Halloween 2022: The Tonewood Incident

[Chistopher]

Yesterday I was being a dummy and tried to raise the action on the left side of my flush-mounted Floyd Rose equipped guitar. This obviously makes the bridge not sit flat, and thus it is "half-floating" and doesn't have a solid connection to the body and it caused a bunch of tuning issues.

As any God-fearing man, I don't believe in this tonewood nonsense. But maybe it's the ghouls and goblins that rain down upon us on October 31st, but when I fixed it and gave it a more solid mechanical connection to the body of the guitar, it seemed to have a noticeable shift in tone. The weird thing is the apparent tone change didn't line up with what it's supposed to according to the tonewood rules. Again, maybe I'm making this up, but with the more mechanically solid connection, it seemed to have less bass and a clearer lower midrange. Which is odd because the acoustic guitar of the tone is very dark with an average amount of bass. It did not appear to effect the higher end of the frequency spectrum.

Must be ghosts or something.

[Mincer]

A well set-up guitar sounds and plays better than one that isn't set up well.

[beaubrummels]

I wasn't there to hear the effect, but the clearer lower midrange could have upstaged any bass. It's all relative, and when something sticks out, there's a tendency to perceive all the other frequencies as less, even if they are the same as they were.

Coupling string vibrations to wood, chambered surfaces, etc. does have an effect. Just touch the headstock of your guitar to the wall and strum the strings, then tell us what you hear different.

[Chistopher]

I wasn't there to hear the effect, but the clearer lower midrange could have upstaged any bass. It's all relative, and when something sticks out, there's a tendency to perceive all the other frequencies as less, even if they are the same as they were.

Coupling string vibrations to wood, chambered surfaces, etc. does have an effect. Just touch the headstock of your guitar to the wall and strum the strings, then tell us what you hear different.

Mostly what I hear is the strings detuning from the neck being pushed up against a wall. But it's funny ive tested that theory by clamping a textbook to a Telecaster. It probably wasn't the most controlled experiment, but I don't remember a meaningful difference.

By clearer midrange, I meant less lower midrange garbling up my sound.

[Demanic]

Ghosts or not, if it works...

Sent from my SM-A115A using Tapatalk

[GuitarStv]

There's a tonal different between a floating bridge and a bridge that is making hard contact with the rest of the guitar body. When a bridge is floating, it moves a little bit as you play and this movement eats some of the vibrations from the strings. When it's decked or blocked, a trem is much more solid so will transfer the vibrations from the body and neck a little bit better.

As far as tonewood goes, you can't tell what a guitar will sound like by knowing the species of wood that is used to build it. There's too much variability from piece of wood to piece of wood. The brightest guitar I've got is a solid mahogany body. I have a maple neck/fretboard guitar on alder that is dark and mid-rangey. Different pieces of wood may sound slightly different though depending on density and the structure of the wood - although I think that this effect is most noticeable with the neck usually.

[Chistopher]

I'm still not sold on tonewood though. The acoustic tone of this guitar is not unlike a jazz box, but when plugged in, the 15k A2 bridge pickup and 18k A3 neck pickup make it sound fairly balanced.

[GuitarStv]

I'm still not sold on tonewood though. The acoustic tone of this guitar is not unlike a jazz box, but when plugged in, the 15k A2 bridge pickup and 18k A3 neck pickup make it sound fairly balanced.

Pickups, amp, and speaker all make way more of a difference to the sound of a guitar than the wood.

[Chistopher]

Definitely, I don't understand how the wolfgang pickups manage to do what they do. Especially the neck pickup. It almost sounds like the guitar has two bridge pickups.

[alex1fly]

There's a tonal different between a floating bridge and a bridge that is making hard contact with the rest of the guitar body. When a bridge is floating, it moves a little bit as you play and this movement eats some of the vibrations from the strings. When it's decked or blocked, a trem is much more solid so will transfer the vibrations from the body and neck a little bit better.

Yeah. On my Floyd guitar I regularly jam a block of wood in cavity to anchor the trem. Changes the sound slightly (a little fatter) and changes the feel tremendously (attack is way faster/harder)

Same on my Strat knockoff.

On my old MIA Strat though, no difference in tone or feel when I blocked the trem with the same chunk of wood.

[Chistopher]

Probably because Strat bridges rest up against the body, and Floyds usually only contact the guitar off of two tiny pivot points.