NGD Aristides 060

[orpheo]

I'm a believer in composites, and I look forward to having one of these on my bench. Also - I'd love to work on any guitar with a Richlite board to experience it and draw my own conclusions.

The core material, Arium, has a varience of less than 1 percent. deviate out of that window and it all falls apart, so it is truly super consistent, which is a lot of fun, because we can have 2 guitars that feature the same pickups, bridge, etc and paint one and keep the other unpainted to truly see/hear/feel the differences in tone of paint and no paint. Leading me to believe that yes, it matters.

[ehdwuld]

The core material, Arium, has a varience of less than 1 percent. deviate out of that window and it all falls apart, so it is truly super consistent, which is a lot of fun, because we can have 2 guitars that feature the same pickups, bridge, etc and paint one and keep the other unpainted to truly see/hear/feel the differences in tone of paint and no paint. Leading me to believe that yes, it matters.

so Blue ones really do sound different from Sunburst ones

[skyshock21]

The core material, Arium, has a varience of less than 1 percent. deviate out of that window and it all falls apart, so it is truly super consistent, which is a lot of fun, because we can have 2 guitars that feature the same pickups, bridge, etc and paint one and keep the other unpainted to truly see/hear/feel the differences in tone of paint and no paint. Leading me to believe that yes, it matters.

If this is true, assuming all things similar in setup geometry, this would mean the pickups are microphonic then? Since in theory they're not supposed to translate sound vibration, only magnetic interference?

Witness, the air guitar - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE&t=607s

[orpheo]

If this is true, assuming all things similar in setup geometry, this would mean the pickups are microphonic then? Since in theory they're not supposed to translate sound vibration, only magnetic interference?

Witness, the air guitar - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE&t=607s

Yes, I am aware of the air guitar. The issue with that 'test', is that it is not a test, at all. There is no musicality in this, only a test of what a pickup does in mid air. it's like saying that you can make a bean burger patty that tastes indistinguishable from a ribeye patty. I'm sure there are folk who can't taste the difference, but reality is not just about sound for the persons listening; WE play the instrument, we FEEL the difference. That's why for so many 'feel' matters.

And you are thinking the wrong way around as far as pickups are concerned. Yes, they pick up the strings but they resonate, they vibrate, and that vibration is dampened by whatever you lock the strings with (i.e.: nut, tuner, bridge, the materials). The pickup picks up the vibration, that is dampened by various things. THAT is why guitars feed back, it's a resonance loop. no guitar string is on tension and able to hover mid air. The table he used, the entire system, is SO MUCH MASS that that means that there is dampening too and he is forgetting that.

I am finding it funny that so many have believes, but honestly, how many guitars has the majority played, owned, or even built? Few rake up more than guys like me, ICTGoober, and GuitarDoc. I'm not saying that to pat us, myself, on the back, but it is a fact. Try 10 guitars and draw conclusions. Then, 100. Then, 1000. I think that at this point I'm reaching a sample size of over 10000 guitars, and at this stage in my life and career I'm starting to not say that wood matters not, but that there are other factors that matter just as much if not more:

thickness of the body and neck
pickups
quality of wiring and electronic components
quality of the neck and wood themselves (i.e. straight, no knots)
Quality of the neck pocket
BRIDGE (material, design)

Does that mean that I'm saying that wood has no impact? no. Read again. Does that mean that I'm saying that mahogany sounds different from ash from alder from xxxx? No. It matters. But pickups and wiring are able to steer the tone way more impactful than wood can. And resonance is great, sure, but why does it get dampened in the first place? Softness of the wood plus a thick, hard finish. It's like dipping your soft cake in hard caramel. It. all. matters. 100 pieces of 1% impact in the end, makes a huge difference, and in those 100 tiny 1%'s is where the cost of expensive instruments lie.

@Ehdwuld: only if the sunburst is painted and the blue is raw, then, yes.

[Chistopher]

I've come to think that the wood makes a difference in the human factor of a guitar. If you had two guitars that sounded and played identically but one was made of the heaviest walnut you could find and the other was made of particle board, I would probably play them differently and even though they sound the same, the final recording would be different. It's kind of like how people like playing twangy songs on Telecasters and metal songs on pointy guitars. It's like Dumbledore said "Of course it's all in your head, that doesn't mean it's not real"

[ehdwuld]

I can see the thickness of the finish or paint muffling the vibration of the guitar a bit

does is translate to a recorded tone?
tone "in the room"?
In the hand?

I can't imagine it being noticeable in a mix or recorded

but i do know i play different body shape guitars differently

That lick on a tele may not be the same on a 335

I my do it with red and black guitars as well
Haven't noticed

The one that catches thw eye gets the most love

[beaubrummels]

If this is true, assuming all things similar in setup geometry, this would mean the pickups are microphonic then? Since in theory they're not supposed to translate sound vibration, only magnetic interference?

Witness, the air guitar - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE&t=607s

That's not an air guitar. What is completely false about that test is the strings are anchored into a bench and a ladder, the heaviest chunks of wood in the series of tests he did.

[GuitarDoc]

When gluing Richlite onto a wood neck, do you need to use epoxy?

[skyshock21]

That's not an air guitar. What is completely false about that test is the strings are anchored into a bench and a ladder, the heaviest chunks of wood in the series of tests he did.

In that case, there should be a bigger difference in sound than there is between the comparatively smaller wood anchor of the guitar to the benches. But there is not, they sound virtually identical.

[skyshock21]

Yes, I am aware of the air guitar. The issue with that 'test', is that it is not a test, at all. There is no musicality in this, only a test of what a pickup does in mid air. it's like saying that you can make a bean burger patty that tastes indistinguishable from a ribeye patty. I'm sure there are folk who can't taste the difference, but reality is not just about sound for the persons listening; WE play the instrument, we FEEL the difference. That's why for so many 'feel' matters.

And you are thinking the wrong way around as far as pickups are concerned. Yes, they pick up the strings but they resonate, they vibrate, and that vibration is dampened by whatever you lock the strings with (i.e.: nut, tuner, bridge, the materials). The pickup picks up the vibration, that is dampened by various things. THAT is why guitars feed back, it's a resonance loop. no guitar string is on tension and able to hover mid air. The table he used, the entire system, is SO MUCH MASS that that means that there is dampening too and he is forgetting that.

I am finding it funny that so many have believes, but honestly, how many guitars has the majority played, owned, or even built? Few rake up more than guys like me, ICTGoober, and GuitarDoc. I'm not saying that to pat us, myself, on the back, but it is a fact. Try 10 guitars and draw conclusions. Then, 100. Then, 1000. I think that at this point I'm reaching a sample size of over 10000 guitars, and at this stage in my life and career I'm starting to not say that wood matters not, but that there are other factors that matter just as much if not more:

thickness of the body and neck
pickups
quality of wiring and electronic components
quality of the neck and wood themselves (i.e. straight, no knots)
Quality of the neck pocket
BRIDGE (material, design)

Does that mean that I'm saying that wood has no impact? no. Read again. Does that mean that I'm saying that mahogany sounds different from ash from alder from xxxx? No. It matters. But pickups and wiring are able to steer the tone way more impactful than wood can. And resonance is great, sure, but why does it get dampened in the first place? Softness of the wood plus a thick, hard finish. It's like dipping your soft cake in hard caramel. It. all. matters. 100 pieces of 1% impact in the end, makes a huge difference, and in those 100 tiny 1%'s is where the cost of expensive instruments lie.

@Ehdwuld: only if the sunburst is painted and the blue is raw, then, yes.

I'm not interested in unquantifiable metrics like "feel" or "musicality". These are words which mean nothing in terms of waveform output over time. Pickups are magnetic transducers. If they pick up anything other than changes in the magnetic field (sound vibration, etc), that means they have gone microphonic. This is not a bad thing, but it means they are not operating as designed/intended.

You say there's a large difference in mass of the connecting endpoints in the demo, but if that made a difference you would hear that in the comparison test. You do not, they sound basically identical. I'm a huge fan of Aristides guitars, they're some of the best sounding guitars on the market right now imo. I'd really love to understand what makes them sound better than any other wood guitar to me. If it's Arium, then the resonance properties of Arium are ****ing amazing, but sound vibration and resonance properties are only possible to hear because the pickups used are translating various levels of microphonic feedback. Again, not a bad thing, but maybe something we can control for?

[ImmortalSix]

I just wanna say that I read this whole thread and that guitar is BAD ASS, and I love it. So cool. I didn't even know stuff like this existed. You have expanded my mind!

[Chistopher]

I'm not interested in unquantifiable metrics like "feel" or "musicality". These are words which mean nothing in terms of waveform output over time. Pickups are magnetic transducers. If they pick up anything other than changes in the magnetic field (sound vibration, etc), that means they have gone microphonic. This is not a bad thing, but it means they are not operating as designed/intended.

Music is entirely built on unquantifiable metrics. Music is not empirical by any stretch. That being said, I think the entire interest in tonewood is mostly championed by two types of people: people who build guitars and care about the minutia that different components of a guitar impart on the whole. and people who think that spending money is a replacement for practice. I'd wager it's mostly the second one.

[skyshock21]

Music is entirely built on unquantifiable metrics. Music is not empirical by any stretch. That being said, I think the entire interest in tonewood is mostly championed by two types of people: people who build guitars and care about the minutia that different components of a guitar impart on the whole. and people who think that spending money is a replacement for practice. I'd wager it's mostly the second one.

Nonsense I build music every day with aspects of every track being easily quantifiable. Amplitude, frequency, wavelength, cycle length, phase, speed, shape, harmonics series, envelope, tempo, cadence, etc... are all quantifiable metrics which are easily represented mathematically and visually inside a DAW. We've built an entire musical notation system for representing playback. We have oscilloscopes which measure sound waves. We have plugins which can affect an entire harmonic series to morph the sound made by a flute into one which could have been made by a guitar, or even a kick drum. I generate drums using a sine curve frequency sweep. I make snares from gated white noise. I've even cobbled together convincing sounding 8-string metal guitars using custom-built wavetables and envelope followers using X-fer Serum through overdrives and filters. That we can *also* describe music using emotional language is great, but it's not in a way which provides actual defining characteristics.

Getting back to Aristides guitars, most of them have a particular harmonic series structure and frequency curve which is defining and present across the entire line that I really like, and one which I haven't heard in any other guitar. I think this is only discernible due to the extremely tight tolerances the injection molding process allows them when they build their guitars. My suspicion is what I'm hearing is due to the microphonic nature of the pickups they use interacting with the resonant properties of Arium, and to a lesser degree maybe the treble bleed circuit they use inside the cavity. I think it would be nice if pickup manufacturers could control for this by properly potting their pickups to exclude the microphonic characteristics of whatever material they're mounted to, and create the desired harmonic structure and frequency curve via the intended magnetic winding design. This way pickup manufacturers could also differentiate themselves from competitors more easily, and the sounds of various pickups could be easily defined in marketing material via a 3D frequency distribution curve and spectral decay. That they still rely on deliberately misleading terms of emotional relativism like "warm" and "punchy" leads me to believe the omission of actual audio metrics is intentional. Guitar pickups are old tech! They originated in the 1930's! Most guitar players today have moved on to using software feeding into impulse response curves instead of vacuum tube amps and paper speakers - and for 1/20th the cost, they're achieving the idealized model of those highly processed sounds they've been chasing for decades. We should have digital modeling pickups by now. You should be able to load an impulse response curve of your choosing and have your guitar output that signal. Want David Gilmour, Dimebag Darrel, and Jimmy Page in the same guitar pickup? It should be at a button push. It's time for pickup manufacturers to move on and improve.

[orpheo]

I'm not interested in unquantifiable metrics like "feel" or "musicality". These are words which mean nothing in terms of waveform output over time. Pickups are magnetic transducers. If they pick up anything other than changes in the magnetic field (sound vibration, etc), that means they have gone microphonic. This is not a bad thing, but it means they are not operating as designed/intended.

You say there's a large difference in mass of the connecting endpoints in the demo, but if that made a difference you would hear that in the comparison test. You do not, they sound basically identical. I'm a huge fan of Aristides guitars, they're some of the best sounding guitars on the market right now imo. I'd really love to understand what makes them sound better than any other wood guitar to me. If it's Arium, then the resonance properties of Arium are ****ing amazing, but sound vibration and resonance properties are only possible to hear because the pickups used are translating various levels of microphonic feedback. Again, not a bad thing, but maybe something we can control for?

Very interesting, that first line, because it is wrong. But I'm exhausted, trying to explain things to people who just don't want to listen to folk who have spent their lives working at these machines of wood, copper, and steel. I'm done. What is heard is not what is felt. it's like seeing a glossy car, but look up close and it is all wavy and bumpy because it wasn't leveled before buffing. What you HEAR is not nearly as exact as what the fingers feel. If 'feel' means nothing, we'd all play Steinberger, but we don't.

[orpheo]

Want David Gilmour, Dimebag Darrel, and Jimmy Page in the same guitar pickup? It should be at a button push. It's time for pickup manufacturers to move on and improve.

Fluence tries to do this, but this just doesn't work. It's an emulation. Remember the Variax guitars, that promised to do just this? It's like, asking so much that the whole system breaks down.

Let's also not forget that what often was thought as a strat in Gilmour's hands, was an LP with p90's, and what was thought of as a Les Paul, was a Tele in Page's hands. So what does that tell you? It should tell you one thing and one thing alone: that tone and guitars are extremely subjective.

My buddy's guitar has Ragnarok pickups in it. I can't deal with those, but when he plays it, it sounds ridiculously good. We don't strum strings just to strum strings. We make music. And how the instrument responds to us is just as important as how it does not respond, and that is 'feel'. It's a play of string gauge, action, the way the guitar resonates to our bodies and in our hands, how it acts with our favorite amps, etcetera. To all dismiss that as irrelevant because it is not quantifiable, is just silly.