Guitar frequency range...

Mr Wolf

New member
Hi guys simple question... What is the typical frequency range of a guitar in standard tuning?

Done some searches on here and on google with various results to do with cabs and pickups, but unfortunately not an answer for my question:banghead:

Many thanks
 
Re: Guitar frequency range...

the higher end of the spectrum is pretty hard to determine exactly, within each note (say an 80 Hz tone) there are many higher modes also excited (higher frequency components or you could think of them as overtones). The fundamental frequency would still be 80 Hz, but many of the higher harmonics (160, 240, 320, etc.) will also be excited to a certain point. When you start adding overdrive and clipping into the picture, it becomes much more complicated and begins to encompass quite a broadband of frequencies to the point of noise eventually.
 
Re: Guitar frequency range...

For audio in general you can ignore anything over 20 kHz since no one will be able to hear that. Why are you asking?
 
Re: Guitar frequency range...

For every octave, multiply by 2. The open low E is around 82 Hz, the open high E is around 330 Hz, and high E at the 12th fret is around 660 Hz. But harmonics and overtones factor in, as APJ said.

For the most part, an easy estimation would be 50 Hz to 5000 kHz. This would be more of the electric guitar and an amplifier acting together.
 
Re: Guitar frequency range...

Another thing to bear in mind, in pretty much most rock music, live (if there's FOH engineers) or in the studio, guitars tend to be high passed at 100Hz, sometimes even higher and typically low passed at 10-12Khz to get rid of fizz.
Guitar speaker manufacturers tell you speakers have a certain range, but they do extend beyond that, they just roll off significantly past those points, which is why you still hear well over 6Khz coming out of a guitar cab.
 
Re: Guitar frequency range...

For audio in general you can ignore anything over 20 kHz since no one will be able to hear that. Why are you asking?

2 main reasons... I am going to be doing some recording with a friend soon + also i may on occasion use my Boss GT6 directly into the board (a travesty i know!) so i wanna know which freqencies need to be sliced out.

Thanks guys
 
Re: Guitar frequency range...

The high end of the frequency range comes from overtones and harmonics, and their prominence will depend on you pickups, pickup placement, wood, amp, cables, pedals, speakers, picking style, picks themselves - the list goes on.

As to which frequencies should be cut, there's no answer to that other than to listen through some decent monitors, and adjust the EQ accordingly to your liking.

If you're in your teens, nothing over 20khz matters. By your late 20's, your ears cutoff will probably be around 18khz. In your 30's it will be 16-17khz, generally dropping at least to the 14khz range by your 40's, and down further as you go on. Of course this degradation goes a lot faster if you don't take care of your ears, and always wear hearing protection in high volume environments.
 
Re: Guitar frequency range...

2 main reasons... I am going to be doing some recording with a friend soon + also i may on occasion use my Boss GT6 directly into the board (a travesty i know!) so i wanna know which freqencies need to be sliced out.

Thanks guys

If that's the case I would check out some mixing and production tutorials on the internet, I've seen quite a few that explain different aspects including equ'ing, compressing, etc. essentially these are the kinds of things you're asking
 
Re: Guitar frequency range...

The pickups form a low pass filter at the resonance frequency, which you can get out of the tone chart.

It's only 6 db/octave and starts from the top of the resonance peak, so the spectrum above it isn't empty.

Then, the rig and amp come in and generate new overtones starting from that. Distortion obviously makes the most out of this.

The is the spectrum of a hardtail blazer with a Jazz neck, clean fingerpicking:

spectrum-cleanpicking.png


Heavy high-gain distortion, single notes:

spectrum-distortion.png
 
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