Electric body timbers

[MBP]

Hi All,

Would love to hear some opinions on electric body timbers.
It seems there are two camps those that say timbers on electrics have little or NO effect on an electric and those that say it makes all the difference.

Acoustic guitars have come a long way in the last 60 years regarding timber choice whereas electric guitar timbers are usually chosen for working ability and price/availability. Im more talking companies here but as well as a lot of smaller scale operations.

A lot of electric players seem to think if Fender or gibson dont use the timber than its shit.
Funny thing is Leo Fender was a radio repairman not a guitar player/maker but people think that he chose woods for the tonal characteristics.

thoughts please

[simso]

Here we go................

Wooohoohaaa

Bodies .... Makes no difference,

Necks ..... Yes it does

[Tod Gilding]

Hi Ro,
I have made a couple of Strat style guitars and played many,on any other forum you would be opening a can of worms,but here you may get fact. my thoughts are that it depends on how the guitar is made,electric pups can pickup (no pun ) microphonics, if the pickups are screwed to a plastic pickguard sometimes the wood selection can make no difference what so ever as the pickup is isolated on the pickguard and this reduces microphonics to a certain extent depending on the particular guitar, If the pups are attached directly to the wood on the body it will pickup most of the microphonics and this can colour the final sound a little,so it depends how the guitar is made. the only way that I know for sure how to check this, is to plug the guitar into an amp and tap the headstock if it sounds loud and like a bass drum it is picking up resonation from the body and this will change slightly with the density of the wood used and colour slightly the final tone,If the tap tone from the head stock is unaudible then in my experience it only depends on the electronics used in the guitar and the wood selection will make no difference what so ever.

My two bobs worth, Cheers

[simso]

To actually test this situation you will need to remove the neck from the equation completley as per attached picture.

Then you are only testing the body, to find out if there is any ability for the body to influence a set of strings vibrating in a magnetic field, you will need to find out if that solid piece of wood has the capacity under normal playing conditions to flex / vibrate enough to physically alter the movement of the strings

[kiwigeo]

The neck to me is a dirty big energy sink....

[ozziebluesman]

I think elecric guitars are really in two camps, Gibson and Fender.

The biggest facts that alter the tone IMO are the scale length, the neck join, set or bolt on and the material the fingerboard is made out of. I have three strats, one with an ebony fingerboard, maple and rosewood. The three have different tones when played acoustically. If you think about how much surface length the string vibrates over it stands to reason that the fingerboard material will provide different tones. The bolt on neck with the 25.5" scale with give you the bright,snap tone, that decays (usually about 15 seconds) where the set neck decay time is around (25 seconds plus) providing long sustain. The pickups provide different tones also. A pickup is really a microphone under the strings. The humbucker is two single coils strapped together picking up more of the string vibration than the single coil where it has a narrower pickup field providing a more focussed, brighter tone.

I think there is a very slight tone difference between body woods but the above points have more to do with the tone.

Queensland maple, tassie sassafrass and victorian ash make good choices for guitar bodies. These woods are sort of inbetween hard and soft woods so they have good weight properties and are great to work with.

Just my thoughts and I hope this helps.

Cheers

Alan

[Nick]

(Where did I leave that can of worms?) I believe that body timbers do affect the sound of an electric to some extend, I've built electrics for a number of years before diving into acoustics and one of the questions I asked the customer before building was "What style of music do you like to play?". My statement doesn't come from any scientific facts that I can point to and say "There's my proof", it's just from my own observations. If you'd asked me twenty two years ago when I first started thinking about knocking holes in lumps of wood & screwing things to it, I would have said no, how can the wood that the pickups (the things that actually 'create' the noise) are screwed too change how pickups sound? but I was surprised to find that the wood they are screwed to can colour the output. Im thinking what's happening is that the wood is absorbing different frequencies (dependant on the density of the timber & the method of attachment of the bridge to the body), these frequencies being the harmonics/overtones that go to make up the shape of the sound the strings produce so the pickups 'see' an altered sound to that of the string in it's pure uncoloured form (Hope that makes sense?). I don't think that we are altering the physical movement of the strings by using different timbers (sorry Steve ) I think we are deducting or enhancing frequencies from the string's vibrations/sound.
Of course the body is only one part of the sound chain, other factors go into the total outputted sound such as scale length, neck materials including fingerboard (again to a small extent, I don't believe you could dramatically 'change' the sound of a guitar solely by changing say from Maple to Mahogany or IRW fingerboard to Ebony) And now with the advent of digital effect units your Strat can sound like a fat Gibson with the tap of a footswitch. So maybe the material the bits are screwed to nowadays is of less relevance to the output but it's still a factor worth thinking about I believe.

The neck to me is a dirty big energy sink....

A muted one at that! If we could play the guitar without touching the neck with our soft sound/movement absorbing paw, it would be interesting to see what difference it would make in either an electric or acoustic (more pronounced in the latter I would guess)

[simso]

Dont be sorry. I understand exactly where you are coming from. Your theory is sound and solid.

The problem however is we are testing these scenarios with necks fitted, ive gone down the path previously trying to identify what acoustical effects can be measured, Ive made the same guitar out of craftwood plywood and mahogany (joys of having a cnc), fitted the same pickups strings and so forth, and then tested and analysed the response's. The differences I found were of such small value it could be contributed to the way the string was being plucked.

Necks on the other hand are such a different scenario, from the type of fingerboard fitted to the material used for the neck down to the shape of the neck and even type of truss rod fitted, everything made a physical and noticeable difference in the output of the sound.

Currently we are still exploring all this, as we are in the contractual stage of manufacturing guitars for some business's.

The body choice on our guitars will be designed solely in a cosmetic sense

[Nick]

I'd be interested in the data you collected about necks Steve, I must admit I've been guilty of not giving them much thought (apart from aesthetics) as I've always thought that you're dampening most of the neck's vibration (and end effect on output) by the simple act of holding the neck while you play, thereby reducing it's effect in the chain. But I'm willing to change that thinking if your experiments are as valid as they sound .

[Dominic]

Nick, i think you are correct in claiming that holding the neck has some effect but it will be to absorb energy out of the system. If you have a contact point that was solid and fixed to the neck you might say the effect was muted or was just an increase in mass. But your hands are soft and so any energy lost into the neck would be lost from the system.

Neck joints do matter, with bolt-on necks having better transfer of string energy and glued on such as dove tails joints the worst. (GAL journal testing)

Body shape has a significant effect on the sound. Not just relative size but distribution of wood.

Simso, given guitars do have necks I am not sure what you are testing in a guitar with no neck. But how about using the same neck on a number of different guitar bodies if you are worried abouts its influence?

I am sure you could do tap testing of solid bodies. The results are just going to be further up the frequency scale. Last electric I made was an Aussie red cedar body RG with a maple top. The red cedar is so light and resonant and made a very interesting guitar. The low notes seem to get a push from the body.
So body wood also matters

Cheers
Dom

[Tod Gilding]

Interesting theory about the neck joint Steve,I tried hard to solve that one years ago I even went to the trouble of carving a strat from one slab of wood ( no neck joint ) all the one piece of wood from headstock to tail, all I found was an increase in sustain, but I also used a hardtail bridge,so that could explain the sustain,in the end the jury is still out, so very interested in your findings.

[simso]

Beautiful

[nutsdan]

I just found this comparison
http://guitarsquid.com/newsletter/squid ... as/50/[url][/url]
this may add fuel to the fire

[kiwigeo]

It's been known for centuries that neck material will influence sound of an acoustic (esp sustain).

Here's my understanding of how wood might affect the sound of a solid body electric:

On a solid body electric it is the electromagnetic pickup that is generating the signal that is turned into sound by the loudspeaker on the amp. The pickup is responding purely to the movement of the strings in its immediate vicinity. There are some who think the pickups are picking up sound travelling through the wooden body of the guitar. This is impossible except perhaps for the case of old pickups with loose coils. Wood properties must affect the signal coming from the pickup indirectly...ie the wood must influence the way the strings vibrate in the vicinity of the pickup. The neck influences the sound of the instrument by absorbing some of the energy of the vibrating strings.

[willcall]

I remember seeing on the Kinman pickups website a section on timbers, necks etc etc. He notes that you can get far better sustain from an electric if you rest the headstock against a wall or something. His theory is the larger resonating area increases the sustain and therefor, larger headstocks give better sustain. This point does nothing to explain tone from different body timbers however.

I do know/have heard that Fender (Leo) chose his body and neck timbers on price and availability in the early years with no regard for tone and sustain. This resulted in the 'Fender' sound.
Picking style also makes a big difference to the sound.
And just to get a little more complicated, the bridge material, thickness and construction method also adds to the overall sound/tone. I am thinking of Telecasters here. Just have a google for "glendale guitar bridges" or ''cold rolled steel bridges''. If you want twang you get a Glendale bridge and if you want muddyness you get a Callaham bridge (almost double the thickness of a glendale bridge).

Will

[DarwinStrings]

If Sebastiaan is around he may be able to find the link to that study of the modes of vibration for several Gibson types. It is interesting to see the difference in them.

I think this link has something to say about it and if not this one check the other Ken Parker interviews. You will find plenty of other reads about it if you dig a bit.

Jim

Someone please turn up the Tele!!!

[MBP]

Very interesting reading peoples opinions.

Keep them coming

[MBP]

The suhr recordings seem to demonstrate that the neck and to a lesser extent the body does make a bit of difference.
I will have to listen on some better speakers.

[simso]

In theory, the body of a guitar "electric" will dampen the ability of a solid fitted bridge to resonate, and thereby alter the tone of the instrument. But the question is, is the difference acoustically measurable between different mediums like plywood / maple / mahogany / craftwood, or are they beyond the human hearing range.

Coupling a known neck to different body mediums is the only true way of telling, however there are also way to many variables that come into play, how accurate the tuning is pre testing, the exact same height of strings, the exact same location of the pickups at the exact same point of string length, with the exact same bridge coupled in the exact same manner for each test, add onto this a miriad of more finer differences temp / humidity / barometric pressure of the day and then throw in the biggest one of all "the player", no player can play exactly the same to quantify any true evaluation, hence why it is the question with no answer only belief's.

Change a pickups winding and you will hear it, change the nut to a bone nut and you will hear it, change the setup and you will hear it. change the neck and you will hear it, change pretty much every facet of the guitar and you will hear it except IMO the body.

[Tod Gilding]

Yes, a can of worms, and some replies remind me of the words of Mr William Cumpiano, Who said, "When I am told something regarding a guitars tone or they way it should be built,my reply is, What do you base that conclusion on ?, and I generally don't bother waiting for the answer".

[Dominic]

My experience is not vast and is simply gathered from owning 9 electrics, a couple bought and the others I made, all have the same emg active pickups and they all sound different enough that I usually end up preferring one for a particular song. But I am not sure these distinguishing features would be able to be tested.

If different necks effect a guitar then its hard to argue that the bits hanging off each end, the headstock and the body don't also have some impact. I don't think it is magic or guitar voodoo. Just a matter of design such as body volume and where that volume is placed relative to bridge and strings, and material properties such as density.


Small bodies like the sg in the pic and also thin, so there is not as much mass and that gives the sg some of it sound.
I have a flying vee with it big body mostly behind the saddle
A couple of explorers with thick bodies and a big mass behind the bridge and pointy bits out the front.
A thick RG and a thin RG, both sound different.
A 7 string RG
A IC 400
A couple of les pauls which sound more like each other than they do the other guitars

It would be difficult to say what is different about them without hooking them all up but I have a clear preference for each with particular songs.

Dom

[kiwigeo]

Yes, a can of worms, and some replies remind me of the words of Mr William Cumpiano, Who said, "When I am told something regarding a guitars tone or they way it should be built,my reply is, What do you base that conclusion on ?, and I generally don't bother waiting for the answer".

I generally wait for an answer in such circumstances....its amazing what you can learn from others experiences and even from others prejudices and misinformed opinions.

[Tod Gilding]

Yes Martin, I have to admit that I do as well. As long as we keep in mind that some points are just opinions then it can be interesting
I gave my thoughts on the subject, and can’t substantiate most points scientifically.

but getting back to Ro ‘s question , I have read a lot about Leo Fender and yes he was a Radio repairman, he used to get a couple of friends that played in a country band to call in and test drive his guitars, we need to also realise that this was going on not long after the end of the war and some woods and electronics were just not available to him, so I think it would be fair to say that he used what he could get his hands on at the time, and not necessarily what he wanted to use.Things like Japanese electronics were not available in those days and even if they were I'm sure no American would have touched them with a ten foot pole.

I play my electrics through a line 6 pod and can make them sound like anything I want, so I choose wood for appearance and availability, taking into account the finished weight.