Question: If the resonant frequencies of "electric" instruments make such a difference, then why don't manufacturers make body sensors for the acoustic properties instead of using cruddy piezo sensors in the bridge? I have a hard time believing that this hasn't been researched before... Is there something wrong with the idea of a body sensor on a solid body electric?
@BarefacedAudio4 сағат бұрын
@@timbrooks521 what would the “body sensor” be though?
@mgr_113819 сағат бұрын
Yesss. Nice. Thanks for doing these. It took me a bit, but I now really appreciate the style of these videos. It's like being in the shop with someone else testing cabs, not an overproduced marketing video. I must say, I REALLY like the Three10. That would work really good for me as a damn fine rock tone. And now I'm torn, because my initial plan was to get one of your 12s for the accuracy and then play around with modelers and maybe cab sims if i need more "color". What am I gonna do now 🥲
@rogerdat7807Күн бұрын
That is some very serious Hogwarts tech there. Now, when asked why my BF cabs sound so 'magical', I will skip the technicals and go straight to: ITS THE GLUE!!!
@GuitarRyder112 күн бұрын
Barefaced Audio - dude has poor sound level for all intro... an audio expert? Methinks not.
@BarefacedAudio2 күн бұрын
@@GuitarRyder11 no - we’re just busy people so that was a single take with no editing or post-production!
@Marta1Buck3 күн бұрын
For me, it matters but not for the sound. I'm more worried about the integrity, also I don't like heavy woods.
@officialWWM3 күн бұрын
There’s no such thing as “tone wood”. It’s just wood!
@tobymoorhouse4 күн бұрын
Big Neo advocate here. I love my Mojotone British Neo; definitely a speaker I'd like to hear you demo
@j.koppany5 күн бұрын
I'm suprised as to how much better the 10" sounds compared to the 12"
@henkehakansson20046 күн бұрын
As someone else already have stated below, buying 2 strats of the same batch, colors, and setups, one got that mojo, and the other was dead as a doornail. The process, methods of getting it all together and the actual build, is way more important than any kind of wood. See the Taylor thing (and that was even on an acoustic). On solid body electrics. Period. I can attest to the strat thing. Back in the 80s one of my friends and I bought - independently of each other - brand new stock Squier strats. Years later we'd found out that our similar strats had serial number right after each other. Can't remember if mine had the "lower" serial number or not. But anyway, stock, from the shelves setup, NO mods at all, not the slightest. His had mojo, and was the better "player", but mine was dead as a doornail too. We used the same kind of strings 010-046 and yada yada. Later on I tried to mod it to the moon and back, changing out pickups, refret with thicker frets, and all that, refine the setups, but it just sounded different, not necessarily better. Here's the crux: Tonewood on solid body electrics? Which is your benchmark? Your yardstick to be measured and compared to relatively? It can't be any acoustic can it? The little (subtle) difference there is will not be better, it will just be different. People often mixes those two ones up, all of the time. Different is not the same as better. Better is not the same as different. There are several renowned luthiers both on bass and guitars, who still swears by tonewood properties on solid body instruments, bass luthier Sadowsky and a couple more. So while we are relying a bit too much on the guild, the cognoscenti of the world, the physical laws still applies. The ipse dixit runs galore in tonewood debate. Yes, now you have to google those ones up, people. Both the words cognoscenti and ipse dixit. Just because someone says it, it's true.
@BarefacedAudio5 күн бұрын
@@henkehakansson2004 why are you assuming that the wood isn’t the difference between those two guitars? If it sounds “dead”, what’s causing that?
@henkehakansson2004Күн бұрын
@@BarefacedAudio build, assembly, they had the exact same "tonewood" all across. Same exact dimensions, and we did even weigh them. Poor fitting of the frets can cause havoc too. Poor fitting of... neck, everything. Look, i've met numerous musicians, that when their electric solid bodies took a fall from a chair, couch onto a carpeted floor, without breaking any headstock or cracks in the neck, or anywhere else, the guitar never became the same, no matter that there was NO damage to it. It lost that mojo, and didn't breathe again.
@BarefacedAudioКүн бұрын
@@henkehakansson2004 they’re very complex interconnected resonant systems with series and parallel connections and energy moving back and forth between components, so there are plenty of opportunities for energy to be lost in a bad way tonally - however it is important to note that it’s 100% impossible for two guitars to be made of identical pieces of wood, because wood is a very complex composite of natural origin. Before a guitar is built it is possible to test the individual wooden parts to get the acoustic behaviour as similar as possible but obviously you can’t do that with a guitar that’s already been built!
@grelumbass7 күн бұрын
Aaaahhhhh - that's why they cost a lot 😊
@ccaappoo977 күн бұрын
evm other category
@user-tz1td8og6f7 күн бұрын
Love to see you entertaining both sides of the argument. For a while I was in the "tonewood doesn't matter" camp, but for some time I've been not as sure... yeah, the pickups only interact with the strings, but the strings interact with the neck and body. Not convinced that it's just lost energy. The string resonance seems to be inevitably influenced by the materials they're resonating with. Will be following this series closely, thanks for offering another perspective on this deceptively simple topic!
@BarefacedAudio7 күн бұрын
@@user-tz1td8og6f one piece of anecdotal evidence that supports it not being lost energy is how semi and fully hollow electrics sound more like an acoustic instrument when plugged in than solid electrics do!
@UphillGardener-ly5sh7 күн бұрын
All 335s have a plywood top and back, and Holdsworth got a wonderful tone out of a graphite Steinberger
@BarefacedAudio7 күн бұрын
@@UphillGardener-ly5sh and the tuning stability of a graphite headless guitar or bass is incredible!
@UphillGardener-ly5sh7 күн бұрын
@@BarefacedAudio I bought (and still have) a lefty Steinberger GL4TA because of Allan's tone
@BarefacedAudio7 күн бұрын
@@UphillGardener-ly5sh is the only difference between a lefty and right Steinberger where they put the control cavity and knobs, plus a reversed strap mount thingy?
@UphillGardener-ly5sh7 күн бұрын
@@BarefacedAudio no, it's a completely reversed TransTrem, even the thread for the arm is anticlockwise. Right handed faceplates will fit, the position for the battery compartment (on the back) is on the other side. I think there were only four lefty GLs made with lefty TransTrems 🙂
@ludovicpeysson11958 күн бұрын
I'm not convinced at all. What the pickups are transmitting are the strings which perturbating their magnetic field. Even if we got the proof that tonewood influences the tone, it might be so light it wouldn't be hearable. And in a mix we don't even need to talk about it
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@ludovicpeysson1195 but the strings are part of this resonant structure, and the vibrations travel incredibly fast through solids, so how can the strings be independent? Watch the next videos and hopefully it’ll all become clear…
@LIKEFUNK8 күн бұрын
Next the Paul Reed guy will be trying to tell the world that he's releasing some new Horse-Feather effect pedal and it's vastly better because instead of it being in a metal casing he's going to avail it in some wooden case of his vivid wild imagining that makes it better because of the 'tonewood' it'll be mounted in.....hilarious stuff methinks!
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@LIKEFUNK except that’s a purely electrical signal chain, whilst an electric guitar or bass is a purely mechanical resonant system which then uses a mechanical-magneto-electrical pickup to create an electrical system. So your analogy suggests that if you’re interested and open minded then you might learn something from watching the rest of this series…
@LIKEFUNK8 күн бұрын
The joke started and was missed at the inception of referring to a piece of timber in the first place as 'tonewood'...end of report! ..on an electric instrument it's not worth the chase quite frankly, it's more about the shape used and chambering if any incorporated in the build or non chambering etc, how the strings resonate depends on what's causing them to resonate and yes from that perspective it gets multi faceted ....strings used, gauge etc, pickups, nut, saddle/s, bridge type and materials used for such, electronics used in the instrument, tone and volume pots etc, capacitor type etc, cable attached, length etc, amp used, speaker/s in cab etc....fun stuff!
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@LIKEFUNK yes, it’s a complex system!
@LIKEFUNK8 күн бұрын
@@BarefacedAudio I'm looking forward to vids about toneplastic any minute!!! 😂
@andyhayes78288 күн бұрын
The way the strings are attached (bridge & nut) on an electric guitar is important for resonant tone, as is the body and the neck. Wood species ( Alder, ash, basswood, mahogany, poplar,etc) have unique tone qualities (I totally agree with the Warmoth 'tone wood' info on thier website). The Ring Orientation of the body wood is very important to how it resonates (for a 2 piece center seam body you want the 'open book' V pattern as opposed to the 'closed book' A pattern). If its a 1 piece or 3 piece the same thing applies for the piece that encompasses where the bridge is ( you want the ring pattern going OUT towards the outside of the tree going towards the face of the guitar, the ring pattern as it heads toward the center of the tree should be going towards the back of the guitar). The way the bridge is mounted whether it is a 6 screw, 2 post, tunomatic, etc, these mounts are connected to the body wood, the strings vibration is affected by the woods resonance. Also, the woods density is important. As an ex. A heavier alder plank will yield a tighter sound than a light plank. Medium weight is best ( around 4 to 4 1/2 lbs for a alder strat body for ex.). Too light and distorted tone gets mushy and undetailed, too heavy and you get a thinner, hard sound.......the middle is the best. A Good (resonant) electric guitar will sound good with any pickup, while NOTHING can save a bad piece of wood.
@VillageMonk448 күн бұрын
“If it sounds good unplugged it will sound good plugged in, and it if it doesn’t sound good plugged in then it just needs new pickups” does this guy seriously not realize he just defeated his own argument lol. I agree that neck wood matters in the stability of the guitar and in avoiding things like fret sprout. But to say it affects the sound has been disproven multiple times
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@VillageMonk44 to clarify - if it doesn’t sound good unplugged it won’t sound good plugged in, however fantastic the pickups are. All the “disproving” of construction having an effect on tone that I’ve seen has been flawed logic and flawed experimentation. Watch the next videos if you have time, you might learn something.
@VillageMonk448 күн бұрын
@@BarefacedAudio Appreciate your reply but can you give some examples of flawed logic in those tests?
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@VillageMonk44 yes, more to come in future videos!
@dabanjo8 күн бұрын
All I hear is the tone of your voice....wake me up when you have some actual GUITAR TONE examples.
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@dabanjo understanding first!
@dabanjo8 күн бұрын
@BarefacedAudio you mean "hypothesis". You hypothesized that tone wood contributes in certain ways to the tone of an electric guitar. Ok...now on to the next step. Prove it.
@GonnaGetYouBoi8 күн бұрын
there's a lot of people who can't afford really good equipment. and just like with anything.. when people cant afford things, they bad mouth them or try to undercut what they're capable of. guitars, tone woods, amps.. they all change the sound.. just not on a recording. because its going to be mixed. now for the rest of us, who dont listen to ourselves play off recordings.. and we're sitting in front of our amps.. this all matters. people listen to these guitar salesman on youtube.. who say tone wood doeesnt matter.. guitars dont matter... and meanwhile they're selling harley benton. so yeah.. they want you to buy cheap guitars. so what are they gonna tell you? they're gonna tell you tonewood doesnt matter.. because the guitars they're trying to sell, are all made out of trash wood. amp modelers are fantastic as well.. just not for live use. but you'll find videos comparing amp modelers vs tube amps... thats fine.. but its not even an argument, that a tube amp fills the room 100,000,000x better than a modeler with a cab. john browne from monuments.. switched from a modeler to using a soldano for live performances. i dont know why people dont specify their arguments. 'tone wood doesnt matter.... in a mix" no shit. it matters for us 99% of guitar players, who jam out in our rooms and arent running through a mixing board. and another thing, sometimes people have bad hearing. hearing is a very important aspect of being a musician, and if you havent honed your hearing.. I'm sure a lot of things sound the 'same' to you.. that dont sound the same to people who understand how to listen, at a high level. hearing each detail of a note. a lot of people dont hear that. they go 'what?' and i go yeah.. you dont hear that? so dont think everyone is the same, that because you hear something one way.. that others arent hearing something else.
@robertandre7788 күн бұрын
but everybody say setup matters the most ^^ and the difference is so tiny that you can correct this with an EQ ;p
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@robertandre778 if anything matters the most it’s the player.
@loydthabartender57948 күн бұрын
Great video. The thing that people miss is that strings dont vibrate in a vacuum. It's not like you just strike them and the pickups pickup only what resulted from your pick attack. The strings "talk" to everything. The wood, the bridge, the fret material, neck, screws, guitar design. Everything. If you loosen a screw on your guitar it can and will kill your sustain plugged in. Hollowbodied guitars have an impact on the tone that is going into the pickup. A string vibrating reacts to everything which means that everything matters. Then you have a group of people who go even further and say pickups don't matter. The less said about that take the better as it literally contradicts hundreds of years of well established electromagnetic science. The one thing I might disagree with is that if your guitar doesn't resonate out of the gate it will never sound good. I think you underestimate what can be done with pickups, tone pots and more drastic measures like hollowing out parts of the body or filling it with foam. Although you also mentioned that so I'm not sure what your actual position on that is. What's funny is when you start looking at composite guitars. Aristides guitars are taking off right now. I personally don't think they sound good. They all have this "twang" that's almost impossible to get rid of. Doesn't matter what pickups, bridge, scale length etc. It's always there in every video I've seen and when I've played them. I'm not sure if it's the material or the construction of the guitar, but I can't unhear it, or pretend its not there. I don't think it's because it's "not wood" but because it's easier to find a good piece of wood then it is to engineer it from the ground up
@TheLambLive8 күн бұрын
Consider your xylophone / woodblock example... Why do we have different sized blocks of wood for each note, and different sized tone bars ?.. Because in a solid body of material the resonant frequency is based on the length of the material... A guitar produces tones from 80Hz to 1Khz, and it's all one single static 'solid body'. Like the wood blocks, it's only resonant at a single frequency and its harmonics. Your theory there would expect an outcome of different notes having wildly different volumes as they resonate, or cancel out, and yet this doesn't happen.... This should give you some idea that your concept here is flawed.
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
A xylophone tone bar resonates as a beam, because it has a small csa vs its length (this is straight-forward mechanical engineering which my degree was in, and is important in all sorts of structures, a good example being the tuned dampers in tall towers). A guitar body is not this shape, so does not have a single fundamental and overtone series that follows the integer ratio.
@nsjohnston8 күн бұрын
There is so much wrong, technically wrong, with what you're saying I barely know where to start. But your description of 'sound' going into the pickups and moving through wood and metal etc. is just fractally wrong. Pickups respond to perturbations in the magnetic field that surrounds and penetrates that coils, this is the strings vibrating in the field causing this. The pickups don't care about whether the acoustic sound of the instrument is nice, the pickups don't amplify or process that, they pick-up the changes in magnetic field caused by the strings moving back and forth in that field. The reason why a bunch of the same model of guitar can sound different is due to the wide tolerances of potentiometer, capacitor, pickup inductance etc. changing the frequency response, you aren't hearing the wood. I could watch no ore of this, it's just nonsense.
@donanders21108 күн бұрын
This guy knows what he speaks of!
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@nsjohnston if you’d like to learn why you’re wrong about this, then please do watch the subsequent videos. You’re correct the the pickups only respond to the displacement of the strings vs the flux in the field vs the winding direction, according to the left hand rule - but the laws of physics mean that the strings interact with their support network because the support network (ie the instrument) does not have infinite mass or rigidity. More to come! Sorry you think I’m so wrong but it’s actually your understanding that is less complete.
@nsjohnston8 күн бұрын
@@BarefacedAudio I'm a professional electronic engineer with a PhD and over 20 years worth of experience. This is a topic I understand very well. I understand that strings lose energy at the anchor points, that' energy the string is losing and isn't turned into the electric signal that is converted into sound in the amp. However that is a trivial effect compared with the frequency response of the guitar electronics.
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@nsjohnston the thing I’ve really noticed about all the “YOU’RE WRONG” response is that it’s coming from guitarists, not bassists. When you’re running an active bass with low impedance pickups into very low distortion flat response preamp and similarly accurate power amp, into a very accurate full-range speaker like our Big Twin 3 (so basically like DIing into studio monitors), then you really hear these changes. But that’s for another video.
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@nsjohnston also, it’s not just strings losing energy - energy is returned from the resonant aspects of the instrument.
@t23c568 күн бұрын
Everyone needs to watch Jim Lill.
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@t23c56 everyone needs to watch the rest of these videos if they’d like to be educated.
@t23c568 күн бұрын
Jim Lill. Everyone go and watch Jim Lill.
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@t23c56 Jim Lil’s poor scientific method was one of the reasons for this video!
@donanders21108 күн бұрын
BS! Maybe on acoustic instruments but electric, BS!!
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@donanders2110 if you can hear an electric instrument unplugged then its acoustic behaviour affects the string motion. Physics will not be denied!
@JohnDaubSuperfan3698 күн бұрын
You do realise that electric guitars communicate through magnetic fields, right? So the shape, size, material or even the very existence of a guitar's body DOES NOT MATTER, whatsoever, even and especially if a marketing person convinced you that it does. This has been proven here on KZread more than once and if you've a functioning pair of ears (granted, most "guitarists" don't seem to have those) you can very easily run some tests at home and hear for yourself. It has also been proven on the market, a carbon fiber Steinberger will sound just as crappy as your starter Squier in the hands of a beginner, and it'll sound just as nice as your custom shop plank in the hands of a professional, or indeed it'll sound just as good as a Parker Fly, another composite guitar. Pickups, pots and scale-length are the only variables in electric guitar building that actually effect its tone, everything else exists purely inside your head. As for tuning stability, ANY guitar with a headstock is a liability since that is an outdated and inherently flawed design. Again, a carbon fiber Steinberger will stay in tune for a solid decade, or longer, as long as the operator isn't some ham-fisted ape, yet even a classically trained musician will put a guitar with a headstock out of tune simply by looking at it, regardless of the quality of wood. So no tonewoods, it's simply not a thing in electric guitar construction.
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@JohnDaubSuperfan369 watch the rest of these videos if you want to learn why your understanding is incomplete (ie wrong).
@JohnDaubSuperfan3698 күн бұрын
@BarefacedAudio I don't think so, if you wanna prove something you're gonna have to do a little more than *talk* about it. Anyone can route their guitar signal through a daw with a graphical EQ, since your ears clearly don't work, and observe exactly what happens (more like what *doesn't* happen) when you start removing pieces of your precious wood, you didn't even bother doing that so you're clearly not the right man to be talking about this stuff.
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@JohnDaubSuperfan369 I’d just like to be clear that I’m not precious about wood and I don’t sell anything made of tonewood - we design and build amps and speakers and cabs!
@jordan-c-bay8 күн бұрын
No evidence provided. This is click bait.
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@jordan-c-bay it’s not click bait - it’s part of a continuing series of education videos because I’m tired of appalling “science” on KZread.
@LogicalQ8 күн бұрын
The electrons don’t care about your tonewood.
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@LogicalQ the electrons only move in response to the displacement of the strings vs the magnetic field - and the displacement of the strings depends upon their vibration pattern, which will inevitably be affected by materials that can absorb and re-emit vibration energy from the strings. And the instrument is made of numerous components with varying resonant and damping characteristics.
@LogicalQ8 күн бұрын
@@BarefacedAudio the displacement of the string is dependent on the initial input from the player (pick/fingers). The tendency for the vibrations to transfer out of the string to instrument body has to do with the acoustic impedance mismatch(Z) between the string and its end points (bridge/fret/nut). This governs the decay rate and reflection tendency of the vibrations. While this impedance mismatch can be altered with material choice, it’s just a value. Two different materials could have the same acoustic impedance value and they would sound the same if used in place of one another. That being said, the pickup is only picking up the change in its magnetic field. The only thing changing its magnetic field is the iron/nickel/cobalt in the vibrating guitar string. The “tone wood” is not moving electrons. If you want to hear how much your tone wood matters, string your guitar with 1 string, plug it into an amp at reasonable volume and tap on the body of the guitar. Then realize that the input you provided from tapping on the guitar body is far more substantial than would be provided to the guitar body by strumming a string. It’s inconsequential. Energy transfer from a low Q acoustic system (guitar neck/body) back to a High Q acoustic system(string) is really inefficient. I’d be happy to recommend some reading on the physics of musical instruments if you’re interested. Or just watch the video Jim Lill did on this topic. What matters the most is: -Initial input -String composition metallurgy/mass/tension -Pickup position in relation to the string -Acoustic Impedance Mismatch -Electronic signal chain
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@LogicalQ it’s a nice explanation but it’s still an oversimplification!
@BillyTheKidsGhost8 күн бұрын
I've played the cheapest peace of S!#%& and the most expensive garbage... The biggest thing for me in both feel and sound is NEW strings... End. Of. f!#%/ing. Story.
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@BillyTheKidsGhost I think that’s very true for a lot of players! But then again some prefer older or very old strings. I’m now a fan of some of the coated strings on bass because they’re not quite as bright as brand new but then stay like that for ages - and longer lasting strings feels like a good thing, for so many reasons.
@paulmdevenney8 күн бұрын
all air and no spectral analysis.
@TheThunderwars8 күн бұрын
I'm an engineer with a thesis in waves propagations in solids. I am a very amateur guitarist, but I do build my own guitars. I was under the impression your video would be a click bait and you would explain why it doesn't matter on electric guitar. I'm a bit disappointed, it sounds to me like you are using concepts you don't understand and dropping some words you've heard about spectral analysis:( One if my friend built a paper guitar "Jazzcaster", you can find it online, and no one could distinguish it from wood, he had to prove to people hearing it, it really was paper. Let's cut the BS out of tonewood :)
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@TheThunderwars as you have a thesis in these things I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts on the forthcoming videos in this series. As someone else with an engineering degree I’m sure you understand how difficult it is to succinctly explain these concepts to people who don’t have this specific type and level of academic education. We design and manufacture some of the most acclaimed guitar and bass cabs in the world - they’re not that good by accident, they’ve that good because we know what we’re doing!
@Herfinnur9 күн бұрын
From what I’ve read, the word “Tonholz”/“Tonewood” originally just indicated the wood chosen from the stacks of wood for finer furniture, and it would be chosen firstly based on perceived higher rigidity and structural integrity, which would coincidentally also mean that it would contain no knotholes, etc. and less moisture or resine, and those last two qualities you would find out by knocking on the wood. All of the magical blabla came later, and even more of it came with the rise of the brilliant but self-taught guitar innovators
@Michael-xp1fq9 күн бұрын
Nope. I have a Telecaster made from basswood and a tele made from mahogany and when they're both strummed acoustically....guess what? They sound the same. Both ring out and create a vibrating resonance in the body for 10 seconds....just picked up my Gibson SG tribute made from walnut...did the same thing....rings out with the vibrations in the body completely dissipating after 10 seconds....hmmm? Well I guess this whole tone wood theory is bullshit. Now hush your gums and get back to making your overpriced cabs for doctors and dentists.
@BarefacedAudio9 күн бұрын
@@Michael-xp1fq while you’re entitled to your opinions, we have loads of customers who are very good musicians and play a lot of gigs, as pro, semi-pro, or amateur guitarists and bassists - and of the thousands of cabs we’ve sold, we’ve hardly had any negative comments about their value from someone who has used one. You may think they’re overpriced, and I don’t disagree that they’re expensive because they cost more to make like this, but versus what many spend on guitars, pedals and amps, the improvement in sound from using our cabs are much greater for the money spent.
@FuzzWoof8 күн бұрын
To be fair, the fact you think your SG Tribute is made of walnut says everything about your knowledge of guitars.
@Michael-xp1fq8 күн бұрын
@@BarefacedAudio It was just a joke, your cabs sound great. I was being ficitious.
@Michael-xp1fq8 күн бұрын
@@FuzzWoof Ah yes, sorry it's made of compressed beer cans and the solidified blood of satan.
@Michael-xp1fq8 күн бұрын
@@FuzzWoof Oh yes, sorry ahem, it's made from compressed beer cans and the solidified blood of Satan.....I mean mahogany? My comment made no claim to behold any kind of knowledge whatsoever. I just picked up 3 of my guitars and strummed them while unplugged and they all resonated/vibrated/rang out for about 10 seconds. I think this makes the whole tone wood theory bullshit. I have only been playing guitar for about a year so I am a mere novice who actually knows pretty much nothing about guitars, acoustics or anything to do with sound. I just like it when my guitar amp goes ROAR!
@simaojoseph9 күн бұрын
The first installment was just great, and now it went all down the cristals and fairy hole.
@BarefacedAudio9 күн бұрын
@@simaojoseph the science of instruments is very complex - I’ve seen so many black and white statements which rely on massive oversimplification, to the point that the truth is lost. And this series will continue to investigate the truth.
@gravyblue9 күн бұрын
Guitars all sound marginally different. I've got a 90's prs that doesn't sound quite as good as my balsawood chibson. " tonewood" is nonsense. A guitar is a system. It involves multiple pieces that can be harmonious together or not. The 'quality' of each piece is arbitrary. Those old danelectro mdf guitars sound great.
@BarefacedAudio9 күн бұрын
@@gravyblue I don’t think you can state that the quality of each piece is arbitrary - you have a system of numerous components, which transfer energy back and forth, connected in both series and parallel, and with different characteristics with respect to both resonance and damping. A poor quality component in the wrong place in the system can ruin the system’s quality.
@gravyblue8 күн бұрын
@@BarefacedAudio Of course it's arbitary. You can't know what will "improve" the tone. Those old Lespauls with nylon saddles or cheap aluminium tail pieces and bridges, the mdf Danelectro's. I've got a DeArmond that is a Gretch killer and is veneered plywood. There's a huge amount of cork sniffing around guitars. The notion that vintage is automatically better is a malaise that will only get worse unfortunately.
@BarefacedAudio8 күн бұрын
@@gravyblue it probably won’t get worse, as the boomers driving up old guitar prices will start dying in greater numbers…
@gravyblue8 күн бұрын
@@BarefacedAudio we can hope!😁
@yoddeb9 күн бұрын
Nonsense
@mark.guitar9 күн бұрын
You make speakers for high end guitarists (and very good the one that I tried was...). Your logical position is to say that the speakers are where it is at. I agree with you that the experience of playing a properly resonant guitar is far more rewarding than playing a dead plank. Jim Lill's replication of the sound of a generic guitar is irrelevant to this issue, as is any after the fact re-amping...
@udderhippo9 күн бұрын
Curious how come the steel James Trussart strats and Fender cardboard strats all sound like strats if the material is that important to the sound?
@BrendanMacsGuitarGear9 күн бұрын
When I bought my first guitar (1993), Ibanez RG560, I bought is solely on the way it sounded unplugged. It sounded great and played great and the both together were enought to push me to buy it. It is till my number one guitar to use now 31 years later
@loydthabartender57949 күн бұрын
Finally a "tonewood is a lie" video I agree with.
@DrMrAgentMan9 күн бұрын
Ultimately, it comes down to testing your claims. You won't do those tests, because you know you will be proven wrong. So kick back and take it easy! It's much simpler to just say things and believe in yourself.
@kotekutalia8 күн бұрын
There are many tests objectively proving tonewood does matter. It's just a matter of taste if it's worth investing extra for a specific tonewood.
@EricClapton19459 күн бұрын
Turns out no one gives a f!ck
@aaronsepulveda28749 күн бұрын
I have always been on the “tone wood” train, but I think different of the phrase “tone wood” different than others, they are all “tone woods” for different scenarios, there’s not some supreme GOAT wood, I agree about Resonance, Sturdiness, and bandwidth of frequencies is goated and is what most players refer to as “Mojo”
@iagobroxado9 күн бұрын
The sound of an unpplugged electric doesn't matter.
@riangarianga9 күн бұрын
Although I'm looking forward to the follow up (I saw what you did here haha), I'd partially disagree with a few topics you mentioned, at least with the way you voiced them in this video 😉: - The guitar body+neck shouldn't resonate, ideally speaking. If this structure vibrates, it also means it's damping the string. In our real world this damping of course acts as a filter, shaping the sound, it can't be denied. You can't avoid this damping if you want to have a playable-size or playable-weight instrument, you can just tune it. However, it isn't related to wood itself, but to the whole construction supporting the string. Who hasn't tried the «magic trick» of supporting the headstock against a heavy door (or the wall) to suddenly get amazing sustain, or either laying down the body on a heavy table and enjoying those ultra-thick notes? I found out the same happens related to cabs. For example, when you change the thickness of the baffle, it sounds different. It was an accidental finding: I had to remove the defective grill from the frame of a 1x12 cab, then I removed this frame altogether, some time later I was making IRs, then I wondered if it would be different when the frame was mounted (just 4 easy-on, easy-off metric screws through t-nuts), and it was. I took many different impulse responses using different mic positions (which to our luck they're playable), I individually compared them, I averaged a few responses from the same mic position, I took it one notch up using a quality FRFR speaker together with a proper measurement mic... Results were consistent, and now I know I prefer the response of a thicker baffle (and looking at the frequency plots I understood why). - Removing the paint of a body/neck wouldn't make the wood «shine» alone. Paint adds thickness and some weight to an instrument body/neck, actually it becomes an integral part of the construction of our string-supporting structure. So you would effectively make the body/neck thinner and lighter, you'd be altering the construction. Different thicknesses/weights do affect the final sound, like using more/less dense/porous woods while keeping the same design would do, and it's the main (but not the only) method used by luthiers to tune to taste acoustic guitars (or even violins, and other similar string instruments). Many players don't realise that, for example, Strats with vibratos basically have a void central body block, so of course this would remove mass from the string-supporting structure, and they'll sound different than hardtail ones, with a full central body block (I heard many pro players who know about it, though). Les Pauls and such thicker/heavier instruments will dampen the string way less. It's enough to read about Les Paul's approach and findings in his journey coming up with «The Log». - The acoustic sound isn't so tightly related to the electric sound. I can empirically prove this with a 7-string I have that I used to use for night practice: it's my quietest guitar ever, but when plug it sounds great (mid-gain passive pickups). But I also took the time to learn about the physics behind it, and how pickups sense the string (they're more related to violin mechanics when sound is produced with friction using a bow, than to acoustic guitars with thin tops and strings pulling the bridge towards the headstock to produce sound). - Changing pickups is one of the most overrated sound-shaping topics in Electric Guitar Land. It's way cheaper to tune the circuit, altering our current pickup resonance point by altering the load using resistors, different cap values, or even using different pots when necessary, let alone designing alternative circuits to the old-school ones (there's so much we can still do, even sticking to passive electronics, like using inductors). But you need to understand what you're doing (RLC circuits) instead of experimenting without direction, it isn't just about grabbing a soldering iron and following recipes. In the late Bill Lawrence's website there are great pills of information to start with. - There are quite a few scientific papers on these topics, specific to electric guitars (not just acoustics). It's not just we need to be out there making up stuff, and having empty discussions based only on perception. We can also read about acoustics, or even read patents (I even took the time to read yours 🙂). The theory part is ultimately based on physics, the empirical one is based on actual instrument construction practice, and then there's taste, which is personal and shouldn't follow rules, just what our ears tell us.
@humanbass9 күн бұрын
Lol, just the same ancient arguments and no rigorous proof or testing. Pickups and and strings matter waaaaaay more than wood. Hardwood is hardwood, they all vibrate similarily. Just switching the pickup position or from rounds to flats will change the sound much more than mahoganny to pau ferro or whatever.
Пікірлер
Question: If the resonant frequencies of "electric" instruments make such a difference, then why don't manufacturers make body sensors for the acoustic properties instead of using cruddy piezo sensors in the bridge? I have a hard time believing that this hasn't been researched before... Is there something wrong with the idea of a body sensor on a solid body electric?
@@timbrooks521 what would the “body sensor” be though?
Yesss. Nice. Thanks for doing these. It took me a bit, but I now really appreciate the style of these videos. It's like being in the shop with someone else testing cabs, not an overproduced marketing video. I must say, I REALLY like the Three10. That would work really good for me as a damn fine rock tone. And now I'm torn, because my initial plan was to get one of your 12s for the accuracy and then play around with modelers and maybe cab sims if i need more "color". What am I gonna do now 🥲
That is some very serious Hogwarts tech there. Now, when asked why my BF cabs sound so 'magical', I will skip the technicals and go straight to: ITS THE GLUE!!!
Barefaced Audio - dude has poor sound level for all intro... an audio expert? Methinks not.
@@GuitarRyder11 no - we’re just busy people so that was a single take with no editing or post-production!
For me, it matters but not for the sound. I'm more worried about the integrity, also I don't like heavy woods.
There’s no such thing as “tone wood”. It’s just wood!
Big Neo advocate here. I love my Mojotone British Neo; definitely a speaker I'd like to hear you demo
I'm suprised as to how much better the 10" sounds compared to the 12"
As someone else already have stated below, buying 2 strats of the same batch, colors, and setups, one got that mojo, and the other was dead as a doornail. The process, methods of getting it all together and the actual build, is way more important than any kind of wood. See the Taylor thing (and that was even on an acoustic). On solid body electrics. Period. I can attest to the strat thing. Back in the 80s one of my friends and I bought - independently of each other - brand new stock Squier strats. Years later we'd found out that our similar strats had serial number right after each other. Can't remember if mine had the "lower" serial number or not. But anyway, stock, from the shelves setup, NO mods at all, not the slightest. His had mojo, and was the better "player", but mine was dead as a doornail too. We used the same kind of strings 010-046 and yada yada. Later on I tried to mod it to the moon and back, changing out pickups, refret with thicker frets, and all that, refine the setups, but it just sounded different, not necessarily better. Here's the crux: Tonewood on solid body electrics? Which is your benchmark? Your yardstick to be measured and compared to relatively? It can't be any acoustic can it? The little (subtle) difference there is will not be better, it will just be different. People often mixes those two ones up, all of the time. Different is not the same as better. Better is not the same as different. There are several renowned luthiers both on bass and guitars, who still swears by tonewood properties on solid body instruments, bass luthier Sadowsky and a couple more. So while we are relying a bit too much on the guild, the cognoscenti of the world, the physical laws still applies. The ipse dixit runs galore in tonewood debate. Yes, now you have to google those ones up, people. Both the words cognoscenti and ipse dixit. Just because someone says it, it's true.
@@henkehakansson2004 why are you assuming that the wood isn’t the difference between those two guitars? If it sounds “dead”, what’s causing that?
@@BarefacedAudio build, assembly, they had the exact same "tonewood" all across. Same exact dimensions, and we did even weigh them. Poor fitting of the frets can cause havoc too. Poor fitting of... neck, everything. Look, i've met numerous musicians, that when their electric solid bodies took a fall from a chair, couch onto a carpeted floor, without breaking any headstock or cracks in the neck, or anywhere else, the guitar never became the same, no matter that there was NO damage to it. It lost that mojo, and didn't breathe again.
@@henkehakansson2004 they’re very complex interconnected resonant systems with series and parallel connections and energy moving back and forth between components, so there are plenty of opportunities for energy to be lost in a bad way tonally - however it is important to note that it’s 100% impossible for two guitars to be made of identical pieces of wood, because wood is a very complex composite of natural origin. Before a guitar is built it is possible to test the individual wooden parts to get the acoustic behaviour as similar as possible but obviously you can’t do that with a guitar that’s already been built!
Aaaahhhhh - that's why they cost a lot 😊
evm other category
Love to see you entertaining both sides of the argument. For a while I was in the "tonewood doesn't matter" camp, but for some time I've been not as sure... yeah, the pickups only interact with the strings, but the strings interact with the neck and body. Not convinced that it's just lost energy. The string resonance seems to be inevitably influenced by the materials they're resonating with. Will be following this series closely, thanks for offering another perspective on this deceptively simple topic!
@@user-tz1td8og6f one piece of anecdotal evidence that supports it not being lost energy is how semi and fully hollow electrics sound more like an acoustic instrument when plugged in than solid electrics do!
All 335s have a plywood top and back, and Holdsworth got a wonderful tone out of a graphite Steinberger
@@UphillGardener-ly5sh and the tuning stability of a graphite headless guitar or bass is incredible!
@@BarefacedAudio I bought (and still have) a lefty Steinberger GL4TA because of Allan's tone
@@UphillGardener-ly5sh is the only difference between a lefty and right Steinberger where they put the control cavity and knobs, plus a reversed strap mount thingy?
@@BarefacedAudio no, it's a completely reversed TransTrem, even the thread for the arm is anticlockwise. Right handed faceplates will fit, the position for the battery compartment (on the back) is on the other side. I think there were only four lefty GLs made with lefty TransTrems 🙂
I'm not convinced at all. What the pickups are transmitting are the strings which perturbating their magnetic field. Even if we got the proof that tonewood influences the tone, it might be so light it wouldn't be hearable. And in a mix we don't even need to talk about it
@@ludovicpeysson1195 but the strings are part of this resonant structure, and the vibrations travel incredibly fast through solids, so how can the strings be independent? Watch the next videos and hopefully it’ll all become clear…
Next the Paul Reed guy will be trying to tell the world that he's releasing some new Horse-Feather effect pedal and it's vastly better because instead of it being in a metal casing he's going to avail it in some wooden case of his vivid wild imagining that makes it better because of the 'tonewood' it'll be mounted in.....hilarious stuff methinks!
@@LIKEFUNK except that’s a purely electrical signal chain, whilst an electric guitar or bass is a purely mechanical resonant system which then uses a mechanical-magneto-electrical pickup to create an electrical system. So your analogy suggests that if you’re interested and open minded then you might learn something from watching the rest of this series…
The joke started and was missed at the inception of referring to a piece of timber in the first place as 'tonewood'...end of report! ..on an electric instrument it's not worth the chase quite frankly, it's more about the shape used and chambering if any incorporated in the build or non chambering etc, how the strings resonate depends on what's causing them to resonate and yes from that perspective it gets multi faceted ....strings used, gauge etc, pickups, nut, saddle/s, bridge type and materials used for such, electronics used in the instrument, tone and volume pots etc, capacitor type etc, cable attached, length etc, amp used, speaker/s in cab etc....fun stuff!
@@LIKEFUNK yes, it’s a complex system!
@@BarefacedAudio I'm looking forward to vids about toneplastic any minute!!! 😂
The way the strings are attached (bridge & nut) on an electric guitar is important for resonant tone, as is the body and the neck. Wood species ( Alder, ash, basswood, mahogany, poplar,etc) have unique tone qualities (I totally agree with the Warmoth 'tone wood' info on thier website). The Ring Orientation of the body wood is very important to how it resonates (for a 2 piece center seam body you want the 'open book' V pattern as opposed to the 'closed book' A pattern). If its a 1 piece or 3 piece the same thing applies for the piece that encompasses where the bridge is ( you want the ring pattern going OUT towards the outside of the tree going towards the face of the guitar, the ring pattern as it heads toward the center of the tree should be going towards the back of the guitar). The way the bridge is mounted whether it is a 6 screw, 2 post, tunomatic, etc, these mounts are connected to the body wood, the strings vibration is affected by the woods resonance. Also, the woods density is important. As an ex. A heavier alder plank will yield a tighter sound than a light plank. Medium weight is best ( around 4 to 4 1/2 lbs for a alder strat body for ex.). Too light and distorted tone gets mushy and undetailed, too heavy and you get a thinner, hard sound.......the middle is the best. A Good (resonant) electric guitar will sound good with any pickup, while NOTHING can save a bad piece of wood.
“If it sounds good unplugged it will sound good plugged in, and it if it doesn’t sound good plugged in then it just needs new pickups” does this guy seriously not realize he just defeated his own argument lol. I agree that neck wood matters in the stability of the guitar and in avoiding things like fret sprout. But to say it affects the sound has been disproven multiple times
@@VillageMonk44 to clarify - if it doesn’t sound good unplugged it won’t sound good plugged in, however fantastic the pickups are. All the “disproving” of construction having an effect on tone that I’ve seen has been flawed logic and flawed experimentation. Watch the next videos if you have time, you might learn something.
@@BarefacedAudio Appreciate your reply but can you give some examples of flawed logic in those tests?
@@VillageMonk44 yes, more to come in future videos!
All I hear is the tone of your voice....wake me up when you have some actual GUITAR TONE examples.
@@dabanjo understanding first!
@BarefacedAudio you mean "hypothesis". You hypothesized that tone wood contributes in certain ways to the tone of an electric guitar. Ok...now on to the next step. Prove it.
there's a lot of people who can't afford really good equipment. and just like with anything.. when people cant afford things, they bad mouth them or try to undercut what they're capable of. guitars, tone woods, amps.. they all change the sound.. just not on a recording. because its going to be mixed. now for the rest of us, who dont listen to ourselves play off recordings.. and we're sitting in front of our amps.. this all matters. people listen to these guitar salesman on youtube.. who say tone wood doeesnt matter.. guitars dont matter... and meanwhile they're selling harley benton. so yeah.. they want you to buy cheap guitars. so what are they gonna tell you? they're gonna tell you tonewood doesnt matter.. because the guitars they're trying to sell, are all made out of trash wood. amp modelers are fantastic as well.. just not for live use. but you'll find videos comparing amp modelers vs tube amps... thats fine.. but its not even an argument, that a tube amp fills the room 100,000,000x better than a modeler with a cab. john browne from monuments.. switched from a modeler to using a soldano for live performances. i dont know why people dont specify their arguments. 'tone wood doesnt matter.... in a mix" no shit. it matters for us 99% of guitar players, who jam out in our rooms and arent running through a mixing board. and another thing, sometimes people have bad hearing. hearing is a very important aspect of being a musician, and if you havent honed your hearing.. I'm sure a lot of things sound the 'same' to you.. that dont sound the same to people who understand how to listen, at a high level. hearing each detail of a note. a lot of people dont hear that. they go 'what?' and i go yeah.. you dont hear that? so dont think everyone is the same, that because you hear something one way.. that others arent hearing something else.
but everybody say setup matters the most ^^ and the difference is so tiny that you can correct this with an EQ ;p
@@robertandre778 if anything matters the most it’s the player.
Great video. The thing that people miss is that strings dont vibrate in a vacuum. It's not like you just strike them and the pickups pickup only what resulted from your pick attack. The strings "talk" to everything. The wood, the bridge, the fret material, neck, screws, guitar design. Everything. If you loosen a screw on your guitar it can and will kill your sustain plugged in. Hollowbodied guitars have an impact on the tone that is going into the pickup. A string vibrating reacts to everything which means that everything matters. Then you have a group of people who go even further and say pickups don't matter. The less said about that take the better as it literally contradicts hundreds of years of well established electromagnetic science. The one thing I might disagree with is that if your guitar doesn't resonate out of the gate it will never sound good. I think you underestimate what can be done with pickups, tone pots and more drastic measures like hollowing out parts of the body or filling it with foam. Although you also mentioned that so I'm not sure what your actual position on that is. What's funny is when you start looking at composite guitars. Aristides guitars are taking off right now. I personally don't think they sound good. They all have this "twang" that's almost impossible to get rid of. Doesn't matter what pickups, bridge, scale length etc. It's always there in every video I've seen and when I've played them. I'm not sure if it's the material or the construction of the guitar, but I can't unhear it, or pretend its not there. I don't think it's because it's "not wood" but because it's easier to find a good piece of wood then it is to engineer it from the ground up
Consider your xylophone / woodblock example... Why do we have different sized blocks of wood for each note, and different sized tone bars ?.. Because in a solid body of material the resonant frequency is based on the length of the material... A guitar produces tones from 80Hz to 1Khz, and it's all one single static 'solid body'. Like the wood blocks, it's only resonant at a single frequency and its harmonics. Your theory there would expect an outcome of different notes having wildly different volumes as they resonate, or cancel out, and yet this doesn't happen.... This should give you some idea that your concept here is flawed.
A xylophone tone bar resonates as a beam, because it has a small csa vs its length (this is straight-forward mechanical engineering which my degree was in, and is important in all sorts of structures, a good example being the tuned dampers in tall towers). A guitar body is not this shape, so does not have a single fundamental and overtone series that follows the integer ratio.
There is so much wrong, technically wrong, with what you're saying I barely know where to start. But your description of 'sound' going into the pickups and moving through wood and metal etc. is just fractally wrong. Pickups respond to perturbations in the magnetic field that surrounds and penetrates that coils, this is the strings vibrating in the field causing this. The pickups don't care about whether the acoustic sound of the instrument is nice, the pickups don't amplify or process that, they pick-up the changes in magnetic field caused by the strings moving back and forth in that field. The reason why a bunch of the same model of guitar can sound different is due to the wide tolerances of potentiometer, capacitor, pickup inductance etc. changing the frequency response, you aren't hearing the wood. I could watch no ore of this, it's just nonsense.
This guy knows what he speaks of!
@@nsjohnston if you’d like to learn why you’re wrong about this, then please do watch the subsequent videos. You’re correct the the pickups only respond to the displacement of the strings vs the flux in the field vs the winding direction, according to the left hand rule - but the laws of physics mean that the strings interact with their support network because the support network (ie the instrument) does not have infinite mass or rigidity. More to come! Sorry you think I’m so wrong but it’s actually your understanding that is less complete.
@@BarefacedAudio I'm a professional electronic engineer with a PhD and over 20 years worth of experience. This is a topic I understand very well. I understand that strings lose energy at the anchor points, that' energy the string is losing and isn't turned into the electric signal that is converted into sound in the amp. However that is a trivial effect compared with the frequency response of the guitar electronics.
@@nsjohnston the thing I’ve really noticed about all the “YOU’RE WRONG” response is that it’s coming from guitarists, not bassists. When you’re running an active bass with low impedance pickups into very low distortion flat response preamp and similarly accurate power amp, into a very accurate full-range speaker like our Big Twin 3 (so basically like DIing into studio monitors), then you really hear these changes. But that’s for another video.
@@nsjohnston also, it’s not just strings losing energy - energy is returned from the resonant aspects of the instrument.
Everyone needs to watch Jim Lill.
@@t23c56 everyone needs to watch the rest of these videos if they’d like to be educated.
Jim Lill. Everyone go and watch Jim Lill.
@@t23c56 Jim Lil’s poor scientific method was one of the reasons for this video!
BS! Maybe on acoustic instruments but electric, BS!!
@@donanders2110 if you can hear an electric instrument unplugged then its acoustic behaviour affects the string motion. Physics will not be denied!
You do realise that electric guitars communicate through magnetic fields, right? So the shape, size, material or even the very existence of a guitar's body DOES NOT MATTER, whatsoever, even and especially if a marketing person convinced you that it does. This has been proven here on KZread more than once and if you've a functioning pair of ears (granted, most "guitarists" don't seem to have those) you can very easily run some tests at home and hear for yourself. It has also been proven on the market, a carbon fiber Steinberger will sound just as crappy as your starter Squier in the hands of a beginner, and it'll sound just as nice as your custom shop plank in the hands of a professional, or indeed it'll sound just as good as a Parker Fly, another composite guitar. Pickups, pots and scale-length are the only variables in electric guitar building that actually effect its tone, everything else exists purely inside your head. As for tuning stability, ANY guitar with a headstock is a liability since that is an outdated and inherently flawed design. Again, a carbon fiber Steinberger will stay in tune for a solid decade, or longer, as long as the operator isn't some ham-fisted ape, yet even a classically trained musician will put a guitar with a headstock out of tune simply by looking at it, regardless of the quality of wood. So no tonewoods, it's simply not a thing in electric guitar construction.
@@JohnDaubSuperfan369 watch the rest of these videos if you want to learn why your understanding is incomplete (ie wrong).
@BarefacedAudio I don't think so, if you wanna prove something you're gonna have to do a little more than *talk* about it. Anyone can route their guitar signal through a daw with a graphical EQ, since your ears clearly don't work, and observe exactly what happens (more like what *doesn't* happen) when you start removing pieces of your precious wood, you didn't even bother doing that so you're clearly not the right man to be talking about this stuff.
@@JohnDaubSuperfan369 I’d just like to be clear that I’m not precious about wood and I don’t sell anything made of tonewood - we design and build amps and speakers and cabs!
No evidence provided. This is click bait.
@@jordan-c-bay it’s not click bait - it’s part of a continuing series of education videos because I’m tired of appalling “science” on KZread.
The electrons don’t care about your tonewood.
@@LogicalQ the electrons only move in response to the displacement of the strings vs the magnetic field - and the displacement of the strings depends upon their vibration pattern, which will inevitably be affected by materials that can absorb and re-emit vibration energy from the strings. And the instrument is made of numerous components with varying resonant and damping characteristics.
@@BarefacedAudio the displacement of the string is dependent on the initial input from the player (pick/fingers). The tendency for the vibrations to transfer out of the string to instrument body has to do with the acoustic impedance mismatch(Z) between the string and its end points (bridge/fret/nut). This governs the decay rate and reflection tendency of the vibrations. While this impedance mismatch can be altered with material choice, it’s just a value. Two different materials could have the same acoustic impedance value and they would sound the same if used in place of one another. That being said, the pickup is only picking up the change in its magnetic field. The only thing changing its magnetic field is the iron/nickel/cobalt in the vibrating guitar string. The “tone wood” is not moving electrons. If you want to hear how much your tone wood matters, string your guitar with 1 string, plug it into an amp at reasonable volume and tap on the body of the guitar. Then realize that the input you provided from tapping on the guitar body is far more substantial than would be provided to the guitar body by strumming a string. It’s inconsequential. Energy transfer from a low Q acoustic system (guitar neck/body) back to a High Q acoustic system(string) is really inefficient. I’d be happy to recommend some reading on the physics of musical instruments if you’re interested. Or just watch the video Jim Lill did on this topic. What matters the most is: -Initial input -String composition metallurgy/mass/tension -Pickup position in relation to the string -Acoustic Impedance Mismatch -Electronic signal chain
@@LogicalQ it’s a nice explanation but it’s still an oversimplification!
I've played the cheapest peace of S!#%& and the most expensive garbage... The biggest thing for me in both feel and sound is NEW strings... End. Of. f!#%/ing. Story.
@@BillyTheKidsGhost I think that’s very true for a lot of players! But then again some prefer older or very old strings. I’m now a fan of some of the coated strings on bass because they’re not quite as bright as brand new but then stay like that for ages - and longer lasting strings feels like a good thing, for so many reasons.
all air and no spectral analysis.
I'm an engineer with a thesis in waves propagations in solids. I am a very amateur guitarist, but I do build my own guitars. I was under the impression your video would be a click bait and you would explain why it doesn't matter on electric guitar. I'm a bit disappointed, it sounds to me like you are using concepts you don't understand and dropping some words you've heard about spectral analysis:( One if my friend built a paper guitar "Jazzcaster", you can find it online, and no one could distinguish it from wood, he had to prove to people hearing it, it really was paper. Let's cut the BS out of tonewood :)
@@TheThunderwars as you have a thesis in these things I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts on the forthcoming videos in this series. As someone else with an engineering degree I’m sure you understand how difficult it is to succinctly explain these concepts to people who don’t have this specific type and level of academic education. We design and manufacture some of the most acclaimed guitar and bass cabs in the world - they’re not that good by accident, they’ve that good because we know what we’re doing!
From what I’ve read, the word “Tonholz”/“Tonewood” originally just indicated the wood chosen from the stacks of wood for finer furniture, and it would be chosen firstly based on perceived higher rigidity and structural integrity, which would coincidentally also mean that it would contain no knotholes, etc. and less moisture or resine, and those last two qualities you would find out by knocking on the wood. All of the magical blabla came later, and even more of it came with the rise of the brilliant but self-taught guitar innovators
Nope. I have a Telecaster made from basswood and a tele made from mahogany and when they're both strummed acoustically....guess what? They sound the same. Both ring out and create a vibrating resonance in the body for 10 seconds....just picked up my Gibson SG tribute made from walnut...did the same thing....rings out with the vibrations in the body completely dissipating after 10 seconds....hmmm? Well I guess this whole tone wood theory is bullshit. Now hush your gums and get back to making your overpriced cabs for doctors and dentists.
@@Michael-xp1fq while you’re entitled to your opinions, we have loads of customers who are very good musicians and play a lot of gigs, as pro, semi-pro, or amateur guitarists and bassists - and of the thousands of cabs we’ve sold, we’ve hardly had any negative comments about their value from someone who has used one. You may think they’re overpriced, and I don’t disagree that they’re expensive because they cost more to make like this, but versus what many spend on guitars, pedals and amps, the improvement in sound from using our cabs are much greater for the money spent.
To be fair, the fact you think your SG Tribute is made of walnut says everything about your knowledge of guitars.
@@BarefacedAudio It was just a joke, your cabs sound great. I was being ficitious.
@@FuzzWoof Ah yes, sorry it's made of compressed beer cans and the solidified blood of satan.
@@FuzzWoof Oh yes, sorry ahem, it's made from compressed beer cans and the solidified blood of Satan.....I mean mahogany? My comment made no claim to behold any kind of knowledge whatsoever. I just picked up 3 of my guitars and strummed them while unplugged and they all resonated/vibrated/rang out for about 10 seconds. I think this makes the whole tone wood theory bullshit. I have only been playing guitar for about a year so I am a mere novice who actually knows pretty much nothing about guitars, acoustics or anything to do with sound. I just like it when my guitar amp goes ROAR!
The first installment was just great, and now it went all down the cristals and fairy hole.
@@simaojoseph the science of instruments is very complex - I’ve seen so many black and white statements which rely on massive oversimplification, to the point that the truth is lost. And this series will continue to investigate the truth.
Guitars all sound marginally different. I've got a 90's prs that doesn't sound quite as good as my balsawood chibson. " tonewood" is nonsense. A guitar is a system. It involves multiple pieces that can be harmonious together or not. The 'quality' of each piece is arbitrary. Those old danelectro mdf guitars sound great.
@@gravyblue I don’t think you can state that the quality of each piece is arbitrary - you have a system of numerous components, which transfer energy back and forth, connected in both series and parallel, and with different characteristics with respect to both resonance and damping. A poor quality component in the wrong place in the system can ruin the system’s quality.
@@BarefacedAudio Of course it's arbitary. You can't know what will "improve" the tone. Those old Lespauls with nylon saddles or cheap aluminium tail pieces and bridges, the mdf Danelectro's. I've got a DeArmond that is a Gretch killer and is veneered plywood. There's a huge amount of cork sniffing around guitars. The notion that vintage is automatically better is a malaise that will only get worse unfortunately.
@@gravyblue it probably won’t get worse, as the boomers driving up old guitar prices will start dying in greater numbers…
@@BarefacedAudio we can hope!😁
Nonsense
You make speakers for high end guitarists (and very good the one that I tried was...). Your logical position is to say that the speakers are where it is at. I agree with you that the experience of playing a properly resonant guitar is far more rewarding than playing a dead plank. Jim Lill's replication of the sound of a generic guitar is irrelevant to this issue, as is any after the fact re-amping...
Curious how come the steel James Trussart strats and Fender cardboard strats all sound like strats if the material is that important to the sound?
When I bought my first guitar (1993), Ibanez RG560, I bought is solely on the way it sounded unplugged. It sounded great and played great and the both together were enought to push me to buy it. It is till my number one guitar to use now 31 years later
Finally a "tonewood is a lie" video I agree with.
Ultimately, it comes down to testing your claims. You won't do those tests, because you know you will be proven wrong. So kick back and take it easy! It's much simpler to just say things and believe in yourself.
There are many tests objectively proving tonewood does matter. It's just a matter of taste if it's worth investing extra for a specific tonewood.
Turns out no one gives a f!ck
I have always been on the “tone wood” train, but I think different of the phrase “tone wood” different than others, they are all “tone woods” for different scenarios, there’s not some supreme GOAT wood, I agree about Resonance, Sturdiness, and bandwidth of frequencies is goated and is what most players refer to as “Mojo”
The sound of an unpplugged electric doesn't matter.
Although I'm looking forward to the follow up (I saw what you did here haha), I'd partially disagree with a few topics you mentioned, at least with the way you voiced them in this video 😉: - The guitar body+neck shouldn't resonate, ideally speaking. If this structure vibrates, it also means it's damping the string. In our real world this damping of course acts as a filter, shaping the sound, it can't be denied. You can't avoid this damping if you want to have a playable-size or playable-weight instrument, you can just tune it. However, it isn't related to wood itself, but to the whole construction supporting the string. Who hasn't tried the «magic trick» of supporting the headstock against a heavy door (or the wall) to suddenly get amazing sustain, or either laying down the body on a heavy table and enjoying those ultra-thick notes? I found out the same happens related to cabs. For example, when you change the thickness of the baffle, it sounds different. It was an accidental finding: I had to remove the defective grill from the frame of a 1x12 cab, then I removed this frame altogether, some time later I was making IRs, then I wondered if it would be different when the frame was mounted (just 4 easy-on, easy-off metric screws through t-nuts), and it was. I took many different impulse responses using different mic positions (which to our luck they're playable), I individually compared them, I averaged a few responses from the same mic position, I took it one notch up using a quality FRFR speaker together with a proper measurement mic... Results were consistent, and now I know I prefer the response of a thicker baffle (and looking at the frequency plots I understood why). - Removing the paint of a body/neck wouldn't make the wood «shine» alone. Paint adds thickness and some weight to an instrument body/neck, actually it becomes an integral part of the construction of our string-supporting structure. So you would effectively make the body/neck thinner and lighter, you'd be altering the construction. Different thicknesses/weights do affect the final sound, like using more/less dense/porous woods while keeping the same design would do, and it's the main (but not the only) method used by luthiers to tune to taste acoustic guitars (or even violins, and other similar string instruments). Many players don't realise that, for example, Strats with vibratos basically have a void central body block, so of course this would remove mass from the string-supporting structure, and they'll sound different than hardtail ones, with a full central body block (I heard many pro players who know about it, though). Les Pauls and such thicker/heavier instruments will dampen the string way less. It's enough to read about Les Paul's approach and findings in his journey coming up with «The Log». - The acoustic sound isn't so tightly related to the electric sound. I can empirically prove this with a 7-string I have that I used to use for night practice: it's my quietest guitar ever, but when plug it sounds great (mid-gain passive pickups). But I also took the time to learn about the physics behind it, and how pickups sense the string (they're more related to violin mechanics when sound is produced with friction using a bow, than to acoustic guitars with thin tops and strings pulling the bridge towards the headstock to produce sound). - Changing pickups is one of the most overrated sound-shaping topics in Electric Guitar Land. It's way cheaper to tune the circuit, altering our current pickup resonance point by altering the load using resistors, different cap values, or even using different pots when necessary, let alone designing alternative circuits to the old-school ones (there's so much we can still do, even sticking to passive electronics, like using inductors). But you need to understand what you're doing (RLC circuits) instead of experimenting without direction, it isn't just about grabbing a soldering iron and following recipes. In the late Bill Lawrence's website there are great pills of information to start with. - There are quite a few scientific papers on these topics, specific to electric guitars (not just acoustics). It's not just we need to be out there making up stuff, and having empty discussions based only on perception. We can also read about acoustics, or even read patents (I even took the time to read yours 🙂). The theory part is ultimately based on physics, the empirical one is based on actual instrument construction practice, and then there's taste, which is personal and shouldn't follow rules, just what our ears tell us.
Lol, just the same ancient arguments and no rigorous proof or testing. Pickups and and strings matter waaaaaay more than wood. Hardwood is hardwood, they all vibrate similarily. Just switching the pickup position or from rounds to flats will change the sound much more than mahoganny to pau ferro or whatever.