Re: Accoustic tone of an electric guitar?
To everybody that for some reason still believes acoustic tone means nothing (but ironically enough will often still obsess over wood and hardware selections ad absurdum )
Coat your guitar in truck bed liner or rubberized automotive undercoating and get back to me on how it sounds
Sounds harsh, but after having this discussion every 2 months for 20 years and constantly biting my teeth out on the armor of ignorance, I just can`t take the topic or the people that believe acoustic tone is irrelevant seriously anymore. :beerchug:
An acoustically dead instrument with no sustain is supposed to sound huge and have tons of sustain amplified? How exactly do you get the guitar to believe that the string that stopped vibrating 10 seconds ago is still vibrating so as to shake the pickup in the proper fashion as to induce the same electric current that the vibrating string would normally produce? Becasue where ther is no vibrational energy, it must be added, either by technical means (fernandes Sustainer or Ebow) or by more tradidional means such as picking. Otherwise there is no note.
The entire system is based on transfer and return of energy. We pick a note, transferring energy to the strings, this transfers it tio the body, which returns it to the strings. This is what produces sustain, the opposite being decay. An acoustically dead instrument returns less energy to the strings "per cycle" and therfore runs out of energy to transfer and return more quickly, killing sustain /speeding up decay. An acoustically lively instrument manages the energy much more efficiently, allowing for a stronger return and longer overall cycle = more sustain.
Please note that lively is not necessarily = loud. That is why even luthiers use the ear to the neck or ear to the body test when they really want to know what it sounds like. I prefer the body becasue by modulating the pressure I can get a bit of an impression how some different PUs might sound in that guitar.
If acoustic tone is irrelevant, I hereby hypothesize that Blue`s disdain for strats and their brighter tone has no basis in reality, nor do all discussions referring to any non electromagnetic component of the electric guitar. Pickups, pots, caps and strings, that`s all an electric guitar is. Oh, yeah, wires, a jack, and sometimes a battery.
If acoustic tone is irrelevant, a Tremolo cannot "suck tone" (still the most asinine phrase in the entire industry and will always be, practically disqualifies the speaker instantly from being taken seriously on any topics related to gear for at least a few hours, with repeat offenses bringing rising levels of ridicule until one reaches Level 10, "Leprechaun" :laugh2: ), and different nut materials, scales, body styles, headstock shapes, wood selections, fretwire selections, et al are ALL completely irrelevant tonally.
I cannot for the life of me understand how somebody could truly believe that, yet still minutely argue aspects of the instrument`s construction or prefer one guitar over another. :boggled::friday:
As every classically trained luthier I`ve ever met has said: ALL guitars are acoustic. Some use an air filled box for amplification, others use electric amplifiers. But even electrically amplified poo is still poo, it`s just much louder and has distortion, now.
