I have read and studied this topic, and I am convinced that wood will affect tone on a electric guitar. But ultimately what matters is how rigid the guitar construction is.

Many things affect tone, and your guitar tone is the sum of its parts. Any one thing you modify will only affect things to a certain degree.

In general, the less rigid guitar is, the more rolled off highs you get. The harder and more dense a guitar is, the brighter with tighter lows you get.

Let's say you built a guitar out of steel, and it was so rigid that it did not need a truss rod. No matter what guage strings you put on, the neck relief is unaffected in this guitar. How do you think it will sound? I would say overly bright, harsh, and thin with bass notes that are very tight and thin.

Why. because the highs are not at all absorbed by the metal because the metal is too rigid to vibrate.

When you feel the wood vibrating, it is absorbing the vibration from the string, causing a dampening affect to the high frequencies.

The simpliest test is the sound differences between a solid body and hollow body electric. When played the hollow body always sounds thicker, and the solid body will sound thin in comparison.

This is a big reason that Jazz players use hollow body guitars with solid state amplifiers. For the clean tone they need, they do not need the amp to thicken and color the sound, because the hollow body does it for the amp. The amp just needs to faithfully reproduce the guitars natural sound. However, solid body guitars need help, and this is why we crave tube amps that actually color the sound.

We can look to other construction methods as well and find the same thing. Ever notice that a bolt-on neck guitar sounds thinner and brighter than a glued on.set neck or neck through? Why, becuase the metal plate and bolts make the joint much more rigid.

Again, I think the overall rigidity of the guitar matters, and different woods have different levels of rigidity. Guitar builders mix and match woods to try to get the right overall balance for a good sound that both has good highs and lows.

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Guitars:
1. mid 70's Ventura MIJ Gibson l6-s clone (Pre-lawsuit) in Black with Rosewood FB and EMG 81 BR/ 85 Neck
2. ESP KH2 Neck Thru
3. 2008 Am Std Strat in 3 tone sunburst

So how does a pickup recognize a signal from wood?

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No no and no

Interesting thing about the "steel guitar" analogy is that I have a friend that has one of those aluminum body Strats with a Rosewood neck. The first thing I wondered was, Wow aluminum will make this Strat sound tinny and hollow. To my surprise it sounded pretty much like any of my other Strats—with NO tone wood at all, other than a maple neck laminated with a rosewood fret board! Then there are the posts of the cigar box guitars on YouTube. If you close your eyes and listen to them play the blues, it sounds like a Gibson or Fender. Jack White made some pretty interesting observations. He said a person who has soul and want to get a sound, can do it on a piece of junk of a guitar. He would use some of the worst old guitars to strive to get great sound.

When I was a kid, my best friend and band mate played a Hagstrum Strat type guitar. It was made of a composite plastic and had vinyl that was padded on the back. Talk about something that will kill vibrations! But that guitar sounded great! He did all the Santana riffs, often holding notes forever using a Super Beatle Amp's built in distortion. So back to the string, pickup relationship... I think what they are mounted too does very little.

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Xhefri's Guitars
www.xhefriguitars.com

It doesn't, it is the woods affect on the transmission of frequencies from the string. Specifically, the gentle higher frequencies emitted by the string being absorbed by the wood. The more the wood can absorb the vibration the more the high frequencies are absorbed. The wood removes frequencies, it does not add anything, the frequencies are all contained in the vibration of the string. The frequencies that are most fragile and subject to absorbtion are the high frequencies.

Have you ever heard someone mention that they feel the body for vibration when checking a guitar? They want to feel the body take on some vibration/resonance. Why? Because if it does not, it will sound less warm, and more harsh in general. How did that wood start to vibrate? It was absorbed from the vibration of the string. If the wood does not absorb some of the vibration/frequencies, it stays in the string and gets transmitted to the pickup.

Anytime you make a guitar more rigid, it will sound brighter.

_________________
Guitars:
1. mid 70's Ventura MIJ Gibson l6-s clone (Pre-lawsuit) in Black with Rosewood FB and EMG 81 BR/ 85 Neck
2. ESP KH2 Neck Thru
3. 2008 Am Std Strat in 3 tone sunburst

I don't see how. Light and electricity travel much faster than sound (not single electron travel of 82mm per hour. Through a copper conductor around 90% speed of light. Coaxial around 60%) . Therefore the pickups will pick up sound way before the wood of the guitar has chance to react. Particularly when you consider that the soundwave has to travel through another material before it gets to the wood. Then has to make a return journey back to the pickup.

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No no and no

Niki, Wow.... don't over-analyze my friend. The differences at the realitively short distances here are way to fast for the human ear to discern. You are probably talking about milliseconds or nanoseconds here. At most, your argument would only apply to the initial attack, before the other factors kicked in.
Your brain will react slower than the speed of light or sound before it can analyze the signal the brain picks up from the ears.

If pickups were the sole tone factor for a guitar, my Ventura would sound exactly like my ESP. They are close, but there is definetly a difference, and the difference is not from the wood at all, because they both use maple. The differences are a bolt-on neck vs neck thru, scale length, and bridge type. Again, the wood is a factor, but only one factor of many that come into play. The tone of your guitar is from a complex interaction of many factors.

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Guitars:
1. mid 70's Ventura MIJ Gibson l6-s clone (Pre-lawsuit) in Black with Rosewood FB and EMG 81 BR/ 85 Neck
2. ESP KH2 Neck Thru
3. 2008 Am Std Strat in 3 tone sunburst

So how much is down to neck construction and hardware.

Hardware, pickups not included plays a far greater role in sound than body wood. There are discrepancies between the guitars so there will be discrepancies in the sound of the guitars. Pickup position Plays a far key part in things too, so therefore does scale length. Thats why if you put a strat pickup in a telecaster neck position, it still sounds like a telecaster neck position. The pickup placement is 3mm further from the 12th fret than a strats neck pickup. The bridge pickup is angled differently too. What you really need to do the test is two bodies of differing material, cut to exactly the same dimensions. Set one up with a neck and electronics, play a note, analyze it on a spectrograph. Transfer everything (neck,bridge, strings the lot) onto the other body and repeat. That would be a accurate test. I'd definitely concede that I was wrong should that test show different results. Everything, nut, saddle, neck, pickup heights would all have to be exactly the same too.

Like I said, passing a soundwave through materials of differing densities kills it pretty quickly. A whole area of the construction industry is based on that fact. When you ask a soundwave to make a return journey (so it would also be acting upon itself too), I find the whole notion unbelievable.

Sorry for being such a bloodhound over it mate. Signing off on this one now. It's becoming more obvious to me, the more I think of it, that body wood sound is physically impossible on a electric guitar. I don't want this to deteriorate into a argument with anyone.

One thing to consider, why does this guy charge mucho spondoolicks for his guitars carved out of tabletops. I got to play one a few months back, their great instruments.
He's a complete nutjob looking at his vulgar writings on his website (or it's a marketing ploy). He knows how to make great sounding guitars out of cheapo Ikea furniture and he picks his customers. The guy wants to hear you play before he'll sell to you.
http://www.zacharyguitars.com/

Over and out lads.

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No no and no

Niki,

I don't want to argue either, but I was enjoying this discussion. Sure beats MIA vs MIM debates. I hope you don't give up on the discussion, we may both learn something.

But when you say this:

Like I said, passing a soundwave through materials of differing densities kills it pretty quickly.

It really supports what I have been saying all along. This is exactly what is happening, but its is more dynamic that just a body wood. I agree that changing only body wood while everything else remained constant will only have a slight effect on tone.

Again, your guitar tone is affected by all the different factors, and changing only one thing on a guitar will only have a slight change in the guitars character, including pickups. Been there done that.

When I went from the superhumbuckers in the stock Ventura, to the EMG 81 in the bridge, it sounded pretty much the same. The 85 in the neck had a greater effect, as it uses alnico magnets, but the difference was still subtle and overall the guitar sounds the same.

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Guitars:
1. mid 70's Ventura MIJ Gibson l6-s clone (Pre-lawsuit) in Black with Rosewood FB and EMG 81 BR/ 85 Neck
2. ESP KH2 Neck Thru
3. 2008 Am Std Strat in 3 tone sunburst

Firstrat, I like you am enjoying this thread too. However I feel like a side of one. Not really a problem because theres no battle. However I'd like to see more opinions than just the few who are participating.

By way of explanation of the sound deadening properties of soundwaves through differing densities.
All I can surmise is that it just wouldn't matter. The guitar string operates predominantly between two points. The bridge and the nut. So where and when do these sound deadening properties enter back into the string? When could only be after the pickup has already picked up the sound of the string. Where is the point that I stick on. Nut or saddle? Well it can't be the nut for 95% of the time as mostly we play fretted notes. It must be the saddle, mustn't it? That great hulking lump of metal who's only contact with the body of a strat is two pivot posts. 6 if you have a vintage sychronized trem. Even if it is flat to the body, it only touches paint. So at best you have 6 screws, 12 grub screws, a 1/8th thick metal plate, 6 saddles and the paint inbetween your string and the bodywood on a fretted note. Can you imagine the way that will distort a weak soundwave.

What I can agree with is that the tension of the strings contracts and expands the wood as notes are played. However I wouldn't call that a tonal benefit. Infact the way to acheive that is to whack the hell out the strings. We all know that don't sound great.

To surmise my thoughts on this, acoustic and electric guitars are completely different instruments. They operate completely differently. The only things they have in common are six strings (though they are made of different materials), frets and some tuners. Everything else is different, we even play the things differently most of the time.

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No no and no

Niki,

I think we are off track talking about soundwaves and there passage through wood.

Would you agree that when a string vibrates, some of that vibration is transferred to the neck and body? If the neck and body also vibrate when you pluck the string, doesn't that mean the energy from the vibrating string was transferred to the wood?

Since some of the vibration energy of the string was lost/transferred to the wood, doesn't that mean the string lost some vibration energy? I don't believe the wood creates its own vibration energy, so it has to be a transfer from the string to the wood. Wouldn't it be possible that vibration energy lost to the wood may have carried certain frequencies that now will NOT get passed to the pickup therefore having an affect on the tone?

Since a denser harder wood will not vibrate as much, it means that it cannot accept the transfer of energy from the string, so the string retains the energy.

I do not believe that sound waves pass from the string to the wood and back to the string. I do believe certain woods will accept the transfer of energy from the string and the string loses some energy to the wood. This transfer of vibration from the string to the wood is where I believe the wood affects the tone.

_________________
Guitars:
1. mid 70's Ventura MIJ Gibson l6-s clone (Pre-lawsuit) in Black with Rosewood FB and EMG 81 BR/ 85 Neck
2. ESP KH2 Neck Thru
3. 2008 Am Std Strat in 3 tone sunburst

That makes sense, I could buy that.

Though I think along with the quest for hardened steel along the bridge were constantly diminishing that effect. Thus proving that tonewoods and a lot of the nonsense were sold are completely conflicting.
Based on this to get the best response from a tonewood we'd need the cheapest, flimsiest bridge possible.

Up the other end of the wood, look at the nut. I urge you to go get some bone and hack through it. See exactly how dense and hard it is. Maple has nothing on it.

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No no and no

I have been reading this topic but I must say that the body does affect the tone/resonance of the guitar. The strings vibrate all the way to the tremolo block. That vibration(sound) then travels through the tremolo to the block, and through the springs, to the claw. The sound is then resonated through the body. don't believe me or anyone else? Put your ear to the body of the guitar and tell me if the wood makes a difference. Why do you think a hollow body sounds warmer than a solid body? It resonates in the body, back to the pickups.

Not saying it doesn't resonate. How does a electric guitar pickup read that resonance though?
It doesn't, that is the only answer.

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No no and no

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Hehe can't be a side of one if we're not actually fighting!!

To me this is a great discussion. I have already done something I would never have done before. I have used a table as a makeshift amplifier before, but I would never have thought to clamp a guitar to a table.

My understanding of the effect of construction material for a solid body is only that energy from the strings is lost through the body into the surrounding environment. Pickups aren't microphonic, unless malfunctioning, so the acoustic character of the wood doesn't transfer, only manner in which the body steals energy from the vibrating string, which will be common to both the amplified and unamplified sound.

This loss of energy is inconsistent across various frequencies. Waves of various types hav6e a set speed in any given medium. It changes from medium to medium, but it is always constant in any one given medium. So what happens as it loses energy is it loses amplitude, ie the crests become smaller, so I would think the frequencies that lose energy the most easily would lose volume or decay a bit faster.

I think the overall effect has to be very small. So what I think happens to the string is depending on the wood it's anchored into it will lose certain overtones at a very slightly different rate as the note decays. The overall main vibration would remain the same, it would only be some of the smaller compound vibrations effected. As long as it is not a drastic change you would at most get a subtle colouring of the notes, not a squelch like when pickups are too close. In that case the electromagnetic field of the pickup is actually altering the overall path of the string as it vibrates, and not just removing energy from it.

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I'm not an expert, but I play one on the internet.

I think that's already been covered...

Try this. Plug your guitar into your amp. Talk or sing into your pickups.
Do you hear your voice thru the amp? Probably not. Or if you do very softly.

Same thing applies to your idea that the resonating sound of the strings travel the distance back to the wood and somehow make the pickups hear the sound.
The sound being generated thru the path you described would have to be louder than your voice to be picked up by the pups.

-T

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-T

"You can't spend what you ain't got, you can't lose what you ain't never had" ~ McKinley Morganfield