Does wood make a difference?

Re: Does wood make a difference?

DreX said:
Well first of all, we're at page 1, reserve judgement until page 25. Second... I'm a little frightened at the thought that you might have created an account just to post in this thread. The last time around, the guy actually make his username "tonewoods", and he was banned before the thread concluded.

I'm working on a tone wood experiment right now, it's about 75% done, but it's proving to be more tricky and laborious than I anticipated. My guess, in general, is that there is an audible difference, but that people will frequently understate of overstate it's significance to the end result.
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I will be interested in these results. How many different wood types will you do? Mahogany, Korina, Alder, Ash bodies? Maple, mahogany, bubinga, Indian rosewood, Brazillian rosewood, padauk, wenge, or any other more commonly used necks? How many different fretboard woods? How many different samples of each species of wood to allow for variables within each species?

Sounds like an expensive test that will take a long time to factor in all the tonewoods being used out there! I agree with your statement there will likely be some kind of observable variance but my question and interest is personal. Is it going to be as much as my ears and mind think it is or less?
 
Re: Does wood make a difference?

Unfortunately I'm not doing a comparison between common guitar solid body woods to say "mahogany sounds like X, while ash sounds like Y", I'm just testing a few different varieties of wood boards to answer the question "does the pickup care what kind of wood it's attached to?" and what the degree of variation between them. I'll measure the difference with spectral analysis as well as set up an A/B blind sound test to see if someone/anyone can even tell that the boards sound an different from one another. That result will be useful to me, even if it doesn't satisfy some people.

IMO, I don't really have faith in the "mahogany sounds like X" statements because of the amount of variation from one piece of wood to the next, so I could get ten planks of mahogany, it would probably cost a lot of money, and it wouldn't prove anything to me, let alone anyone else, because even ten planks is still a ridiculously small sample size, and that's just for one type of wood. If my own test shows audible distinction is an A/B blind test with two/three different samples of wood, and significant deviation in the spectral analysis, then I'll be firmly in the "wood makes a difference" camp, because that will be shown to be the case in a very simple test, but if the differences are impossible or hard to detect, I'll be far more pessimistic, but still not 100% sure that there is no audible difference. What I know so far is my three test subjects sound extremely different from an acoustic standpoint. It's hard to imagine there wont be an similarly obvious difference perceived through the pickup.
 
Re: Does wood make a difference?

I believe it does for passive pickups. Guitars with active pickups tend to sounds roughly the same between each guitar.
 
Re: Does wood make a difference?

As I said before I have two almost identical Burny LPs. While one is labeled as a Custom it has a rosewood board. They have the same neck join construction etc etc, same neck thickness. I did test both of them with my standard set of pickups that I put into every guitar that goes through my basement. One of them is undenyably more scooped. It is audible and shows up in a frequency plot.

I'm too lazy too look up my pictures with the charts from the last time this came up, if somebody needs them a search for my name and "Burny" should turn them up.

Suspicious new registrations make my alarm bell go off.
 
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Re: Does wood make a difference?

I believe it does make a difference. neck and body woods definitely. I'm not sure if fingerboard wood makes much difference. Seems quite insignificant compared to the neck although, I guess when it's bonded to the neck wood it might have a noticeable effect on how the neck bends as it vibrates, like the two different woods used to make a bow.
 
Re: Does wood make a difference?

well the majority seems to think that wood makes a difference and I believe in most cases it "wood" lol
being that the guitar is as cheap as it was I doubt it has the mahogany back and maple top. though I was going to use it for a boat paddle this summer I think it'll be fun to play around with it and maybe try a few different pickups in it. I love the mockingbird look and how it plays just not the sound. I think I might start with the black winters as suggested earlier and maybe even try the pups from my les Paul since they're being swapped out already. really though it's going to depend on how long it's going to take to order whatever pups I choose, still waiting on a set I ordered 6 weeks ago. thanks for all the responses, it's an interesting read.
 
Re: Does wood make a difference?

uOpt said:
As I said before I have two almost identical Bury LPs. While one is labeled as a Custom it has a rosewood board. They have the same neck join construction etc etc, same neck thickness. I did test both of them with my standard set of pickups that I put into every guitar that goes through my basement. One of them is undenyably more scooped. It is audible and shows up in a frequency plot.

I'm too lazy too look up my pictures with the charts from the last time this came up, if somebody needs them a search for my name and "Burny" should turn them up.

Suspicious new registrations make my alarm bell go off.
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I remember those charts. And I believe wood makes a difference. I don't believe in tonewood as in audiophile wood though. Only great wood and not so great wood.


Johnny the Kid said:
I believe it does for passive pickups. Guitars with active pickups tend to sounds roughly the same between each guitar.
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This though, I do not believe, and it is not my experience. This sounds more like a passive guy take on the active pickup myth (i.e. not have tried actives for more than 2 minutes, if at all).
 
Re: Does wood make a difference?

Dahla said:
I remember those charts. And I believe wood makes a difference. I don't believe in tonewood as in audiophile wood though. Only great wood and not so great wood.
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Yes, absolutely. "Tone wood" as a selection before making the instrument seems like a very dicey proposition at best.

Weight and species, sure, but it seems that the guitar manufacturers have very little control other than those two.

I do notice that the average expensive Gibson LP comes out statistically better (let's say a historic) than e.g. a faded. It should be wood, but what do we know how much more attention really matters when making the guitar?

If anything I notice that guitars that have been tinkered with longer when making them are better, for whatever reason that might be.
 
Re: Does wood make a difference?

Dahla said:
This though, I do not believe, and it is not my experience. This sounds more like a passive guy take on the active pickup myth (i.e. not have tried actives for more than 2 minutes, if at all).
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I'll admit that I don't know much about actives and have been a passive guy pretty much my whole guitar playing career (my first electric guitar was my brother's Epi Casino that he rewired with some hot Bareknuckle P90's), so I could very well be wrong, but given the anecdotal evidence (which is all this really is, you can prove it for yourself, but someone else can just say that the results are wrong) I would have to say that actives are much less responsive of tones woods than passives are. If you can provide me some evidence to the contrary, I am more than willing to change my stance on that.
 
Re: Does wood make a difference?

I didn't use many active guitars in my life but I feel strongly that active basses make it worse when something about the wood or construction isn't kosher (to the user's taste).

There also is a big difference between an active setup involving EMGs, which do not have the traditional resonance peak as such (replace it with a more complex curve also emphasizing the required frequencies around where a resonance peak would sit) and a setup where you have a pickup with a regular resonance peak and it simply has the first active rig stage on the south side of the cable.
 
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Re: Does wood make a difference?

I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, with absolute certainty, that wood makes a difference in the acoustic sound of a guitar. I think that's irrefutable, even though there are some less-enlightened hardliners in the "it doesn't matter" camp who will feel uncomfortable accepting something that they perceive as ceding territory in the argument. Those people are idiots, so we can ignore them.

I think the very question "does wood matter in the electrified sound of a guitar?" is broken. It's the wrong question being asked, and it polarizes people into two sides fighting over a line in the sand, but on the wrong beach.

The real question, one that can be asked without nearly the amount of bias and vitriol - the one that could actually be tested by scientific means is this:

Does the unamplified sound of an electric guitar have any bearing on the amplified sound, independent of other factors?

That's the question. Does a loud guitar send more signal through the pickups? Does a dark-sounding guitar sound darker through the pickups than a bright-sounding one does with the same pickups?



It's my feeling that the answer is "Yes, it does." I don't have data to prove it that isn't circumstantial, but that's my assumption. But, from this, we can devise two tests.

First.) Use a neck, wiring harness, hardware, and strings as a control. Test different identically-shaped body blanks with the control parts and measure if there is any difference in the acoustic sound. If no, the whole thing is debunked. If yes, move on to round 2.

Second.) From the body blanks of the previous test, assuming there was found to be a difference, select the darkest- and the brightest-sounding body blanks and test them against each other to see if there is a difference in the electrified sound.

That should give you your answer.
 
Re: Does wood make a difference?

Johnny the Kid said:
I'll admit that I don't know much about actives and have been a passive guy pretty much my whole guitar playing career (my first electric guitar was my brother's Epi Casino that he rewired with some hot Bareknuckle P90's), so I could very well be wrong, but given the anecdotal evidence (which is all this really is, you can prove it for yourself, but someone else can just say that the results are wrong) I would have to say that actives are much less responsive of tones woods than passives are. If you can provide me some evidence to the contrary, I am more than willing to change my stance on that.
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You could have just said "Yes im just repeating internet rumor"
 
Re: Does wood make a difference?

Play two or more guitars with the same hardware unplugged. Let your ears tell you the answer.
After that, its just a matter of selecting the pickup set that best complements/supplements the tone of the axe.
 
Re: Does wood make a difference?

Can the way a pick-up is mounted make a difference to how it sounds? Like, whether (a) it is screwed into the body of the guitar, or (b) it is suspended off a scratchplate or mounting ring.

Also what about the size of the pick-up cavity? Will a big 'swimming pool'/'bath tub' style cavity make a difference compared to a tighter fitting cavity?
 
Re: Does wood make a difference?

gibson175 said:
Play two or more guitars with the same hardware unplugged. Let your ears tell you the answer.
After that, its just a matter of selecting the pickup set that best complements/supplements the tone of the axe.
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The acoustic output and the pickup output are wildly different things. Your ear hears the wood as well as all of the string vibrating. A pickup only hears a "node" of the string, or as much as falls withing the magnetic pickup, minus any harmonic cancellation that occurs, and only in the range of frequencies that they pickup is sensitive to. It's because an electric guitar only delivers a tiny fraction of the information that is acoustically produced that it sounds the way it does. Part of the mystery over "tone wood" is how much impact the wood makes over what occurs at the node(s), and within the frequency range the pickup is able to transmit.
 
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