At some point I shall try out this contraption I just thought up. Fixed to walls it should have very little other resonance than the strings & hardware. If anyone beats me to it I am interested in results.


Man, I feel like I'm in that series, Mythbusters, eh? Awesome!

-Nutter

Nutter

You can remagnetize a pickup, just the same way you would any lump of iron.

Also it is advised if storing pickups to put a keeper magnet across the poles and not store pickups together, loose in a box.

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No no and no

Ah Nikininja thank you.

I remember some discussion about nylon strings evoking audible reaction over magnetic pick-ups. I figure that's because there probably is static electricity in the nylon which is detected by the magnetic field of the pick-up. Does that make any sense?

-Nutter

Yeah it's entirely a possibility. As is metal residue being left on the strings from the manufacture process.

Perhaps it's just that having something moving quickly in the magnetic field causes a disturbance. A magnet force is more powerful through thin paper than it is through 1/4" of plywood. So a string, whether it be nylon or steel, should effect a magnetic field to a greater or lesser degree.
(just a theory, not saying it's right)

Like I said, when I did it I was running a load of gain. Probably 3 distortion pedals in series. The sound was still very weak.
I did only try it on singlecoils too. I've never tried that with humbuckers, or the shouting down a pickup thing.

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No no and no

My ears can't tell the difference plugged in, I can hear a difference unplugged.

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2012 American Vintage Telecaster 1958
09 Fender american deluxe strat.
97 Gibson les paul special P90's double-cut
65 Princeton reverb re-issue
2010 Guild Gad-F40e

After reading people's convincing arguments on here, I've decided to tear down all of the dry wall in my house and replace all the walls with real Mahogany because I would like for my light bulbs to burn "warmer".

Perhaps it will help keep the heat in during the upcoming winter too!

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No no and no

Dime your amp, load up on distortion and rock out. You won't be able to tell the difference

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"Life is like eating jalapenos. What you do today may burn your arse tomorrow"

Mate I don't even think you have to distort your amp. If you consider the eq stack on your amp that alone is going to zero out any tiny effect that wood may have.

Great tool for tonestacks here
http://www.duncanamps.com/tsc/
It's free and very easy to use. Simply select a circuit type, click a component, change it's value. See the line of the eq change.

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No no and no

+1

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Being able to play and enjoy music is a gift that's often taken for granted.

Don't leave home without it!

It is all explained below, the wave that is created as your finger applies pressure to the string goes round and round, back and forth, perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 times over several seconds before it all comes to a stop, and silence. At first, the wave moves away from your finger in either direction, hits the nut and stop piece, most is reflected back into the string, from either direction, setting up a resonance frequency at the key of the string, eg 440 cycles per second for an A string. A TINY LITTLE BIT of energy passes throught the nut and stop piece and onto the neck and body, the wave coming from either direction hit, combine, a tiny little bit the reflected back to where it came from, a little bit hits the molecules in the surrounding air and creates sound waves. A tiny little bit enters your hands, and you feel it, I know you do, and you hear the energy that escapes the body, head, neck, even if the electic guitar is not plugged in, I know you hear it.

This is the propagation of waves through one solid and into others. Sound waves travel faster through solids. They can also travel through gas (air) and liquids and can move from one to the other and back again.

The compressability and density of the media determines the speed of the wave, see final paragraph below. This means, a harder or denser wood produces a brighter, higher freguency sound. And assuming no two species of wood have the exact same level of compressability nor density, sound will travel at a different speed through different wood.

The speed of sound and frequency are the same thing. An a string vibrates at 440 cycles per second, we hear that vibration as an "a" note. Low e at 330 cycles per second, we hear that as an "e" note.

If you understand the following, then you can believe that wood will impact the energy generated by an electric guitar. Being able to hear that is an entirely other matter.


From wikipedia.com;


Speed of sound is the distance traveled per a unit of time by a sound wave propagating through an elastic medium. In dry air at 20 °C (68 °F), the speed of sound is 343 metres per second (1,125 ft/s). This equates to 1,236 kilometres per hour (768 mph), or about one kilometer in three seconds or approximately one mile in five seconds. The speed of sound in air is referred to as Mach 1 by aerospace professionals.

The speed of sound in gases increases roughly as the square root of temperature, but is nearly independent of pressure or density for a given gas. For different gases, the speed of sound is inversely dependent on square root of the mean molecular weight of the gas, and affected to a lesser extent by the number of ways in which the molecules of the gas can store heat from compression, since sound in gases is a type of compression. Although, in the case of gases only, the speed of sound may be expressed in terms of both density and pressure, these quantities partially cancel each other to yield the simpler dependence on temperature and composition already noted.

The speed of sound in ideal gases is independent of frequency, but it weakly depends on frequency for all real physical situations (an example being a lightning strike, where the lower frequences arrive later, as the descending-frequency rumble heard after the initial crack of thunder).

Although the speed of sound is commonly used to refer specifically to the speed of sound waves in air, the speed of sound can be measured in virtually any substance. Sound travels faster in liquids and non-porous solids (5,120 m/s in iron) than it does in air, traveling about 4.3 times faster in water (1,484 m/s) than in air at 20 degrees Celsius.

In solids, sound waves propagate as two different types. A longitudinal wave is associated with compression and decompression in the direction of travel, which is the same process as all sound waves in gases and liquids. A transverse wave, often called shear wave, is due to elastic deformation of the media perpendicular to the direction of wave travel, and thus has a polarization in this direction. In general, transverse waves occur as a pair of orthogonal polarizations. These different waves (compression waves and the different polarizations of shear waves) may have different speeds at the same frequency. Therefore, they arrive at an observer at different times, an extreme example being an earthquake, where sharp compression waves arrive first, and rocking transverse waves seconds later.

The speed of elastic waves in all media is determined by the media's compressibility and density. The speed of shear waves, which can occur only in solids, are determined by the solid material's stiffness, compressibility and density.

Unless you can hear tonal subltleties that even dogs cannot it's all in your MIND (for sure from an electric guitar stand point). Your guitars "tone" is heavily influenced by your string gauge, pickup choice, amp (put very simplistically, tube or solid state, there's tons of variables in here too) and your amp settings.

Which wood your guitar body is made of is of negligible influence, though there are those that SWEAR it makes a difference.

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"Life is like eating jalapenos. What you do today may burn your arse tomorrow"

Neglibible - true

No impact - not true

Can a person hear the difference - some say they can't, some say they can - impossible to verify.

Jeffytune just posted this in I'm in tone heaven now.

"I fell in love with the feel and the way it played acoustically first, I didn't even plug it into and amp, it just played prefect and I knew the rest could be made to come in, a guitar that plays alive in your hands like this one does is one worth the time and effort. If it doesn't play alive, there is very little you can do to bring it alive, dead is dead."

I find this interesting.

True, some say they can hear a difference but that is because they WANT to hear a difference. I defy anyone to listen blindfolded to an Alder bodied guitar and an Ash bodied guitar (let's use Strats because I'm partial to them) where all other impacts on the signal path are as equal as they can be made (same type pickup, same gauge strings, same amp) and tell which is which due to the tonal differences in the body wood. Run the test 3 times because a person could still "guess" correctly.
If all 3 times they id'd the wood correctly I'd believe it.

Seriously, it's all nonsense designed to create a market for a particular wood or to justify the use of a specific wood (that was probably the cheapest available at the time and that's why it was used)

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"Life is like eating jalapenos. What you do today may burn your arse tomorrow"