ImmortalSix
John Mayer's Mankini
I just wanna say that I read this whole thread and that guitar is BAD ASS, and I love it. So cool. I didn't even know stuff like this existed. You have expanded my mind!
NGD Aristides 060
- Thread starter 6stringerguy
- Start date
Chistopher
malapterurus electricus tonewood instigator
Music is entirely built on unquantifiable metrics. Music is not empirical by any stretch. That being said, I think the entire interest in tonewood is mostly championed by two types of people: people who build guitars and care about the minutia that different components of a guitar impart on the whole. and people who think that spending money is a replacement for practice. I'd wager it's mostly the second one.
skyshock21
New member
Nonsense I build music every day with aspects of every track being easily quantifiable. Amplitude, frequency, wavelength, cycle length, phase, speed, shape, harmonics series, envelope, tempo, cadence, etc... are all quantifiable metrics which are easily represented mathematically and visually inside a DAW. We've built an entire musical notation system for representing playback. We have oscilloscopes which measure sound waves. We have plugins which can affect an entire harmonic series to morph the sound made by a flute into one which could have been made by a guitar, or even a kick drum. I generate drums using a sine curve frequency sweep. I make snares from gated white noise. I've even cobbled together convincing sounding 8-string metal guitars using custom-built wavetables and envelope followers using X-fer Serum through overdrives and filters. That we can *also* describe music using emotional language is great, but it's not in a way which provides actual defining characteristics.
Getting back to Aristides guitars, most of them have a particular harmonic series structure and frequency curve which is defining and present across the entire line that I really like, and one which I haven't heard in any other guitar. I think this is only discernible due to the extremely tight tolerances the injection molding process allows them when they build their guitars. My suspicion is what I'm hearing is due to the microphonic nature of the pickups they use interacting with the resonant properties of Arium, and to a lesser degree maybe the treble bleed circuit they use inside the cavity. I think it would be nice if pickup manufacturers could control for this by properly potting their pickups to exclude the microphonic characteristics of whatever material they're mounted to, and create the desired harmonic structure and frequency curve via the intended magnetic winding design. This way pickup manufacturers could also differentiate themselves from competitors more easily, and the sounds of various pickups could be easily defined in marketing material via a 3D frequency distribution curve and spectral decay. That they still rely on deliberately misleading terms of emotional relativism like "warm" and "punchy" leads me to believe the omission of actual audio metrics is intentional. Guitar pickups are old tech! They originated in the 1930's! Most guitar players today have moved on to using software feeding into impulse response curves instead of vacuum tube amps and paper speakers - and for 1/20th the cost, they're achieving the idealized model of those highly processed sounds they've been chasing for decades. We should have digital modeling pickups by now. You should be able to load an impulse response curve of your choosing and have your guitar output that signal. Want David Gilmour, Dimebag Darrel, and Jimmy Page in the same guitar pickup? It should be at a button push. It's time for pickup manufacturers to move on and improve.
Very interesting, that first line, because it is wrong. But I'm exhausted, trying to explain things to people who just don't want to listen to folk who have spent their lives working at these machines of wood, copper, and steel. I'm done. What is heard is not what is felt. it's like seeing a glossy car, but look up close and it is all wavy and bumpy because it wasn't leveled before buffing. What you HEAR is not nearly as exact as what the fingers feel. If 'feel' means nothing, we'd all play Steinberger, but we don't.
Fluence tries to do this, but this just doesn't work. It's an emulation. Remember the Variax guitars, that promised to do just this? It's like, asking so much that the whole system breaks down.
Let's also not forget that what often was thought as a strat in Gilmour's hands, was an LP with p90's, and what was thought of as a Les Paul, was a Tele in Page's hands. So what does that tell you? It should tell you one thing and one thing alone: that tone and guitars are extremely subjective.
My buddy's guitar has Ragnarok pickups in it. I can't deal with those, but when he plays it, it sounds ridiculously good. We don't strum strings just to strum strings. We make music. And how the instrument responds to us is just as important as how it does not respond, and that is 'feel'. It's a play of string gauge, action, the way the guitar resonates to our bodies and in our hands, how it acts with our favorite amps, etcetera. To all dismiss that as irrelevant because it is not quantifiable, is just silly.
Chistopher
malapterurus electricus tonewood instigator
Oh man, you would hate wind instruments
I'm interested in this idea that resonance in the body accounts for some part of the tone by directly vibrating microphonic pickups. It sounds wrong to me. I think if it was significant, there'd be a big difference in the sound of the same pickup between direct mounting, pickup rings, and pickguard mounting, which I haven't heard - and I have converted guitars from direct mount to pickup rings, and I've had the same not-very-well-potted pickup in the same guitar with both systems. I thought the importance of resonance in the body and neck was how it affected string vibration. But I'm not a builder or an engineer, I just play the thing... anything to it?
skyshock21
New member
"What is felt" is an emotional appeal. It's a reaction which is subjective and perceived differently by everyone, not a description of source sounds. And often these descriptors are only used by corporate marketing strictly to mislead rather than inform. "A custom wavetable drawn as follows set to 440Hz being run through a 12dB/octave Steiner-Parker filter set to 3khz with ADSR envelope all flat, and passed through time based effects as follows..." may make a person "feel" one way, and may make a different person feel another way. But the source is the same, and easily describable. Telling a person how you feel about a sound is one thing, but it doesn't convey to that person at all the waveform characteristics which actually created that sound. The sub-text here is that people who create sounds often don't have a clue about what is actually going on from a physics perspective in terms of what makes audio that they like, or sometimes the source of audio is too complex to describe easily so they use emotional terms as shorthand.
skyshock21
New member
Variax is also extremely old tech! Remember what digital modeling amps were like back then? Now fast forward to today. We have amp models from NeuralDSP which are indistinguishable from the originals, and in many ways even better sounding. Pickups have not kept up accordingly.
As for the human factor, I can record a track, hand the guitar to my friend and have him record the exact same passage - and lo and behold, you can actually quantify the differences in timing, touch, timbre, etc... via the waveforms created in the DAW. I know, impossible right? I could even use a plugin to align the waveforms to make one sound like the other. If a guitarist's feel is a fingerprint, so is a singer's voice - and look how easily those are cloned using AI tools. Nobody is dismissing the human factor as irrelevant, the opposite - all these factors ARE quantifiable, and can be modeled now.
Companies today have created digital modeling microphones which can model other analog vintage microphones extremely accurately, there's no reason we can not do the same with guitar pickups which are much more simple devices.
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skyshock21
New member
skyshock21
New member
If a pickup is microphonic, i.e. you can take the strings off and yell into it and it translates that sound wave into a signal coming out of the output jack, it will translate any other sound the guitar makes acoustically, as well as the magnetic field interruptions made by the strings. If a pickup is not microphonic, it will only translate the magnetic field interruptions created by the metal strings hovering over it. Since the same hardware configs are available on other guitars and don't have the same tonal qualities that Aristides guitars do, the only other variable at that point is Arium, and if the resonant properties of Arium are being transferred into the output signal we have to assume the pickups are microphonic as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE
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skyshock21
New member
And actually the Variax series are getting closer than I remembered, but I think they're still mostly preset-based with some configurability, I don't think they've gone as far as the ability to model another guitar (or player!) of your choosing yet...
https://line6.com/variax-modeling-guitars/sound/
Your speculation about mechanical vibrations from the body into a microphonic pickup is interesting; it doesn't line up with my experience. If that was the case I think I'd hear a big difference between screwing a pickup directly into the wood of the guitar over a piece of foam, vs. hanging the same pickup off some screws going through a piece of plastic which is then screwed into a different part of the same guitar. I didn't hear a difference, myself, and that leads me to think you're barking up the wrong tree with your idea about what's responsible for the tone you like... but I'm not a builder and I've only played one or two composite guitars. I'd like to hear what the people who build and repair guitars think about it.
Chistopher
malapterurus electricus tonewood instigator
Hit the nail on the head with that one. I don't play my instruments so that I can dump money get a certain sound the easiest way possible. I play my instruments as a form of self expression and because it is fun. If I record a saxophone track, it's because I want to play a saxophone. If I want to play trumpet, I will learn trumpet. No point to limit yourself just because computers can make you sound like whatever you want.
Chistopher
malapterurus electricus tonewood instigator
I would be interested in knowing why you think that a tool used to evoke an emotion would be advertised any other way.
skyshock21
New member
Yeah it's all about trying to isolate the variables. I think at bare minimum what has the most impact is the string sizes, string material/tension, electronics hardware, setup geometry, and bridge. In your case, since the pickup mounting arrangement didn't have much impact, maybe they were less microphonic than others?
Also, what brands of strings do Aristides ship their guitars with? Is it Elixir? Maybe it's as simple as that?
