O.O i see what your saying about pickup to string vibration but if it was THE major factor we could all have great sounding guitars for £40. As i said previously you can put a bad sounding pickup on a good guitar and still get a decent usable sound. Can you put a great pickup on a poor guitar and get a good sounding guitar? I cant.

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No no and no

The shop where I bought my guitar has a lot of vintage gear... sadly for me I live a few minutes walk from there and I'm like a moth to a flame... heh. Anyway, although such things can never be exhaustive, they did A/B an original '54 with a custom shop '54:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0fGnm88nm0&feature=player_embedded

Wow one of the first things you learn in College debate "I am think we agree" or I'm sure all agree"

An electric guitar that sounds dead when unplug will not sound good amped. It may sound better with higher quality pickups but those pickups are still going to sound better in the better quality guitar.
Electric guitars depend on the same acoustic qualities as acoustics do but with additional elements. That being the addition of pickups and amplification and those two items just increase the multiples in a electric guitars sound possibilites and differences between them.
It is also the reason every guitar has its own voice. We sit down and play several at the shop, many the same model but one strikes you, Why?
Thers something there doing it.
Amps sound different when you change speakers or tubes.
Guitars sound different when you change a block.
Same gauge strings sound and tune different "flat wound, round wound"

Where does it all start? From the base up, the body and the neck and its acoustic possibilites. And in a solid body its the neck and its quality even along with the body. In a acoustic its both as well but the need of a quality body is amplified more because of the job the soundboard has to do.

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The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

Thomas Jefferson

Density. Density. Density.

A vibrating steel (or other ferro-magnetic metal) string causes a flux in the magnetic field created by a pickup's coil, a flux that produces an altnernating (AC) voltage (a signal) that is transmitted to the electronic amplifier where it is enlarged then sent to the amplifier's speaker.
Magnetic fields are not affected by wood or plastic. Only another magnetic field or ferro-magnetic metals.

That being said the strings on a guitar are going to vibrate at varying frequencies and in varying arcs depending on the type of string, the type of pick used, whether you play fingerstyle, where you attack the string etc...

Now, add to that the wood used for the neck, the fingerboard, and the body and there is a dampening affect on the strings that is going to influence the tone of the guitar. Very dense woods are going to transmit vibrations faster but for a shorter distance and for less time than less dense woods due to the distances between molecules. Much like the speed of sound in water is faster than in air but it travels a shorter distance in water.

Put it all together and you have wood that affects the strings that affect the pickups that generate a signal for the amplifier and we get a musical note of varying tonal characteristics depending on all of these variables.

So, does wood affect the tone of a guitar? Yes. Can we here the difference? Yes and no. If the difference in density is sufficient enough, our hearing is good enough, and the difference is in our auditory range we will here it. If two woods are close in density and all other factors are the same than we probably won't know any difference other than asthetics.

You didn't answer my question about which pickup position best reflects the sound of the woods. When I change pickups, I have the same wood, the same neck, but very different sounds.

That's because the wood is a very minimal contributor. When you can change strings and get a new fresh brighter tone; when you can strum at a different point; when you can switch that pickup selector switch and get very different tones; when you can take a screwdriver to the pickup height screws and get different tones it all adds up to one thing: these wild sound variations mean the woods have minimal effect on the tones I hear coming from my amp.

It is the physics of the string and pickup position that gives you all of your tone. Most of the pickups on most of my Strats were not intentionally wound differently.

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Member #26797
My other guitar is a Strat.

I don't have to use a great pickup. I can use the stock MIM ceramic pickups and I can get a great sound out of a plywood bodied Squier Affinity (or maybe even that Woolworth's $20 guitar). I would say that you haven't tried, niki.

That Woolworth's guitar would probably play like dirt, but I wager I could get a good sound through my Marshall's. I could get plenty good sounds from my nephew's stock Squier.

There are plastic and composite bodied electric guitars that sound great.

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Member #26797
My other guitar is a Strat.

^ If you're measuring variables against a constant, you can't really say that the constant is making no contribution to the result. You just have no reliable way to measure its extent.

Since the tones are all across the board, what I can assume is that it's effect is smaller than all of those others.

If the woods were the greatest contributor and those other things minimal, then those other things wouldn't cause the changes I hear. And I wouldn't need more than one pickup on a guitar.

I could be a big "Tone Snob" ... and be like: "it's Brazillian fingerboards for me, boys" or "sorry, it's only pre-CBS guitars for me" or "it's only one-piece bodies with nitro-lacquer finish for me, gents." But aside from a couple of over-wound bridge pickups, my 4 to 55 year old Strats all pretty much sound the same through my "tone chain" (usually just a wah-wah and a Marshall). I've done plenty of back to back playing of various Strats (guitar changes at gigs, for example). I rarely have to tweak any amp controls.

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Member #26797
My other guitar is a Strat.

Ah, yes, I wasn't begging to differ, really... it'd be nice to be able to change body woods as easily as flicking a switch, that's all. I can't help feeling that we'd hear an enormous difference if we could, but as has been mentioned I imagine that would be more to do with the difference between individual pieces of wood rather than the type. Personally I think that anything that makes a difference in the mind of the player will somehow affect the sound, so anybody who gets hung up on one aspect or another will probably find their experience bears out their preconceptions. If a guitar puts a smile on my face, it's a good guitar for me... heh.

About the only thing that seems consistent to me is that old gear (guitars, amps, whatever) does seem to "mellow" somewhat over time. There's still plenty of sparkle to be had in the highs, but it's as if they've become more smoothly integrated with the mids somehow... like the tone has amalgamated. Whether or not it's due to pickup wire undergoing some sort of change, the wood of the body drying out, electronics corroding , a combination of all of these, I don't know. Contemporary gear seems to have a more distinct high/mid/low thing going on. Turning the treble down a bit seems to produce a serviceable "vintage" sound... but this is my opinion only...

i thought you guys were musicians not rocket scientists..
nah, seriously great info on this thread especially by nik, damn near everyone else who contributed.
i was going to throw my 2 cents in, then i saw about 10 dollars worth of info.

hey niki, was that your 50th ann deluxe?

Yea this was a great thread it brought back things I learned in the past. And you can never no to much thats why I tell people to experiment when you can and read. Plus look for local Luthier courses on both Acoustic and electric building and repair. I did this stuff as a side job until recently a little more now though and have never had a problem letting someone watch and learn on guitars, amps a different story some times.

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The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

Thomas Jefferson

So why cant i make my JSH V100 sound like a gibson lespaul. Surely if its that simple all we'd need to buy is a load of 498's and drop em in. I assure you i've tried many things to improve the sound of that guitar. It plays like a dream but sounds like a dog.

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No no and no

Well, we sure don't agree on THAT. Because that statement is absolutely wrong.

I've played many, many guitars... often Les Pauls, but some Fenders, too... that produced virtually no unplugged sound at all, that you would imagine would be thin and and nasty sounding, but when you plugged them in they rocked your world.

This is my direct experience with dozens of guitars, not a lone anecdote. They don't have to sound good unplugged to sound great plugged in. When auditioning guitars, I don't even bother to play them unplugged, except for the moment or two while I'm waiting for the shop dude to find a cord.

I think this is because of what niki said (he did say it first, right?)... a guitar is a system. A given system makes a given sound. That sound is either good (usually) or not (less often). Trying to predict the response of a given system based on material specs is a fool's errand, because the materials are just too variable.

See, this is my only argument with the whole "every tiny thing affects the sound of the guitar" argument you hear so often. "Nitro sounds better than poly, a bone nut sounds better than Corian." It's bunk. But people like to be able to have the "cool guy" answer to how things work, they want to be able to predict results (this is the main thing our brains do that kept us at the top of the food chain all these centuries.)

I knew a guy on a couple of other forums who was a master of this BS. He would go on and on about how he was planning this guitar or that guitar... a mahogany body with a maple cap, but the maple was a little harder than usual, so he was going to counteract that by choosing these pickups blah blah woof woof. At the heart of this kind of speed-shop chatter are two bad ideas, one I find much more offensive than the other:

1. A guitar is a predictable system, and you can sculpt he sound to perfection by spec'ing just the right components;

2. There is a "perfect" sound to be obtained.