Re: 6000 stainless jumbo frets & tone?
For the sake of argument, let's say I concede that stainless wire may make a tonal difference (which to be quite honest I
was expecting when I first began working with it). Now I want to prove that it does, but also want to make sure there could be no doubt left as to whether it was simply placebo effect or confirmation bias. I want to make sure people can't say that those who hear the difference are simply falling for something like
this.
So I'll set up a blind test, where players can listen to notes played on different fret materials and try to identify a difference. I don't want any confusion with subjective descriptions getting in the way, so I'll stick to test methods which only ask whether different tones have qualities that are same or different, like an odd-one-out or up-down style test.
Of course repeatedly refretting a guitar through the course of a test is not only impractical, but introduces long lags between listenings, makes consistent playing in comparative sessions near impossible, and presents enormous challenges that nothing has changed even slightly in setup or perfectly consistent seating of the frets each time you pull old ones out and put new ones back in.
Playing several identical guitars may be a good option, but they would have to be made from consecutive cuts on the same board, cut on the same machines, weighed out to precision matches, and set up to exacting tolerances to minimize potential control issues. This would of course be expensive as well, as you would need several of these guitars made, 3 or 4 at the
very least for any reliable survey results. Plus there would be the issue of lag between samples, consistent positioning of the hands and attack - all these things could have potential to interfere with the comparison, and even if the changes were only slight, be enough to lessen listeners' odds of identifying differences correctly.
No, I want my to make sure listeners and players have the best possibility to correctly identify even the
slightest differences if there are any, and to prove that it could only be the frets causing these effects I want to make sure there are no other variables changed. For this I can't imagine a better opportunity to hear a difference than putting both stainless and nickel frets in the same neck. All wire from the same rolling mill, installed the same way at the same time in the same board, same setup, strings, and the player can move from one to the other instantaneously, so that even if they aren't intimately familiar with the nuances of the particular test guitar their tonal memory would only have to last milliseconds to hear a change so immediate. If a change can be heard between dropping a guitar off for a refret and picking it up days later, or setting down one guitar and picking up another, than most surely the effect would be crystal clear if you could move back and forth between wires without missing a beat. Surely I can think of no better opportunity to hear a difference, and prove definitively that it could only be due directly to the change in fret wire alloy.
Of course I don't believe there is a difference (although I once did long ago). Still, this is what I do. If I believe there is
no difference and want to put this position to the test, I try to do everything I can to
prove my position wrong. I try to create the perfect storm, circumstances so ideal for identifying a difference that if there is even the slightest noticeable effect it will have the best possible opportunity of being identified. Of course if even a small percentage of listeners do demonstrate ability to make a statistically significant positive identification of which frets are different, then I will be quite ready to change my position, but in all the stainless partial refrets I've done to date, and the more recent test guitar fretted specifically for this survey, I have yet to find such listeners who can identify any better than by random chance, even in the most unrealistically ideal scenario for hearing a difference I could muster up.
With all the time I've invested in this issue, and the inability to find any listener to date able to pick out a change under optimal circumstances in a controlled blind test, I have to hold that differences others hear with stainless are either placebo effect, or perhaps more likely very real changes that do occur, but are the result of peripheral changes that were present between comparisons due to lack of diligent controls. For the most part I am not challenging the notion that others do indeed hear real differences, but rather asserting that controlled test evidence indicates those changes are more likely due to other factors which lacked ideal controls rather than the wire alloy itself.
