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Post subject: Re: Evolution of the American Standard Tele
Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2015 10:27 pm
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John C wrote:
MickJagger wrote:
The "American Standard" Tele goes at least as far back a the Smith era, Fullerton, CA, 1983-84 Teles, which had 12 inch radius necks with jumbo frets and the Schaller/Fender, Elite saddle, top-loader bridge.
I love these bridges.
These bridges were only used for two (2) years, at a time when these guitars were considered to be the last Fender guitars to be made in the USA, with all future models to be made in Japan, prior to the CBS/Employee sale and move to Corona, CA.
There were no string holes through the body.
Contrary to well worn mythical tales, a top-loader bridge sounds no different than a through the body strung Tele, and may possibly have improved sustain.

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I believe those 1983/84 models were just called "Standard", not "American Standard", back in those CBS days. I wish I still had that 1983 Fender catalog, but it was lost long ago. :(

You may be right John, I'm not sure.


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Post subject: Re: Evolution of the American Standard Tele
Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2015 10:50 pm
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Basses already have great sustain due to the mass vibrating being much higher. It's sustain on thin strings that tends to be the biggest problem.

A string loses energy in a lot of different ways:
1: Air resistance. You can't do much about that except playing on mountain tops or switching to heavier strings. In the latter case, the air resistance will be the same, but the mass is higher so it takes more of it to slow down the string.
2: Magnetic field resistance. Fewer and lower pickups help. Or Lace pickups, which don't affect the strings much. And, again, heavier strings that are less affected.
3: String stiffness causing internal conversion of vibration energy to heat. Different strings have different elasticity and internal crystalline friction.
4: Stretch across the nut or fingered fret. Keep your finger still; varying the pressure tends to reduce sustain (which is why vibrato notes don't sustain as well).
5: Vibrations onto the nut or fingered fret. Worn frets is the main issue here. Or a too soft or badly cut nut if it happens for open strings.
6: Stretch across the bridge saddle. Too low angle over the bridge or not enough tension can cause this. That's where string-through-body or a height-adjustable tail piece can come in handy.
7: Vibrations on the bridge saddle. Light saddles are main culprits, but also separate saddles that touch each other can dampen a string.
4-7 are also affected by the neck and body stiffness. In general, the stiffer, the better sustain.

You may get awesome sustain with a heavy bridge, sharp angle across the bridge saddles and nut, single low-powered and low-placed pickup, really heavy strings, sharp vintage frets and never doing vibrato or bends, but the question is whether it will sound good.
It's always going to be a trade-off.

Anyhow, the best sustain I have is on a tele with a very stiff birdseye neck, low-set wide range humbuckers and string-through-body. Worst is an SG with softer wood, shorter scale (thus less tension), and pickups almost touching the strings. But it sounds great when I don't need super sustain - sometimes release is more useful.

But the easiest way to get better sustain is to change strings, no doubt about it.


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Post subject: Re: Evolution of the American Standard Tele
Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2015 11:27 pm
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arth1 wrote:
MickJagger wrote:
Contrary to well worn mythical tales, a top-loader bridge sounds no different than a through the body strung Tele, and may possibly have improved sustain.

That's your opinion. Which as usual is not backed up with anything.

With a string through body you get a more acute breakover angle, and thus a larger downward force on the bridge. This does indeed affect sound, which is why the tailpiece height can be adjusted on many hardtail bridges.

Also, compared to any other hardtail bridge except a fantail, the total string length from ferrule to peg is longer, which gives a larger stretch to tune over and allows for more accurate tuning.

Hi, arth1,
I don't care if you disagree with me, but there is really no need to be such a tosser about it.
But since you were, I'll return the pleasantries.
The fact of the matter is, and BMW-KTM, you may agree with this: Guitar strings vibrate and create reproducible vibration frequencies between the contact points of the bottom of the nut, and/or a given fret, and the bridge saddle contact points.
Period.

Anything above the nut, or above the contact point of the fret, and beyond the contact point of the bridge saddle, has no discernible affect on amplified sound, including in all likelihood, sustain.
Sustain is primarily affected by scale length, the gauge or mass of the strings, and the quality of pickup.
Contrary to popular fiction, sustain is certainly not affected by the wood in either the neck or body.
String vibrations cause vibrations in the wood.
Vibrations in the wood do not cause string vibrations.

Electric guitar sound is reproduced by string vibration frequencies between the nut and saddle, or between the fret and saddle, passing through a magnetic field above the magnetic pickup.
The magnetic field vibration frequencies are then transmitted to the amplifier by the magnetic pickup.
The type of wood in the body, and in the neck, or finger board of the guitar; or how the strings end beyond the bridge saddle contact points; or the length of string beyond the bridge saddle contact points; have no discernible affect on amplified sound.

If you want to believe in fairy tales, such as believing that bottom loader Tele bridges "create a more acute break-over angle, and a larger downward force on the bridge," which discernibly affects amplified sound; or if you want to believe that magnetic pickups can reproduce wood vibrations in solid body electric guitars; or if you want to believe that if "total string length from ferrule to peg (??) is longer, it gives a larger stretch to tune over, allowing for more accurate tuning"; or if you want to believe that "you can get awesome sustain with a heavy bridge with sharp string angles across the bridge saddles, or that sustain is affected by the type of neck or fingerboard wood on the guitar"; or if you want to believe that some exotic process for setting intonation on six saddle electric guitars, more accurately sets intonation, which is discernible to the human ear, than by using tuning at the 12th fret to set intonation; then have another drink of whiskey arth1, and have fun living in your fairy tale world.


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Post subject: Re: Evolution of the American Standard Tele
Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2015 7:58 am
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Clean strings or dirty, set neck or bolt-on, humbucker or single coil ... the quickest road to sustain is to use a really good amp and crank it up.

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Post subject: Re: Evolution of the American Standard Tele
Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2015 7:46 pm
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MickJagger wrote:
Contrary to popular fiction, sustain is certainly not affected by the wood in either the neck or body.
String vibrations cause vibrations in the wood.
Vibrations in the wood do not cause string vibrations.


This is demonstrably false. Go to the bathroom. Grab an electric toothbrush. Plug your guitar into a live amp, and place the vibrating toothbrush against the back of the neck. Palm the strings, and unpalm them, and listen to the sound change.
This is vibrations in the wood making it into the strings (and also into the pickup through the wood, making the pickup vibrate - which is why you hear sound even when the strings are muted. It doesn't matter for a magnetic field whether the field itself moves or the intrusion to the field moves; both cases produce electricity the exact same way).

An even better example is if you have a good heavy tuning fork and touch it to the headstock or wood next to the bridge, with a well-tuned A string nearby. In that case, it's certainly sound vibrations making resonating from the wood into the strings. It's not magic, and doesn't require belief in anything except physics. It's falsifiable and you can repeat the experiment yourself.


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Post subject: Re: Evolution of the American Standard Tele
Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2015 10:00 pm
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That would be an interesting argument if it were not for one glaring little detail. In the case of playing an electric guitar, electric toothbrushes are not typically used. I would venture to say that unless you are willing to give up all of the traditional methods of playing, being those methods of causing strings to vibrate directly either by way of the fingers or by a plectrum I believe we will have to settle for the strings doing the vibrating and the wood being influenced by them and not the other way round. As a matter of fact all of the study I have done on this issue leads to the conclusion that wood acts as a damper to string vibration, not an exciter of string vibration. Meaning it has a tendency to inhibit string vibration thereby reducing sustain in comparison to what said sustain might be were those strings anchored to something much harder and stiffer. The leads logically to the conclusion that for all intents and purposes the vibration of the wood prolly doesn't do much in the way of causing the strings to vibrate, Eddie Van Halen and his drills and mallets notwithstanding.

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Post subject: Re: Evolution of the American Standard Tele
Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2015 10:32 pm
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MickJagger wrote:
Contrary to popular fiction, sustain is certainly not affected by the wood in either the neck or body.
String vibrations cause vibrations in the wood.
Vibrations in the wood do not cause string vibrations.

You are partially correct. Vibrations in wood do not cause string vibrations. Nevertheless wood still plays a role in tone and sustain. As I said in my prior post, wood acts as a damper. Different woods damp differently, thereby affecting tone as well as sustain.

The following video was quite popular about 4 to 5 years ago for people who wished to argue that tone and sustain had nothing to do with the body wood and were only affected by construction method (ie: bolt neck vs. set neck) and the pickups. The video was used as "proof" that the wood didn't matter. In actual fact the video proved the wood does matter. The guitar in the video is a standard Strat bolt neck design except the body is a cinder block. Please note the monstrous sustain this guitar has. It is certainly not due to the bolted Strat neck or the pickup. It can only be due to the cinder block guitar which in combination with the pickup is also responsible for the decidedly un-Strat-like tone. The concrete block is much stiffer and harder and as such vibrational energy is not absorbed nearly as much by the block as it would be with a piece of Alder or Ash or Mahogany. Please also note the blue bandana in the strings behind the bridge, presumably placed there to absorb some vibration as it probably sounded even less like a conventional guitar without it.



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Post subject: Re: Evolution of the American Standard Tele
Posted: Mon Jan 19, 2015 11:01 am
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arth1 wrote:
MickJagger wrote:
Contrary to popular fiction, sustain is certainly not affected by the wood in either the neck or body.
String vibrations cause vibrations in the wood.
Vibrations in the wood do not cause string vibrations.


This is demonstrably false. Go to the bathroom. Grab an electric toothbrush. Plug your guitar into a live amp, and place the vibrating toothbrush against the back of the neck. Palm the strings, and unpalm them, and listen to the sound change.
This is vibrations in the wood making it into the strings (and also into the pickup through the wood, making the pickup vibrate - which is why you hear sound even when the strings are muted. It doesn't matter for a magnetic field whether the field itself moves or the intrusion to the field moves; both cases produce electricity the exact same way).

An even better example is if you have a good heavy tuning fork and touch it to the headstock or wood next to the bridge, with a well-tuned A string nearby. In that case, it's certainly sound vibrations making resonating from the wood into the strings. It's not magic, and doesn't require belief in anything except physics. It's falsifiable and you can repeat the experiment yourself.

These are silly examples that have nothing to do with whether vibrations in the wood of an electric guitar cause string vibrations or are in any other way realized by the pickup and discernibly affect amplified sound.
You are citing examples of vibrations that originate external to the strings, which has nothing to do with the argument that wood vibration affects amplified sound during normal guitar playing.
I will leave the bathroom to you to perform such silly experiments and analysis.

Obviously you can hit the body of the guitar with your fist and hear vibration transmitted from the body to the strings.
This has nothing to do with arguments that wood vibration during normal playing of an electric guitar affects the duration of sustain, or the tone of amplified sound, where vibrations in the strings are transmitted to the wood, other than to dampen sustain by absorbing vibrational energy, as was astutely noted by BMW-KTM.

String vibrations cause vibrations in the wood.
Vibrations in the wood do not cause string vibrations.

Wood vibration in both the neck and body has no affect on amplified tone or sustain (other than some degree of dampening), nor do the other propositions that you have made regarding string length beyond the bridge contact point; string angle over the bridge; or whether the strings pass through the body of the guitar.

Your continued effort at proving that any of these fairy tales discernibly affect amplified sound is requested for my amusement.


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Post subject: Re: Evolution of the American Standard Tele
Posted: Mon Jan 19, 2015 12:33 pm
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BMW-KTM wrote:
That would be an interesting argument if it were not for one glaring little detail. In the case of playing an electric guitar, electric toothbrushes are not typically used.


This kind of argumentation is what I tried to preempt by saying that an even better demonstration would be with a tuning fork. *sigh* So much for that.

But the toothbrush (or loudspeaker or whatever you use) is still valid as a demonstration because it transmits vibrations into the wood, and those vibrations affect the strings and pickups and generate sound.
It's not what causes the vibrations that is important, but that vibrations are demonstrably transmitted through the wood to the strings and pickups, generating sound.

BMW-KTM wrote:
I would venture to say that unless you are willing to give up all of the traditional methods of playing, being those methods of causing strings to vibrate directly either by way of the fingers or by a plectrum I believe we will have to settle for the strings doing the vibrating and the wood being influenced by them and not the other way round.


Um, why? The source of the vibration doesn't change whether the vibrations propagate. The bridge and nut don't act like diodes that allow vibrations to pass in only one direction. That's magical thinking.

The neck and body of a guitar vibrate for many reasons - some from the strings, and some from sound waves hitting them. Some of those vibrations get transferred back into the strings and pickups.
Certain vibration frequencies will resonate the string or other parts of the guitar more and produce more sound, and some will even dampen certain other frequencies.

BMW-KTM wrote:
As a matter of fact all of the study I have done on this issue leads to the conclusion that wood acts as a damper to string vibration, not an exciter of string vibration. Meaning it has a tendency to inhibit string vibration thereby reducing sustain in comparison to what said sustain might be were those strings anchored to something much harder and stiffer. The leads logically to the conclusion that for all intents and purposes the vibration of the wood prolly doesn't do much in the way of causing the strings to vibrate, Eddie Van Halen and his drills and mallets notwithstanding.

Your conclusion is not logical. That it acts as a dampener does not imply that it doesn't also transfer vibrations. The two are not mutually exclusive. It just means that the body transfers vibrations less than the strings do.

The rubber wheels and shock absorbers on your car is a much better dampener than the wood in a guitar (if you've ever ridden a wooden cart, you'd attest to that), but that doesn't mean that shocks and vibrations don't pass through them - both ways. Drive over rattle paint, and you'll feel it. And park the car with the engine running on an auto ramp, and you'll feel the autoramp vibrating.
(But now you'll probably tell me that you don't play guitar with rubber tires or shock absorbers... No, you play with WOOD, which is a much much worse dampener.)

I don't play a lead-weighted rubber-clad marble slab guitar that's designed to not vibrate or resonate. I play wooden guitars. They resonate. And two different guitars with the same pickups sound different. Solid wood resonates and transfers vibrations. Which is good, else there wouldn't be xylophones.


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Post subject: Re: Evolution of the American Standard Tele
Posted: Tue Jan 20, 2015 2:22 am
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So ....
You're saying wood can in and of itself excite the strings into vibration. Am I reading you correctly? It seems to me that was the point that started the debate. I think you may want to backpedal a bit. Wood cannot be the source of energy that causes the strings to vibrate. A guitar at rest will remain at rest barring some external force acting upon it.

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Post subject: Re: Evolution of the American Standard Tele
Posted: Tue Jan 20, 2015 8:10 am
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I'd say the key questions of this topic hijack are,
does the vibration from the strings "bounce back" from the neck and body wood, and
does the wood in some way deform the "bounced back vibration".
I see dozens of pages of pro and con arguments in the future.
Just try not to fight, kids.
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Post subject: Re: Evolution of the American Standard Tele
Posted: Wed Jan 21, 2015 12:54 am
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BMW-KTM wrote:
So ....
You're saying wood can in and of itself excite the strings into vibration. Am I reading you correctly? It seems to me that was the point that started the debate. I think you may want to backpedal a bit. Wood cannot be the source of energy that causes the strings to vibrate. A guitar at rest will remain at rest barring some external force acting upon it.

This is the type of delusional thinking that we are dealing with here, Beamer.
You should discuss setting intonation on a six saddle guitar sometime with Arth1...... OUCH....!!!!

Arth1, the strings are the source of vibrational energy.
The neck and body bleed off some of the vibrational energy from the strings.
The neck and body have no vibrational energy of their own to transmit to the strings.
Any vibrational energy received by the body or neck cannot magically reflect back to the strings.
Sorry Arth1, it's a one way street.
The wood is absorbing energy, not transmitting energy.

That is why your examples with electric tooth brushes and tuning forks have absolutely no relevance to your generally flawed argument.
Your examples add vibrational energy into the wood that is external to string energy.
Of course the wood can transmit external vibrational energy to the strings, such as if you beat on the guitar with your fist.
Are you really that dense that you can't figure out the dichotomy here, or are you just too stubborn to admit the fallacy of your thinking??
Which is it Arth1?
There are really no other options.


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Post subject: Re: Evolution of the American Standard Tele
Posted: Wed Jan 21, 2015 1:36 am
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MickJagger wrote:
There are really no other options.

There always are other options. :mrgreen:

If the wood can project the vibrations from those external sources to strings, is it possible (and after that, the question turns to notable, audible etc.) that the wood projects also the vibrations from the strings back to the strings?
If not, how does the wood separate the source of the vibrations, external/string related?
Why is it a one way street?
Is there life on Mars, and does it vibrate?

jmattis wrote:
I see dozens of pages of pro and con arguments in the future.

And, please, tone down your style a bit. People who disagree with you on the forum are not your real enemies.


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Post subject: Re: Evolution of the American Standard Tele
Posted: Wed Jan 21, 2015 3:51 am
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The source of the strings vibration is the guitarist, not the wood. Even an acoustic guitar doesn't sustain very long and that is a guitar in which the wood is expressly designed and fashioned to amplify and exploit string vibrations. The fact is the wood does not excite the strings. The strings excite the wood. And they lose energy in doing so. There is zero logic in the notion the wood in a solid body electric, or any guitar for that matter, causes the strings to vibrate.

In every system there is loss. Simple physics. The guitar is not some kind of mythical perpetual motion device. Energy goes in and it is dissipated, not regenerated.

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Post subject: Re: Evolution of the American Standard Tele
Posted: Wed Jan 21, 2015 5:28 am
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So you're basically saying that wood absorbs the energy (created by the player, transmitted via the strings :wink: ) always in the same way, and thus has no effect on the sustain of the guitar?
If so, does that same physics principle of dissipating energy apply to any material - a guitar made of styrofoam would have the same sustain as a guitar made of steel?


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