A few specific questions about testing wood influence on tone

[DreX]

Re: A few specific questions about testing wood influence on tone

Blinding is non-negotiable.
...
If you want to get into setting up an efficacious test to duplicate conditions that isolate tonewood as a concept completely away from its interplay with the instrument, we first have to establish the question we want to answer in its simplest and clearest terms.

I'm more interested in measuring a difference, because if it's measurable, then there's something there, regardless of whether it's audible, and if it isn't likely to audible but people claim they hear a difference anyway, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and let them ascribe as much or little meaning as they want to it. But if I can't even measure a difference with multiple samples of wood of varying varieties, then I'm going to doubt that myself or others ever heard a genuine difference.

I like the idea of a blind test, but I'm not in the best position to conduct such a test. More time and money required than I have available.

[DreX]

Re: A few specific questions about testing wood influence on tone

I feel that on an electric, the body has a very small effect, but the neck could potentially have a noticeable effect. What about having a test body that stays the same and then you just swap necks?

I was thinking I should test larger boards and very thin ones, to represent the body and the neck respectively. Maybe it's the case that the neck makes all the difference and body make almost none. Maybe a 1x2 for the thin and a 2x12 for the thick.

One problem I've already run into is looking for "tone woods" on ebay, they come is many strange non-building sizes, and I don't have a planer to make a bunch of weird shaped samples into a consistent size and shape. This would be really easy test for a luthier to set up, it makes me wonder if they'd rather not know.

[Tonewoods]

Re: A few specific questions about testing wood influence on tone

If tonewood can withstand blinding in practical terms, we can 'give the benefit of the doubt' to its theoretical underpinnings since it will have demonstrated itself practically.

If tonewood is only perceptible under spectography, that still does not mean they can hear it, even though they sincerely believe they do. Its easy to confuse 'a certain sort of person' with tricky causal variables, so no benefit of the doubt is earned simply by demonstrating that there's a spectrographic difference, particularly of the MOE isn't normalized.

[DreX]

Re: A few specific questions about testing wood influence on tone

If tonewood can withstand blinding in practical terms, we can 'give the benefit of the doubt' to its theoretical underpinnings since it will have demonstrated itself practically.

If tonewood is only perceptible under spectography, that still does not mean they can hear it, even though they sincerely believe they do. Its easy to confuse 'a certain sort of person' with tricky causal variables, so no benefit of the doubt is earned simply by demonstrating that there's a spectrographic difference, particularly of the MOE isn't normalized.

But it changes the question from "is there a difference to be seen?" to "can the seen difference be heard?", and I would be satisfied to have narrowed it down some.

Maybe I could do a blind audio test with the same test rig used for measurement, but in this case even I would take issue with the rig not being an actual guitar, since there would be the question of whether, for example, a single string of fixed pitch makes the differences as clearly audible as six strings that can perform a full scale length of pitches.

[GoldenVulture]

Re: A few specific questions about testing wood influence on tone

Blinding is non-negotiable.
There's also the bottomless 'variable rabbit hole' that tonewood believers tend to use as a crutch when their beliefs are called out in practical terms. In their demands, they usually just wind up demonstrating how little they understand about science (blood pressure? LMAO)

If you're interested in the theoretical, Will Gelvin did some very decent videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJfeFe4CKEk - Tonewood Riff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7tcVVt3OrM - How pickups work (he has patents on pickups)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ehgl-AeDPkQ - Resonant frequency / anm actual sig generator

If you want to simplify it, here's a guy offering a free blind challenge in a random blind test. He posted it yesterday'ish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjHt9IqDmIA

If attack subsumes tonewood as a operational variable, then the tonewood believer narrative just took a huge dump.

If you want to get into setting up an efficacious test to duplicate conditions that isolate tonewood as a concept completely away from its interplay with the instrument, we first have to establish the question we want to answer in its simplest and clearest terms.

LOL December 29, 2014
This is a valiant effort, but this is not ‘science’.
It could perhaps better be called ‘vaguely science’ish’ or maybe ‘sciency’ but there is just so much wrong.
First off, you start out from the vantage that wood makes a difference in an electric signal to a degree that can be heard. You basically accept an inherently invalid premise as valid, then go from there. The entire experiment is essentially an exercise in confirming your own biases, which themselves would not withstand a blindfold.
Your entire conclusion is that it has something to do with ‘overtones’ that again, are deep into the realm of magical thinking.
Lastly, everything is unblinded (you provide an answer key before the video even begins) which all but guarantees confirmation bias will be overwhelming.
Nice try, but perhaps study how medicines are studied in clinical trials- and more importantly, why they are studied that way- to shed a little light on why this kind of ‘test’ doesn’t add much to the tonewood debate, other than being a Rorschach that allows a certain sort of person to see what they want.

- http://guitarworks.thestrandbergs.co...ectric-guitar/ -

[DreX]

Re: A few specific questions about testing wood influence on tone

- http://guitarworks.thestrandbergs.co...ectric-guitar/ -

That's pretty close to what I'd like to do, but I'll dumb it down even further, take more pictures and try other sample methods for the FFT comparison. I'm unclear as to how they dealt with issues of repeatability and why the pick attack sounded as different as it did from one sample to the next. It looks like I can expect a wide variety of variation based on this, but I'd like to see it for myself and document the process a little better.

[DarkMatter]

Re: A few specific questions about testing wood influence on tone

I wonder if there is some type of relatively cheap spring-loaded device that could be repurposed as an string stimulus. Of course, proving it's repeatability may be a problem.

[DarkMatter]

Re: A few specific questions about testing wood influence on tone

- http://guitarworks.thestrandbergs.co...ectric-guitar/ -

Was one of the comments after the article you Tonewoods?

[Chris of Arabia]

Re: A few specific questions about testing wood influence on tone

I'm unclear as to how they dealt with issues of repeatability and why the pick attack sounded as different as it did from one sample to the next.

My guess is that it's nothing to do with pick attack, but is instead to do with the way the samples were cut from the original recording. He says in the article:

Created Fast Fourier Transform snapshots 2 seconds into each clip to provide a visual comparison

Assuming that to be a precise, but arbitrary, cut point, there is no guarantee that the signal was at 0dB there; it could be anywhere between 0dB and whatever the max signal strength is for that recording. Anyone with any experience in cutting up samples will know that you cannot just select an arbitrary point in time, you have to get right into sound wave and cut at the point where the signal crosses 0dB - using the Strandberg article as an example, that may or may not be at 2 seconds. The practical effect of not doing this is that you get something of a click as the sample is played - the amplitude of the click is very much dependent upon how close to the 0dB point the wave was where is was cut.

[LesStrat]

Re: A few specific questions about testing wood influence on tone

There are so many confounding variables in this proposed "study" as to make the entire process uncontrolled, and therefore invalid, unreliable, and meaningless.

[Archer250]

Re: A few specific questions about testing wood influence on tone

I'm interested in seeing how much the frequency response differs between different types of wood, mostly to satisfy my own curiosity, but I'd like to do a good enough job that the results would reasonable useful, objective and worth sharing.

All I'm interested in determining is how much variation in tone can be observed simply by swapping out the pieces of wood in a simple test rig, and it seems to me that it shouldn't matter much that the test rig contain all the features of a working guitar, so with that in mind, I have a few questions pertaining to the complexity or, preferable, the simplicity of the experiment:


1) could I use a simple 2x4s, 2x8 or 2x12 board, or is there a compelling reason that the wood be the shape of a guitar and have a proper neck?

1.2) is there a compelling reason to have a typical metal saddle and nut, or it is enough that both ends of the string be firmly attached to a single piece of wood?

2) could I simply use different species or types of wood (wood scraps), or is there a reason I should only test common guitar woods, such as poplar, ash, etc. in order to get a worthwhile result?

3) is an ebow an OK source for constant input, which to say, a uniform method of vibrating the string?

for all these questions, I'd add "if not, why not?"

My problem lies with the no. 1)

We are not 100% sure whether wood type has an audible effect; we wouldn't be speaking of this test if otherwise. Furthermore, don't know for sure if the saddle and nut negate said theoretical effect or amplifies it.

That's my input, at least.

[DreX]

Re: A few specific questions about testing wood influence on tone

My guess is that it's nothing to do with pick attack, but is instead to do with the way the samples were cut from the original recording. He says in the article:


Assuming that to be a precise, but arbitrary, cut point, there is no guarantee that the signal was at 0dB there; it could be anywhere between 0dB and whatever the max signal strength is for that recording. Anyone with any experience in cutting up samples will know that you cannot just select an arbitrary point in time, you have to get right into sound wave and cut at the point where the signal crosses 0dB - using the Strandberg article as an example, that may or may not be at 2 seconds. The practical effect of not doing this is that you get something of a click as the sample is played - the amplitude of the click is very much dependent upon how close to the 0dB point the wave was where is was cut.

I was under the impression the pick attack was in the recording and that it was only the fft image that was two seconds in.

[Stratman]

Re: A few specific questions about testing wood influence on tone

The following picture of Les Paul's original hum bucking guitar says it all, and disproves any notions about specialness of different woods species in electric guitars.

[Snake Aces]

Re: A few specific questions about testing wood influence on tone

The following picture of Les Paul's original hum bucking guitar says it all, and disproves any notions about specialness of different woods species in electric guitars.

Actually this proves nothing at all.

[Falloffthebonetone]

Re: A few specific questions about testing wood influence on tone

Isn't there already a modern electric guitar called the Teuffel Birdfish that has bars of wood that are exchangeable to alter the tone on the fly? Anyone explain that? I mean the strings and action and pickups and everything else would be literally identical as you are unscrewing and screwing back on different bars of wood that come with it to get different tones out of it. No need to slack the strings or move anything, just A and B, even easier than changing a pickup. Point of the design, if it didn't matter enough, why bother with the bars? Why bother shipping it with a set of alder and a set of maple to double up or mix and match? Why bother with the design if it DIDN'T change? Getting a hold of someone with one of these would finish the debate once and for all wouldn't it? They could even do a demonstration. Like this one you can download from their site with the HB3 with both the maple and the alder bars exchanged playing the same riff.

http://www.teuffel.com/english/sales/soundcheck.htm

3mbs go ahead and download so you can have a listen. Even under all the gain, I can notice a bit more of a scoop and more subdued low end to the maple, which isn't something I necessarily expected as I thought maple would make the notes sound more pronounced all around, but it actually surprised me and that is probably the best thing I can say about it when it comes to scientific results. There's even a guy on youtube who captured the wave forms and noted the different peaks.

Of course, nobody here will be convinced unless Robocop was the one playing the guitar and he went back in time so he could play it at the exact same time so the earth was in the same place in the universe and the humidity was just right while Neil Degrasse Tyson, Eddie Van Halen, Charles Xavier, and Jesus discuss it for weeks afterwards in an isolation chamber at the bottom of the sea by consistently erasing their own memories and rerecording themselves giving their opinions on it each time and then discussing those opinions until they reach a consensus on Groundhog day. That way they can see if the Groundhog sees his shadow; if he does that means 60 more years of debating this topic.