot placement and God knows what else is not very high. Generally speaking I think we all agree that any effect wood has on the tone of a solid body electric is going to be small but I think that the cues we can pick up from acoustic guitar woods will have a similar action on electric guitar strings as they have on acoustic guitar strings.
Good point. Different samples of the same species of wood can still have different characteristics, within reason.

KidBlast wrote:
I also will say that an SG for example, with 490r/498t pups verses a les paul with the same pups will NOT sound the same. But those are wildly different guitars.
Another good point. Same species of wood, same pickups (I don't know about the rest of the electronics in them), their most noticeable differences are in geometry and mass.

Thoughts?

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