Re: Accoustic tone of an electric guitar?
What you hear acoustically doesn't necessarily come thru to an amp. There's a lot of things in the signal chain that modify the signal: PU's, pots, cable, pedals, amp, tubes, speakers, etc. I think a lot of very good guitars get overlooked/rejected at a music store because they:
- are in need of a good set up (intonation off, action off, PU height wrong, truss rod adjustment needed, etc)
- need some TLC (rusty strings, greasy neck, etc)
- the stock PU's or magnets aren't the best fit for the wood
- they sound better plugged-in than acoustically
I think that many guys on this forum can take a guitar that doesn't sound or play particularly well, and significantly improve both. I've owned many guitars, and don't think I could pick the best guitars in the store unless I spent some time tweaking each one. Maybe some guys have a special gift from above (or believe that they do) and are able to do it. It's easy to pick the one with the set-up that fits you best, whose stock PU's match the wood best, and that sounds the best acoustically, but that doesn't take much skill, and you miss a lot of gems when you do that. The best-sounding guitar in the store may be the one with old crud-infested strings, with a slight back-bow in the neck, and the intonation off so you can't tune it right; 15 minutes and that guitar may sing, but who's going to do that? No customer will, and its unlikely any of the employees will either. So it sits neglected.
I personally don't think it matters what an electric guitar sounds like acoustically, as your ears can't hear everything unless it's amplified, and besides, in the hundreds of bands I've seen live over the years, I've yet to see anyone play an electric guitar that wasn't plugged in. The starting place is a good, clean amplified tone; that may or may not correlate with it's acoustic sound. There's been posts here by guys with electrics that sounded great, until they plugged them in; it's happened to me. One of the best-sounding guitars of mine acoustically took several sets of PU's before I could good tones thru an amp. One poster I recall said he had two guitars that sounded almost identical acoustically, but when plugged in were very different sounding. There's a comfort that comes with making assumptions, and you can use any criteria you want to pick your guitars, but all that matters is how that guitar sounds thru your amp. Everything else is irrelevant. It is certainly possible to have a guitar that sounds great acoustically, that sounds mediocre amplified.
