Enjoying the tone befefits of an unfinished guitar
Because the acoustic properties of electric guitars have a noticeable effect on their amplified tone. Either the acoustic differences of the guitar are represented in the strings and the pickups read that, or the pickups read some directly from the guitar, or both.
But paint doesn’t change the acoustic properties. Explain how it would.
Now you’re probably going to say it damps vibrations. That’s doubtful. You can test that by playing your guitar while plugged in without your body touching it, and then lay it across your chest and see if the tone changes as it does on an acoustic. It doesn’t. You can also cover the body in blue painter’s tape. Hear any change? Nope. Finish has about the same mass.
Also the finish is hard and vibrates along with everything else.
Next let’s look at why you DON’T want the body vibrating; the reason why solid bodies exist was the quest for more sustain and resistance to feedback. How does it accomplish this?
On any stringed instrument you have a rigid frame that the strings are stretched across. You want this frame to be stiff. On an electric guitar this is the neck and body.
A large part of the tonality of the guitar comes from the neck. A hard, stiff wood like maple will sound brighter than something softer like mahogany or even basswood. A hard heavy body also sounds brighter than a light soft body. But this isn’t an acoustic quality, since the instrument produces very little sound acoustically.
So what’s going on is you pluck a string which puts energy into it. On a very stiff frame, like a steel bar, the string would vibrate for a long time. This is because very little energy is leaving the string.
So let’s compare a Les Paul and a banjo. On the LP, the body has a lot of mass. The vibrating strings don’t transfer much energy to the body, so more stays in the string. This gives you a very long sustain but very little acoustic output.
Now take the banjo. It’s very easy to excite the drum head. So most of the string’s energy is converted to a loud acoustic output. But then you get very little sustain.
So whenever people are talking about couplings the vibrations from the strings to the body, they act like this is somehow adding energy to the strings. It’s actually doing the opposite. And for a solid body you want to keep the energy in the string.
But of course some energy gets absorbed by the flexing of the neck and into vibrating the body. This happens in a non uniform way. It’s frequency dependent. So a light soft wood will accentuate the lows and absorb some highs, and you get a “warm” tone. A hard heavy body like maple has a higher mechanical impedance. So it sounds brighter since the body has less influence on the strings/tone.
Now think about what a very thin layer of paint would do? Look at drum heads. They paint those.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
