Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

[WhooHoo]

There is the old debate about how much the wood of a solid body guitar influences the tone.

The usual debates range from the wood of a solid body guitar having no effect to having a huge effect.

There doesn't seem to have been much research done on it besides people just offering their opinions which can vary all over the place but there has been some research done and here are the results of one test.

Seems like the wood of a solid body guitar does influence the tone but not in a simple way and also the guitars hardware and the pickup can enhance or diminish certain frequencies as well so it becomes a complex case of matching the guitar wood and hardware with the pickup to a players taste which a lot of players realize and do already.

Some people think that the wood of a solid body guitar or whatever other material the guitar is made from has little or no effect on the tone and just the pickup and hardware are responsible for the majority or all the tone.

In these articles, different pickups and electric guitar solid bodies are put through a frequency analyzer and it shows how different types of woods of a solid body guitar and different pickups affect the tone and also how the wood and hardware and pickups work in tandem to make up the tone.

http://www.calaverasfretworks.com/u...ds_in_Solid_Body_Electric_Guitars_-_Part1.pdf

http://www.calaverasfretworks.com/u...ds_in_Solid_Body_Electric_Guitars_-_Part2.pdf

Of course the guitars tone gets altered further by effects and amps and speakers as well.

It also turns out that pickguards and how the pickup responds to pickguard vibrations can also affect the tone to some degree as well.

http://210.101.116.28/W_ftp41/14108805_pv.pdf

 

[TheLivingDead]

Re: Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

That is some pretty interesting stuff. Nice to see actual proof to what we all believe.

 

[SD fan]

Re: Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

There is the old debate about how much the wood of a solid body guitar influences the tone.

The usual debates range from the wood of a solid body guitar having no effect to having a huge effect.

There doesn't seem to have been much research done on it besides people just offering their opinions which can vary all over the place but there has been some research done and here are the results of one test.

Seems like the wood of a solid body guitar does influence the tone but not in a simple way and also the guitars hardware and the pickup can enhance or diminish certain frequencies as well so it becomes a complex case of matching the guitar wood and hardware with the pickup to a players taste which a lot of players realize and do already.

Some people think that the wood of a solid body guitar or whatever other material the guitar is made from has little or no effect on the tone and just the pickup and hardware are responsible for the majority or all the tone.

In these articles, different pickups and electric guitar solid bodies are put through a frequency analyzer and it shows how different types of woods of a solid body guitar and different pickups affect the tone and also how the wood and hardware and pickups work in tandem to make up the tone.

http://www.calaverasfretworks.com/u...ds_in_Solid_Body_Electric_Guitars_-_Part1.pdf

http://www.calaverasfretworks.com/u...ds_in_Solid_Body_Electric_Guitars_-_Part2.pdf

Of course the guitars tone gets altered further by effects and amps and speakers as well.

It also turns out that pickguards and how the pickup responds to pickguard vibrations can also affect the tone to some degree as well.

http://210.101.116.28/W_ftp41/14108805_pv.pdf

Really does not compare enough variables to state woods change the electric guitar other than the basic physics of mass, density and hardness, pickups are infinitely variable.
One would have to see the same guitar, same cut with different woods using same pickup set up exactly the same with tuning. Even then it is a matter of the weight density, mass, and hardness of the woods.
Comparing dissimilar variables cannot show what people think they are seeing here. One would have to remove the entire guitars hardware and components transplanted into same cut different wood guitar bodies with the same FINISH done as close as possible. Setting the same neck on each body wood would also be a variable adding to the impossible nature of an accurate scientific rendering.
Scientific testing is much more complex and difficult to comprehend very easy to misinterpret data. A true scientific analysis is almost impossible per the above requirements so ipso facto the matter is placed right back into the realm of opinion as the data really does not indicate what is imagined.

 

[DreX]

Re: Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

That is some pretty interesting stuff. Nice to see actual proof to what we all believe.

This is definitely much too loose to be called proof, starting with the fact that he manually plucked the strings for these measurements, but probably not ending there.

I wish he would have stuck with one pickup at a time. Keeping track of the different wood types and several pickups all at once made it very difficult to follow.

 

[Chris of Arabia]

Re: Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

Every material that affects the resonance of the strings, including the sympathetic resonance of the guitar itself, will impact what the pickups 'hear'. Everything that then processes that heard signal, will impact what reaches your ears. If you like what you hear, play it. If you don't, change something and see if you like it any better...

IMNSHO, micro-analysing the properties of different materials is a job for the people who make what we use. Our job is buy (or not) and just play...

 

[DreX]

Re: Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

Every material that affects the resonance of the strings, including the sympathetic resonance of the guitar itself, will impact what the pickups 'hear'. Everything that then processes that heard signal, will impact what reaches your ears. If you like what you hear, play it. If you don't, change something and see if you like it any better...

IMNSHO, micro-analysing the properties of different materials is a job for the people who make what we use. Our job is buy (or not) and just play...

The problem is if you leave this knowledge in their hands, they can say they have determined that two woods sound "very different", and so you should buy one guitar of each type of wood to gain access to all the tonal variety. So you try them out and you agree, they sound "very different", but your ears aren't scientific instruments. Maybe it's not the wood, maybe it's everything else that makes them sound different. Maybe they sound identical and it's the different color of the guitars that's throwing off your perception. Consumer ignorance leads to all sorts of exploitation.

 

[Chris of Arabia]

Re: Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

Caveat emptor....

 

[ehdwuld]

Re: Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

I can see neck material contributing to sustain

But body material , not so much

Tone is a control on the amp
Which plays a much larger roll in the sound you hear

*(Sent from my durned phone!)*

 

[Rockstar216]

Re: Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

The problem is if you leave this knowledge in their hands, they can say they have determined that two woods sound "very different", and so you should buy one guitar of each type of wood to gain access to all the tonal variety.

So if they were to sound the same you think people wouldn't still buy the same guitar again?

I'll leave you with this quote by a man named James Brown "If it sounds good it is good".

 

[Chris of Arabia]

Re: Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

Look lively lads. Straighten things up. We're on Facebook...

 

[wishUwerehere]

Re: Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

Everything the sound touches...

Seriously though, everything vibrates, and every material is going to dampen some frequencies and amplify others, and so each piece of the guitar is going to act a little like a bandpass filter and ultimately influence the way the whole system vibrates and resonates, changing what the pickup experiences. The pickups themselves will have the greatest share of effect, an effect that is very noticeable to even untrained ears. The amp will have its own effect depending on the circuitry and layout. The woods and construction of the guitar will have some effect, but it may take a player who is intimately familiar with one guitar to notice the difference between it and another of different construction. Heck, the cable will have a small effect. But the reproducibility of results is questionable, since no two setups are identical. The best we can hope for is trends.

 

[FuseG4]

Re: Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

I hate when people argue that the pickups don't sense the wood, they only pick up the vibrations of the strings.

What do they think the strings are attached to? Are vibrations not passing through the metal hardware, through the wood of the neck and the body, and reflecting or feeding back through the strings?

 

[DreX]

Re: Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

So if they were to sound the same you think people wouldn't still buy the same guitar again?

It helps to think that two guitars sound different if you're trying to satisfy GAS. People say things like "it doesn't matter how a guitar looks so long as it plays and sounds good", so if you want to believe you're a smart shopper, you wouldn't want to admit to yourself that the primary selling point is the sweet looking wood grains. If you can say to yourself "I already have a basswood guitar for my power ballads, but I could use a mahogany guitar with more low end for my djent" then it gives you a "legitimate" reason to buy the guitar, even though it was actually a superficial difference in appearance that motivated the GAS in the first place.

The sad thing is someone might play a few guitars, and not like one that happened to be made of wood X, and blame it on the wood type, and not the thickness of the wood cut, or that particular piece of wood, or maybe it has nothing to do with the wood at all, but they take than incorrect conclusion and might refuse to try out a guitar they might like, just because it's made of a wood they decided they disliked based on bad information. When I was younger, I had somehow come to the conclusion that heavy=better, so if I picked up a guitar and it was light, I disliked it right away and wouldn't even want to plug it in and try it out.

 

[uOpt]

Re: Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

I hate when people argue that the pickups don't sense the wood, they only pick up the vibrations of the strings.

What do they think the strings are attached to? Are vibrations not passing through the metal hardware, through the wood of the neck and the body, and reflecting or feeding back through the strings?

You don't even have to go there. The wood moves. Very easy to tell by putting you chin on the upper horn of a Strat. Moving wood means moving pickups. That induces a signal that mixes with the signal of the moving strings in a complex way. Signal induction works both for moving pickups and standing strings as well as vice versa, and now you mix them in interesting ways.

OP, I really don't think any of this stuff needs any evangelism on this forum

 

[Butch Iafelice]

Re: Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

This is definitely much too loose to be called proof, starting with the fact that he manually plucked the strings for these measurements, but probably not ending there.

I wish he would have stuck with one pickup at a time. Keeping track of the different wood types and several pickups all at once made it very difficult to follow.

You should re-read the beginning of Part 1 where I show how I calibrate the manual pluck using the amplitude spectrum and how the repeatability of my data is better that a few percent. It works quite well.

How you pluck the strings makes quite a large difference in the frequency response and sustain. The exact measurements I show in my papers are quite repeatable and only valid for the way I plucked the strings. The main point to take out of all of this is that if you make an "apples to apples" comparison, as I did, the pickups are the main contributor to the tone, and both the neck and body woods also contribute (all other hardware and setup factors being equal). This will be true no matter how the strings a plucked as long as you pluck them the same way for all the measurements.

The effect woods and pickups have on tone is quite a complex problem and the longer articles are even confusing to me at times so I used specific short examples to illustrate how fingerboard and body woods effect the tone and sustain in an particular guitar build. You should check out the short papers on my site where I looked at 1 pickup, one string, and one exchange of wood variable.

http://www.calaverasfretworks.com/u...he_sound_from_solid_body_electric_guitars.pdf

http://www.calaverasfretworks.com/u...ly_change_the_sound_of_an_electric_guitar.pdf

 

[DreX]

Re: Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

You should re-read the beginning of Part 1 where I show how I calibrate the manual pluck using the amplitude spectrum and how the repeatability of my data is better that a few percent. It works quite well.

How you pluck the strings makes quite a large difference in the frequency response and sustain. The exact measurements I show in my papers are quite repeatable and only valid for the way I plucked the strings. The main point to take out of all of this is that if you make an "apples to apples" comparison, as I did, the pickups are the main contributor to the tone, and both the neck and body woods also contribute (all other hardware and setup factors being equal). This will be true no matter how the strings a plucked as long as you pluck them the same way for all the measurements.

It says:

Repeatability tests that I performed showed that this method was able to obtain better than 2%
repeatability error, that is, if I were to repeat the measurement many times the variation between
measurements would be less than 2%.

Based on this language "if I were to..." it sounds like you determined in one sitting that you could pick with less than 2% of variation, and not that you repeated each experiment multiple times to ensure that each test had a variation no greater than 2% in each sampling. Maybe when you started out, you were plucking with a high degree of consistency, and became less consistent as time went on. Maybe you feelings about the test results and subconsciously altered your pickings to reflect how you felt about the results. That's why it's generally bad to put yourself into the equation, because everything that's imperfect about a person becomes imperfect in the experiment.

Also there's no mention about making sure you plucked the string in the same location each time. That alone could created a world of difference in harmonic amplitude. Pluck close to the bridge and the fundamental drops and the harmonics spike, pluck closer to the middle and the opposite happens. The amplitude calibration would account for overall amplitude, but wouldn't reveal if you were picking in a different location of the string. It also wouldn't reveal how you're pick left the string, whether it snapped off the tip or rolled off the edge. The difference might show up in the attack shape, but it might not be recognizable.

You might think you don't hear much difference at the time of testing, but then you're analyzing graphs after the fact that reveal precise differences you wouldn't have been able to hear. If you just devise some sort of spring loaded plucker and use masking tape to ensure it's always mounted at the same spot you can replace a large amount of variability with a much tinier amount. When you open with "There is the old debate about how much the wood of a solid body guitar influences the tone" it sets up an expectation that this will be more scientific, and not the same old conjecture that we have plenty of already.

 

[wokrzysiek]

Re: Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

I have seen a few such experiments, of course with the use of spectrum analyser, that prove exactly the opposite, that wood doesn't affect the tone. You can find them easily on the internet. Some phisicists claim that due to the construction pickup can't "hear" the vibrations of the wood as it only reacts on the vibrations of metal parts. I'm not saying I agree with them. I'm just saying that there are many different opinions and myths regarding electric guitars and it is unlikely to make a proof that will end the discussion. Every player has its own observations and different experience because tone is very subjective. Some say you should use 250 k pots with humbs, the others claim that a set neck has better sustain. I disagree with both. I don't know whether wood affects the tone, but I personally hardly hear any difference and therefore it doesn't affect my decisions on buying guitars. I believe that changing pots or switching to different amp has much more impact. That is my experience. You can have different and I have no problem with that.

 

[uOpt]

Re: Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

I have seen a few such experiments, of course with the use of spectrum analyser, that prove exactly the opposite, that wood doesn't affect the tone. You can find them easily on the internet. Some phisicists claim that due to the construction pickup can't "hear" the vibrations of the wood as it only reacts on the vibrations of metal parts. I'm not saying I agree with them. I'm just saying that there are many different opinions and myths regarding electric guitars and it is unlikely to make a proof that will end the discussion.

I studied physics and I understand that moving the pickup through the moving wood relative to the strings will induce current the same way as moving strings. I really don't like when people make up such claims (not you, them).

Spectrum analysis without looking at impulses and other phases through the single notes is also quite useless. I have thousands of the former, it only got useful when I got into the latter.

 

[Butch Iafelice]

Re: Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

It says:



Based on this language "if I were to..." it sounds like you determined in one sitting that you could pick with less than 2% of variation, and not that you repeated each experiment multiple times to ensure that each test had a variation no greater than 2% in each sampling. Maybe when you started out, you were plucking with a high degree of consistency, and became less consistent as time went on. Maybe you feelings about the test results and subconsciously altered your pickings to reflect how you felt about the results. That's why it's generally bad to put yourself into the equation, because everything that's imperfect about a person becomes imperfect in the experiment.

Also there's no mention about making sure you plucked the string in the same location each time. That alone could created a world of difference in harmonic amplitude. Pluck close to the bridge and the fundamental drops and the harmonics spike, pluck closer to the middle and the opposite happens. The amplitude calibration would account for overall amplitude, but wouldn't reveal if you were picking in a different location of the string. It also wouldn't reveal how you're pick left the string, whether it snapped off the tip or rolled off the edge. The difference might show up in the attack shape, but it might not be recognizable.

You might think you don't hear much difference at the time of testing, but then you're analyzing graphs after the fact that reveal precise differences you wouldn't have been able to hear. If you just devise some sort of spring loaded plucker and use masking tape to ensure it's always mounted at the same spot you can replace a large amount of variability with a much tinier amount. When you open with "There is the old debate about how much the wood of a solid body guitar influences the tone" it sets up an expectation that this will be more scientific, and not the same old conjecture that we have plenty of already.

The calibration amplitude spectra from each measurement configuration is saved on PC and can be compared real-time during any subsequent measurement. A plucking that did not match the calibration file within a known percentage would be discarded. The long term repeatability data (better than 2%) has been collected over the course of several years. What that means is if I plug in the identical guitar/pickup set and use the cal file to adjust my picking, I will get the same results today that I got years ago within a few percent.

That alone is amazing to me! What that really means is that, if you are careful, you can train yourself (with the aid of a visual reference) to pick the same note (I only used open strings so fingering would not be a factor), at the same location (to within a few mm of center between the two pickups), with the exact same pick (Gretsch 0.050) , in nearly the same way (moderate lead passage), and get almost identical results. One might be able to improve on my 2% long tern repeatabilty data by using a picking robot, but the differences I am reporting on in my papers can be orders of magnitude in spectral amplitude and factors of 3 and 4 in sustain. These difference will not arise from picking variations alone. That's not conjecture - that's a fact that is easy to verify. I already have.

 

[CTN]

Re: Effects of Wood and Pickups on Tone

sweet mother of mercy.

hasn't this thread already been done to death a million times over in other threads here and on countless other forums over the past however many years it's been since the internet was created?

There is no need to argue these points gents.

What it comes down to is this:
If you hear a difference, it exists, to you.
If you don't hear a difference, it doesn't exist, to you.
If your testing equipment DOES show a difference, then you might suggest it's true, but people will disagree.
if your testing equipment shows there ISN'T a difference, then you might suggest it's not true, and people will still disagree.

There is no point to this discussion. It is an endless loop that never resolves.

Gents, PLAY YOUR GUITARS, STOP LOOKING AT GRAPHS.