Tested: Where Does The Tone Come From In An Electric Guitar?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 มิ.ย. 2024
- This did not go how I thought it would.
0:00 - What am I doing?
1:00 - Introducing the Partscaster
2:00 - First Tests
3:43 - Questioning My Methods
4:47 - The Height Revelation
6:07 - The 2x4 Guitar
8:44 - The Air Guitar
11:01 - Outro Jam
My website is JimLillMusic.com.
I'm @jimlill on instagram.
____
Lately I’ve been looking for where tone comes from.
I did a video a few months ago where I started down the path of actually testing things in the signal chain to see if they make a difference or not, and I was surprised at some of the results.
The rush I got out of finding reality and realizing that most “facts” about tone must come from people who are just repeating stuff instead of actually testing them made me want to go farther.
In this video, I go farther.
I test as many aspects of the electric guitar that I can, with the goal of figuring out which parts contribute to the amplified tone and which don’t.
See (and hear) for yourself.
-Jim, 1/24/22 - เพลง
The main reason the air guitar sounds so good is that you are using the air in a very old shop, which gives it that vintage sound.
The workbench the strings are attached to is from the '90s. That's basically vintage tonewood right there, bro.
@@DesertDweller1 can't argue with that either
Next video, moving the bench outside into the open air to test.
@@canadianguitarguru ...he's gotta figure out how to attach the strings to a floating bridge using magnets.
...alnico or ceramic tho???🤔🤔🤔
My list of most important tone factors:
1. The player
2. Pickups
3. How cool the guitar looks
4. The audience's blood alcohol content
5. How your preferred deity is feeling on that particular day
Why this comment isn't getting enough love is baffling to me
This is spot-on.
That pretty much nails it
Number 5 seems particularly important. I swear I can plug into the same amp, same settings, same guitar, on two different days and get completely different sounds sometimes.
#1 should be "the vocalist"
The first comparison strum on the air guitar is one of the funniest moments in guitartube history
I think "tone wood" in electrics is a carry-over from acoustic instruments where the wood really does make a difference.
I think that's a very intelligent theory.
musician and guitarists are just kind of gullible and absurd and very very superstitious
I think this is an insightful, mature, and open minded thread of comments.
How the guitar sounds acoustically is how the guitar sounds, the pickup is just a microphone and some have characteristics that also change the sound but electrically instead of how the strings sound
@@c.a.k.comedy692 A pickup is not a microphone. Watch the video.
Take a moment to appreciate the amount of string tuning this video takes.
For REAL!
Dear God, I hate retuning!
@@TotalDec Then you would really love setting up a floyd rose
or how many strings a rock band goes through in one tour
I’m glad my first guitar was a floating bridge so I’m used to the tuning of each string 20 times before it gets to pitch
Having played the air guitar for years it always sounds exactly just like the album. Remarkable.
Without your facial expression and tone of voice, I think people are missing how funny your comment was. Good one!
Let's make an air band. I'll be on the air drums
I think facial expression is the single most important aspect of air guitar tones.
That's what I've found anyway, after 35+ years of research.
LOL!
No wonder so many players are just as good as I am!?!
I had noted but never considered air guitars never need to be tuned and are always in tune. Facial expressions, no beard or beard, and now mask and it’s types 😷 are in need of consideration.
Next step, obviously, is to try weighing the bench with something other than honda... ducati engines, yamaha engines, harley engines, indian engines, etc. And then you will need to try them in every possible combination and engine size. Will an 80cc sound different than a 500cc? And of course, it is necessary to consider the implications of engine size for touring. It would not surprise me if you developed a guitar you could just ride to the gig. Thank you for helping to move science forward! I very much enjoy your video. Good ear on that slide, with no frets to visually guide you.
And remember that the Ducati might have a desmodromic valve train: you have to account for the subtleties!
Tone from motorcycle engine is a myth. It’s really the workbench. He needs to find an early 60s vintage workbench. I bet that’ll sound sweet.
@@TennisCoachChip and take a axe and make it a "relic" workbench....ultimate custom shop sound....
My thoughts exactly. Replacing the weight of the guitar body with a bench still equates to a measurable quantity of tone-producing material being used to make the strings resonate..
As someone who equally loves guitars and motorcycles, this comment is the best! And if you’re not using the engine from a Panigale, then you’re wasting your time 🙃
Thank you for your faithful service to the world of tone. We can all finally give up the search for the perfect guitar and instead look for the perfect pickup.
And AMP. And pedals) But not a wood.
@@creepin_deth True, true.
String type makes a small difference, too
You should choose guitars based off of how they feel to play, not really the sound.
@@watersnortmoment3734You're right, the tone and sound of instruments doesn't matter whatsoever.
The message I get from this is: buy yourself a cheap guitar with a neck that feels comfortable to you, replace the cheap pickups with decent ones, have the guitar properly set up by a pro, and you're in business. Great video !
First take lessons, study and practice a lot, along with what you said.
Then once you practice a lot, maybe get better pots if needed so you can have a more linear volume change for the volume knob and EQ change for the tone knob. Also tuners if the OG tuners are crappy and can't stay in tune.
It's cheaper to just buy the guitar with the parts you want than to perform a bunch of upgrades.
@@MikeSW
If that's your experience i'm sorry to say that you've been scammed, me and my friends have built ridicilously specced partscasters and mod rods in the 500e ballpark
@@ihavewaited90daystochangem51 Don't know the pricing on the DIY builds. They may very well be cheaper. I'm referring to getting a Squier or Epiphone and swapping out parts for the equivalent specs of what you are looking for. When you factor in time, labor and purchasing tools to the equation - of what is already barely cheaper - it isn't worth it at all. If you are starting in the ballpark of those custom shop, artist branded runs of guitars that are thrown out every so often for thousands and thousands of dollars, yeah of course you can make something that performs just as well for much much cheaper. Those are more like fashion products though, I don't think they should be used as anything to weight costs of alternatives against.
This guy really understands the importance of research methodology
There aren’t enough variables in his test to declare that body wood doesn’t matter.
@Mario Reyes The nut makes direct contacting with the vibrating string, the wood below the bridge doesn't. 🤦🏻♂️
if he knew how to research he would have seen that all this has already been thouroughly tested by guitar makers...
@@myname-mz3lo I would counter with the sales factor. Who would buy a banana gaffa taped to a wall?: apparently it was worth $120,000!!
@@myname-mz3lo guitar makers have a very big incentive to keep the myth of electric guitar tone wood going as it makes them a hellla lot of money
How has this video not exploded and broken the guitar community?!
Because like many many other previous tests, people put their hands over their ears and go "la la la laaaa". Everyone 'knows' the vast majority of instruments of overly priced, when you agree with that... you find it difficult to buy them. So it's easier to deny any evidence.
B/c they listen to ppl like paul reed smith who are invested in selling people fairy dust. And there are plenty of ppl who want their expensive solidbody to be more special than one that was less expensive.
If you had bought a guitar for 10k, you'd also want to convince yourself you didn't just light 10k on fire.
Because there's only a few thousand videos out there demonstrating the kind of changes various woods can make to a guitar's tone.
Warmoth posted a video a few months ago featuring different neck woods. th-cam.com/video/z7jrZrrH4jA/w-d-xo.html
The differences are what anyone that's actually built guitars already knew. Yes, there is a difference in tone. No, it's not anywhere near as much as the corksniffers would have you believe. Pretending that everything sounds the same is just as much snake oil as pretending that plastic tuner knobs give you more midrange, PAUL.
@@ObscuraDeCapra You realise you've just linked to a video which demonstrates that different necks make absolutely no difference to the tone right?
100% accurate. I used to believe neck wood mattered the most until a pro luthier and builder did a deep dive with me into how pickups work. By FAR the biggest factor.
When I was a young man, ands full of unwarranted opinions, I swore that only maple fretboards could give me the "tone" I had developed. I played religiously, tweaking every aspect of my tone until it was perfect, but always swearing by the maple fretboard.
Then, one day, I was travelling, and didn't have my beloved Candy Apple Red Strat (I still believe that Candy Apple Red produces the best tone) and was invited to sit in on a jam by my uncle.
I told him that I didn't have my Strat, but he promised to loan me his. When I got to the jam, I was appalled to learn that his Strat had a rosewood fretboard. I resigned myself to sounding like shit. I didn't have my amp. I didn't have my guitar. The fretboard was god damned rosewood. I sat down to play.
A couple of hours into the session, I realized that not only was my tone good, but it sounded like my tone. That's when I realized that it wasn't the tweaking of knobs that had polished my tone. It was the hours of relentless playing.
Since then, I've owned and played some beautiful guitars, and some real pieces of shit. If I can get them to stay in tune for a little while, they all sound good.
@earhornjones You got an audible laugh out of your Cany Apple tone remark 🤣
Ya I'm not sure sure if it's my age, or the trends of the time, but I'm observing more of a demand for critical thinking and proof in recent years.
pickups mic the sound of the guitar. bad sounding electric unplugged=bad or stale sound when amplified
@@theuserthatishereYou’re completely wrong here. Pickups DO NOT work like a microphone. It doesn’t pick up sound, it picks up the string vibration through an electro magnetic field. Thus, the pickup matters more than anything else on the guitar.
"This list is long, but it's finite. So I started chipping away at it." This is a beautiful message applicable well beyond the bounds of this video.
Thats how I handle the ladies.
I think air from the equator brought north by the gulf stream would make that air guitar sound more organic and giving it that ethereal tone that you just can't get anyway else.
Or a fart after consuming loads of ghost peppers!
brand new sentence right there
@@fleecefoxes6471 Muchas gracias.
@@InTheSh8 Of course the peppers would have to be from heirloom seeds from India's NE high hills. Otherwise you wouldn't get that mojo , man.
gulfstream is in the ocean, you mean jetstream
It's insane that even after doing all of this, some people will still die on the tonewood hill. This table&shelfcaster just got a tie with the fencecaster in the functional guitar tierlist for me lmao. Good job mate.
Anyone who plays acoustically will die on the tonewood hill. However, it's laughable for the electric guitars.
@@le_th_ And STILL, a lot of electric players still die on that hill as well. Maybe there's something else on that hill, like good coffee or smt.
I built this guitar th-cam.com/video/GfGkCQigbOo/w-d-xo.html I have 2 necks for it, one neck has a maple fretboard, the other a a rosewood board. I can tell you that the difference in tone between the 2 is huge, anybody who isn't deaf could easily notice the difference between them. @@sukitta2
Nah, just a lot of denial.@@sukitta2
@@sukitta2
It's definately not coffee on that hill!
You know what's funny to me? There are still people who can't accept they've been wrong this whole time so they resort to "well, it's not a scientific test without the measurements so it's invalid and we still don't know!". As if the fact that a real guitar and one made of air sounding extremely similar isn't enough to tell us how much could wood really matter then. So I'm supposed to believe a guitar and a bench could sound so similar that I couldn't tell a difference in a blind test but if you somehow compared it to the same guitar but swapped the fretboard for rosewood it would sound different.
And you just know you can provide every measurement they ask for, and they'll always find something else you "missed," which apparently renders the whole thing invalid. Some people won't be convinced unless you fly them out to Nashville and make them watch the process from start to finish.
And it's funny that's still hundreds times more scientific than pretentious snob ears, "feelings"... It's even everything laid ou too be reproduced by anyone.
The difference in tone is as clear as night and day. Blind test and all. You don't have to spend a fortune but if you want a decent tone you still have to spend a bit, be that time or money.
@@MrRadbadger Night and day in Scandanavia maybe...
@@aneveningwithebola2727 There's a reason successful artists tend to go with good gear. Like I said you don't have to spend a fortune but anyone arguing it's confirmation bias to justify the expenditure.. That argument could apply equally to someone who wants to justify being a cheapskate.
What an absolute legend of a video. VERY interesting
What up Ola.
Agreed.
Will the air guitar chug?
But will it Chug? I smell a Collab maybe?? 🤣
Did the video chug though?
Brazilian students of luthiery produced a paper in 2010, where they tested 9 guitar bodies, with 9 very different woods. They even had a mechanized strumming machine, that achieved the same strumming every time, and they concluded that same as this video. The paper is called "Sobre o acoplamento corda-corpo em guitarras elétricas e
sua relação com o timbre do instrumento", and can easily be found via Google. It's in Portuguese though.
Interesting
podda maneirao te amo cara vou ler isso obg pela dica
In a strange twist, I minored in Brazilian Portuguese in college (university of Tennessee) Thanks for posting.
I read it. Translation to English--they used the same necks and pickups on 9 different Telecaster bodies of different woods. No one could hear a difference nor could they measure a difference. They also measured the vibration of the wood and calculated how much that changed the string vibration and the amount was so neglible that they discounted it as possibly changing tone.
massa legal vou pesquisar
This great experiment confirms some notions I’ve had based on my background in physics and electrical engineering. The heavy and stiff body and neck of a solid body guitar just doesn’t absorb a lot of the energy from the waves that propagate between the nut and bridge. That’s why you don’t hear much sound when a solid body guitar is being played without an amp. Since a solid body doesn’t interact much with the strings, it has little effect on the sound. That leaves the pickups and pots and capacitors, along with the strings themselves. So: with same strings, pickups, spacings and lengths, pots and caps, the sound is gonna be much the same. Other effects are subtle. I’m not saying they don’t exist or that they can’t be heard or that they don’t matter. Just that strings, pickups, spacings and lengths, pots and caps dominate. Then there’s the effect of the amp, which can be anything but subtle!
Thanks!!!!
I'm guessing you never saw Les Paul's interviews where he talks about his log guitar using a piece of 4x4 pine. He discovered exactly the same thing as you regarding electric guitars over 90 years ago. However, his real epiphany came when he performed for audiences with the log - nobody was impressed with the 4x4, so he found an old Epiphone archtop, cut it down the middle and attached them to the log so it would "appear" more like a guitar.
When he played it that night in front of an audience they cheered and loved it! He said, "That's when I realized... *MY GOD! People listen with their eyes!*"
Yes, pretty much everything we've been told about electric guitars and "tone" is complete BS.
I don’t think Les Paul even cared much about tone. What he did care about was how to amplify a Spanish style guitar without feedback and his experiments were successful. He was one of the first to understand that the “box” that made an acoustic guitar work was interfering with amplification and the solution was to get rid of it. He and a few contemporaries basically invented a whole new musical instrument much like an organ is a different instrument than a piano.
I spent about two years switching out every part there was on my guitars and came to the conclusion that I should just play more. This video proves that.
This. And the fact that there are some guitars more suitable for specific genres than others. I‘ve blown a shit load of money to transform my Les Paul into a modern metal mashine when all I had to do was go out and buy a freaking Ormsby.
Now you're talking
@@flowryan5829 After being totally obsessed with gear and even being a complete freak with small things like capacitor values I found that almost none of it really matters. Just play. You can play metal on a Telecaster and you can play jazz on a Jem. A versatile amp seems to be the one thing I needed to get every sound I wanted.
@@timbervandenhul9383 you are completely right. The guitar doesn‘t matter for the most part. BUT: You can‘t tune down with a 24.75 inch guitar down the same way you could with a 25.5-27.5 inch multiscale guitar.
That‘s what I meant.
@@flowryan5829 you can compensate with thicker strings to some degree, how low are we talking?
In recent years I already had heavy suspicions that 90% of the value in an expensive guitar comes from how comfortable/enjoyable it is to play, as well as how well it stays in tune (that's where things like the construction, hardware and especially the neck come in place), because the other 10% value could at the very least be satisfyingly obtained through the electronics, setting and amp combination. On your final test, I couldn't help but have a smile of my face.
Yep
And with a little research, some basic tools, and a cheap guitar to practice on, you can do the comfort work yourself.
My $250 Ibanez plays as well as any $1000+ off the shelf model, simply because I went through the trouble of doing the fretboard work myself.
I've got s pretty extensive collection and have to say, my PRS CE tops any of my other more expensive guitars. Why? The fit, weight,small attention to detail
I used to work on guitars in a busy well renowned London workshop and 70 % of our work was properly setting up new and old guitars and it always gave me a sense of pride when you took a loved (new or old) instrument that felt s**t under the fingers set it up and then seeing the delight on the owners face when they started playing it. Some manufacturers were better than overs but still for the money of some new instruments out there you'd have thought theyd set them up better to sell more! Then again it gave me an income.
@@coyotejohn3101 Not all of us are good with our hands in that way or have the space or tools to do it!
@@TheBanana93 So many guitars seem to arrive at the music shops with horrible setup. I have changed many people's idea of what a basic guitar setup is, how a guitar can feel, with a truss rod adjustment and lowered nut height. Tools required - a single allen key and a piece of sandpaper on a flat bench. Rarely have I come across a guitar that I could not improve in this way. It seems to me most of us are afraid to attempt any adjustment. I was terrified for years until I tried. My understanding of the instrument and ability to play the instrument skyrocketed once I took the leap.
People seem to forget, the pickups take vibrations directly from the strings, they dont take body noise or anything like that so ofc the body has no real impact on the tone, and if it does it is so hard to notice it is irrelivant anyway.
And those vibrations, their frequency,how they vibrate, and how long they vibrate, are a direct result of what the guitar is made of and how it's made. I didn't say anything about the type of material used. So no, I'm not defending the tone wood myth.
This is a FANTASTIC video. The "air guitar" alone is a piece of art
I don't have a guitar yet and as a habitual overthinker, this helps take the pressure off of choosing
I'm seeing a lot of wood shavings around the shop there so I'd imagine the tone wood in the air is helping the air guitar get those nice, warm tones!
Maybe the bench is made out of some quality wood that you can't get anymore these days :D
I think maybe the engineering prowess of Honda’s engines blessed the air in the garage which made the tone so good
I just wanted to say MST3K is awesome.
I'm telling you, it's the old Honda engines holding down the bench. lol
Nice demonstration of the importance of "tone air" in the guitar's sound. You didn't mention where you got the air from, though. Next we can see a comparison of air from different workplaces, public parks, and sports stadiums to see the impact each has on overall tone.
I use only a pure nitrogen-filled room for recording. It adds so much warmth and sparkle to the tone. Very analog.
@@cullendelmore2614 i sugest you to try a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. Realy sparkling tone and mind blowing experience guaranteed ;)
And you also forgot to mention to possibility of using "chambered air", a very common technique for achieving lighter bodiless bodies.
I like recording my air guitar in LA to get a super dirty tone.
Gotta love that stadium rock tone. It must be from all the sweat left hanging in the air by the sports-ball athletes. I'm pretty sure American football sounds the best with basketball being a close second.
Awesome. Very clear and transparent demonstration.
A Very interesting demo. Both Mark Knofler and Chet Atkins told me in NYC in 1999 that they felt that at least 50% of tone comes from the player, and how we fret & strum the strings.
you met mark knopfler? absolutely awesome
I'm guessing that a large chunk of the remaining 50% comes from the amp
@@ianmayer8032 yes during the Audio Engineering Society Convention in nYC, October 1999. He's one of my all time favorites, and a big influence on my as a guitarist, songwriter, arranger & producer.
So much this. Bad guitars suddneky sound really nice played softly with fingers
@@mikesolomon481
Think Mark was being humble.
More like 80% of the tone comes from the player. Thats why whatever Guitar he plays sounds like Mark and every Guitar Eric picks up sounds like Eric. There's nothing special about their guitars either other than they are all setup by their techs to play exactly how they like them.
You deserve a medal for this. I am not surprised in the slightest by the result so far. Tonewood? The wood is selected for cost. Shape? How well does Bo Diddley's square guitar play quarter notes? neck material, because somehow maple has "more snap". Please. You have shown the emperor has no clothes. Well done!
He actually has no body.
@Mario Reyes Tell me, on Strats made in Mexico, are the boards that make up the body laminated together with Tone Glue?
@Mario Reyes I can PROMISE you, In a double blind study... you would not be able to significantly differentiate the difference.
Data does not lie, Science does not lie bro. I don't care if you have been playing for 90 years. That means nothing. Take a double blind study, and you will see how laughably wrong you are
@Mario Reyes tone wood only matters on acoustics not plugged in. PERIOD. Acoustics are actually getting their sound from bouncing off the body wood. It doesn’t matter at all on electrics because none of that is happening.
@Mario Reyes I wonder if someone with a good quality spectrum analyzer and speakers measured the sound what it would show. That would be more definitive then an untrained ear. Of course a person would have to be technically proficient at analyzing sound in the frequency domain.
I think the biggest determining factor in guitar tone is what size Honda engines you are using to hold down the shelf! Thank you for an excellent video that proves the most important parts of electric guitar tone have nothing to do with wood
You say that in jest but as a scientist who has designed studies, this must be taken into account. This is a very valid "Feasibility study" (in science words) but I can see some issues. As mentioned above, one must take into consideration the possiblity that the 4 different guitars were actually all made of very resonant wood. Easy to think "well a 2x4 could not be resonant" but how do we know that. Perhaps mount the exact same experiment to a piece of Trex decking (plastic 2x4). Also try it with a metal bar (much harder to do). Same with the air guitar. I would like to see a further comparison using plastic or dense foam in the shape of a guitar and a metal shelf and bar mimicing the other 2. Again, scientifically speaking, it is entirely possible that 4 very resonant woods were chosen here. This is not to detract from the excellent experiment that was done. This is outstanding and needs to be continued. I would be willing to chip in on some materials to see more!
and if they're v-tec and which generation plays a big role too!
@@drjsmajor if we were doing an academic study of this topic then yes I’m with you and we it would be cool to take this even further, but I think this video was clear enough and pretty much proved the only thing that matters is the electronics.
Think they were Honda tonecasters! 🤣
Honda is leaving F1 so they can start supplying power units for guitars.
People still won't believe it. lol
Saved to favorites. Thanks for doing this.
this was absolutely incredible to watch! Thank you for being so thorough! Brilliant!
I've always suspected it made little to no difference. I used to paint guitars occasionally for a music shop and always used to receive the instruments in parts, not being a musician myself I did ask the shop owner if the sound might change if I was doing a paint job that needed a lot of layers and clear coat and he waved a little notebook at me and said "As long as I don't lose this it'll sound the same when it leaves as it did when it arrived". He was of the opinion that as long as the electronics were exactly right then the rest was irrelevant.
So he wasn't saying that as long as the money keeps coming in don't worry about it?
No, I believe the notebook was a diagram of the electronics.
@@Art-zs6sl He wasn't a greedy man as far as I could work out, it was a little local shop where he sold and repaired used instruments. He never charged me any commission for supplying me with work when he was entitled to it (not sure on the legality but I offered him 10% and he refused), he just took an hours labour for taking the guitar apart and putting it back together when I was done
I was really indecisive the other day pondering if I should buy a 50yo wooden table and a vintage honda motor to set-up some strings and play live, and after watching this video I've never been so sure of anything in my entire life
🤘🤣
Or just a cheapo guitar kit with the best pickups and hardware you can buy. You can give it a cool paint job even.
The only trouble with this is bring it to gigs!😊
@@iamoraal it sounds so good, gigs will come to him instead.
finally somebody gets the video
Always coming back to watch this video. It's unbelievable.
1). The finish. The finish has to breathe or it will choke and even suffocate.
2). What kind of soil the tone wood was grown in.
3) The tightness of the frets in the fret slots and the hardness of the fret material.
4). The age of the copper in the windings and where the copper was mined. Chinese copper is severely diluted with cheaper metals.
5). And lastly.but probably the most important factor in guitar tone is Magic Fairy Dust. Yes fairies have been known to throw their special magic dust on some guitars. Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Dave Gilmour, and Stevie Ray Vaughan have mentioned this to their closest friends.
love it
I was always very skeptical of the whole “mahogany body gives warmth and the flame maple top adds a shimmering top end” and I’m like nah pretty sure you mostly hear your pickups and amp. This confirms that very cool
I hear those kinds of phrases all the time lol this video definitely debunks that
People literally hear with their eyes. Put both in a blind test and now they can't tell the difference.
It definitely adds flare to your playing :)
I would simply choose whichever wood is least susceptible to changing shape in different temp/humidity.
@@katyungodly there are guitars made of metal or carbon. They're really underrated.
This could have been a Mythbusters episode. I love how such a scientific approach has been taken in this analysis. Absolute genius. The best analysis of its kind in the history of electric guitar I would say.
Doesn't have 30 minutes of ads
Still a purely subjective test. He should have recorded the audio signals, and shown how much the audio signal matched or didn’t with each change. That would have been far more definitive
@@eurly93 LMAO. It sounds the same. It is the same. It's the same. The same.
S A M E.
@@eurly93false
@@eurly93 would the difference matter though if you can hardly hear it at all?
let's say he did that and they didn't perfectly align, what would it matter?
your ears are not hearing a graph that shows slight inconsistency.
what you are _hearing_ is nearly indistinguishable.
WOW. This is an amazing level of effort. Thank you for sharing this with the world!
Amazing. This is one of the most brilliant guitar-related YT videos I've ever seen. Thanks a million for shedding light on such a controversial subject.
My jaw dropped when you started strumming the Air Guitar vs the Anderson. You've convinced me, tonewood doesn't matter, neckwood doesn't matter. All that is weight and aesthetics. Freaking amazing video man!
I would agree with you and the majority that "tone" wood doesn't matter one bit on an electric guitar as he has extensively proven but I'm still curious if it makes any difference to sustain and "tone" life
@@mrnorvegianguitarman No, it wont. UNLESS you plan to play your electric guitar without an amp, "acoustically". Then it might matter a tiny bit.
@@DrSamE it makes a difference in how it feels when vibrates against your belly as you play it. If it feels better, you will play better and think it sounds better. I feel that's what was driving the tonewood thing.
The biggest change was the pickup and the pickup height. That's what we anti-tonewood people have been saying all along.
Neckwood MIGHT still matter when you actually use the neck/the frets as opposed to strumming an open chord or playing with a bottleneck.
But I bet it’s so subtle I personally wouldn’t hear the difference.
Love this video. Pretty much kills the whole “tone wood” debate for electric guitars.
Acoustic instruments are another story. Wood absolutely makes a difference in them.
But for companies charging insanely high prices for mahogany bodied electric guitars, just because of the mahogany, tell ‘em where to stick it.
B*I*N*G*O*!
It is almost all the top wood and braces that makes the tonal difference in acoustic guitars, though. Not all the wood. Antonio de Torres Jurado, called by some the most important guitar maker of the 19th century, did an experiment to prove this. In 1862 made a guitar with paper-mache back and sides and it sounded great. People could not tell the difference. That guitar still exists in a music museum in Barcelona. Five years ago, Robert O'Brien, a celebrated classical guitar luthier, who also teaches luthiery courses, repeated the experiment by making a classical guitar with cardboard back and sides and a wood top that he was going to scrap. It sounds great also.
@@thirdactwarrior317 Thanks for this wonderful comment, and for sending me down a rabbit hole of researching 19th century luthiers.
Some records mic up semi hollow guitars as well which adds to the confusion
What touches the strings on an electric guitar? The nut, the frets, and maybe most importantly, the saddles. These things actually touch the string, which is what creates the sound. The pickup is obviously the primary factor, type and position. Cool to see it shown so clearly here. I was shocked at the steel vs. brass saddle difference, actually. Very cool.
It drives me crazy when people say things like "I want more tone" or "i want less tone" or "what makes the tone?".. y'all need to read the definition of tone. saying "i want a different tone" makes perfect sense. There is no such thing as more or less tone, just different tone. tone does not equal volume, there is no more or less.
Thanks for all your work on this and your other videos. Well done!
Speaking as an Electrical Engineer this is exactly as I suspected! I've always held that 99% of the sound of an electric guitar is purely a function of the pickup and associated electronics since coil pickups are NOT very microphonic in nature. This has now been confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt. Thanks for doing those tests.
I am EE too, and I am always saying the same, it absolutley doesn't matter what wood the electric guitar is made of, even a acrylic guitar sounds amazing (!) Don't believe me? Look at Steve Vais acryllic signature JEM guitar! It is ALL about myths and sales bullshit that makes the MONEY.
The pickup and the associated electronics. I'm just starting this video so what is the best pickup and what are the associated electronics? I'd love to have a shopping list from an electrical Master such as you are
@@amnesie6615 with an acoustic guitar the story is completely reversed. Am I thinking right? I mean it sounds that way to me.
I don't play electric guitar
yet 😂
Coils are microphonic, thats why they are wax potted
Wood has no effect on electromagnetic fields..... physics 101
I have been trying to tell people for YEARS that that best tone wood for the body is a 1990 workbench weighted with Honda engines.
You really went above and beyond here. Thanks for all this. Entertaining and informative!
I LOVE your Videos. FANTASTIC work.
Leo Fender must have had the same idea: that for solid body guitars, tone wood is more placebo effect than anything. He experimented with pine, ash, alder and probably plywood. But not for “tone”, for structure and stability. It takes a lot of strength to stay straight and not bend or especially twist under string tension. It was Gibson, trying to catch up with Fender that introduced the myth that expensive and exotic tropical hardwoods improved the tone of a solid body. It was a marketing ploy. Still is.
I agree. 'Tone wood' is absolute BS.
@@wireworks4252 in electric guitars, ya, pretty much. With acoustic guitars it makes a hell of a difference.
@@marctestarossa Electric guitars are the topic here, not acoustic ones.
@@nowave7 ok
@@marctestarossa have you had the chance to play on a carbon fiber body acoustic guitar? Lol there no wood at all on those and they sound almost dead on to most acoustic guitars. I think tone wood is more of a marketing selling point rather than function. Regardless of wood choice
I can only imagine how long this took to produce. Just the editing alone must have taken days.
Absolutely brilliant!
Thanks for all of your hard work and information.
such fantastic work! the discovery is so helpful too!
Good job! I work as a postpro audio engineer. What regularly happens is this. A client sitting next to me demands a certain change whilst I'm changing something else. I go back to the part that he wants to have changed to have a listen first. Client says: "thanks that's better"
Also the amount of times I heard stuff change whilst working on a bypassed plugin...
Expectation plays such a big role in perception it's insane.
DFA Slider?
I had a job for several years selling men clothes, One day someone walked in saw a nice sweater and said I want that...I looked up the right size for him and it fitted perfectly.
He said its too small... Well give me your sweater and I will look for you in the basement if we have another one in the good size... I folded the same sweater nicely in shape again, put it in a plastic bag, went upstairs in the store again and handed the sweater over to the guy, he put it on ( again...:-) ) and said, : "Yeah much better !!, Thank you......
It's like wine tasting. Same wine could be $5 or $100, depends if you ate pizza yesterday, or a maybe dog barked before your sip
Exactly. Watching this video, the 2x4 sounds clearly better to me ever time. But I fully expect I wouldn't be able to pick it out blind.
Producer: "Can we make that more 'orange'?" Me: "Sure, you dial it in. Use that EQ. Roll off a bit of 5K to start..." Producer: "yeah, much better." Me knowing: (that EQ is bypassed)
You’ve done a great service to the guitar community with this video.
and a great disservice to guitar centers world wide lol
No amount of evidence to the contrary has *ever* been able to convince The True Believers.
@@Jimiz666 exactly my thoughts. You can't change the views of evangelists with science.
Maybe most of the sound differences are heard acoustically
Years ago William Gelvin from Gelvin Custom Guitars, throughout many others, made videos debunking tonewood, the backlash was hard for him he ended up just stop talking about it. He was kind enough to pull up videos, while he was trying to impose facts and science over the discussion table, which breakdown the physics on this subject and the videos are still up on his channel.
He deserve some recognition, i'm pretty sure this video and it's impact was possible thanks to all the prior attempts to debunk the myths on this tonewood bs.
What an outstanding research piece. First video I've seen of yours and it's a 💎. Cheers!
The problem is that this video is trying to say that woods/substrate/guitar body doesn't matter.. and basing that whole argument on the fact that everything but the pickups, the strings and the tuners have been replaced... but that's not the case. Strings need something solid to resonate with to maintain their oscillation... plugging this rig into a bench does not demonstrate that.. you're just replacing the guitar body with a bench.. so, of course the strings will resonate the same - maybe better! Replace it with stale bread and you might have a point. :-)
This was absolutely the best video over this topic I have ever seen.... This was brilliant.! Thank you!
I’m a physicist so this is exactly my kind of thing. The only thing I’d like to add is some more objective measurements. Compare EQ curves, time how long a note rings out, etc. I appreciate your approach of using amped sound as the true test, but it would be interesting to see if there’s objective differences, especially given that they might become more apparent in different contexts.
total time of a string vibration of course will be different between materials because of damping but in practical application (material being rigid enough to hold tuning) any difference will be well below noise floor of a pickup )
someone did a study like this (can't find the link at the moment). They made "guitars" out of planks of wood, mounted a pickup/hardware, and measured the signal straight into the DAW. The researchers found minor spectral differences between guitars of different woods. They also claim most listeners could pick out the unique recording when given three to analyze. All that being said, a practical test like this video is very exciting to me. If wood makes THAT little of a difference in the finished product, great guitars can be cheaper and gorgeous guitars made from WHATEVER can be commonplace
Taylor, there are already various studies with frequency curves as you say, even a Thesis. There are also videos on that. But for papers for instance, search for "Vibroacustical Study of the Solid-Body Electric Guitar" from Yo Fujiso of the Chalmers University of Technology (2009) or "Body Woods and Electric Guitar's Frequency Spectrum" from Keith J. Soper of University of Toledo or even "A vibro-acoustical and perceptive Study of the neck-to-body Junction of a solid-body electric Guitar" from A. Paté et al. of University of Paris I think
@@JCleggy it was the swedish dude, johan
It's oscilloscope time gang!!!
Electronics technician here.
If the pick-ups we're sensitive enough to be affected by "tone wood" or the finish on the neck ,your guitar would be an extremely good microphone.
External noise would vibrate the strings enough to be picked up.
You'd literally hear your own breathing and pulse coming out of the amp when the guitar rests against your chest.
While it's possible to make pickups that sensitive , we don't
( for obvious reasons )
A couple things you missed that actually matters in very slight ways.
1.The distance between the strings matters , classical guitar necks have a cleaner sound for "fingerstyle" because less vibration is induced into the other strings.
But few people can hear the difference which is why electric guitars with classic necks are rare
2. A stiffer neck and body gives you more "sustain"....which the amp can also do.
And that's about it.
Everything else is just vanity and marketing.
Small correction in its place: A stiffer neck a body does NOT give you more sustain,- it increases the structural integrity of the instrument,- makes sure it doesn´t break or rips apart under heavy use, tension or load.
Sustain comes from vibration of the strings NOT being transferred into the bridge, saddle and tuners and on into the wood, but instead vibrating the string more by the vibrations running back and forth the string for longer thus giving the pickup time to pick up a longer lasting vibration turning that in time into a longer lasting signal.
No... the body vibration resonates back with the strings and alters the way the strings vibrate which IS picked up by pickups. That's not how body wood affects the tone. It's not like the pickups pick up the body. The resonance of the body and the strings together change each other and the pickups pick up the strings. The body resonance just alters the string resonance. Yeah it's not a huge impact either way but I think you misunderstand the mechanism for that.
Like the weight and material of the body determines what frequencies the wood will interfere with, and "steal" those frequencies energy from the strings. And therefore the signal from the pickup from the string vibrating is different because the body affects the string vibration.
@@Dude8718 not enough for the pickups to detect.
Ooooh, looks like we have a c-c-c-ca-cat fight on our hands. If you don't mind, I'll spend the time practicing some of the nice country licks Jim was playing.
Amazingly done. Gave me a lot to think about and reconsider.
Fantastic video Jim keep up the great work.
So many Guitar bros had their world shook up with this video. I love it. Science wins over "feelings" and marketing.
I doubt that. Anyone that seriously collects knows that guitars are pickup platforms. Saddles make a tiny bit of difference but the sound of a guitar comes from its pickup. I have 25 guitars and each one has a different pickup. EMG's, DiMarzio, Seymour Duncan, Fender, Gibson, Danelectro, etc. I love them all.
@Mario Reyes I'll be waiting for your video where you prove that maple somehow gives pickups a brighter tone using actual science 😂😂
@Mario Reyes I used to be a "stereophile". Every "high-end" store I went in to sold some sort of ultra-expensive snake oil. My favourite was speaker wire and devices to lift speaker wire off the ground. There is a story where the folks at McIntosh (if memory serves... which it often does not) did a blind test with one set of expensive speaker wires and then another set of expensive speaker wires. They had the stereophile press describe the two and choose which sounded best - which they did. They waxed poetically about wire A, and wire B with some choosing the former and the others choosing the latter. The only thing was, they used a coat hanger wire in place of expensive speaker wire - for both tests. You sound like the stereophile press in this story.
@Mario Reyes if he replaced the benches with steel?
@@DESOUSAB I guess you've meant "audiophile"? Never heard about the "stereophile" term
The pickup height adjusted was groundbreaking to me. Unbelievably clear.
I love the way you handled and navigated your way through this experience. It really reminded me of conducting statistical experiments.
Pickup height is such a massive factor with tone. For high gain it lends or reduces clarity, but with cleaner sounds you really hear dynamic ranges like crazy. Along with that, adjusting the pole pieces changes things (being careful not to unscrew a pole completely!).
Ok... First off, thank you for all the effort you put into these tests! The entire guitar community is greatly in your debt. And I personally am grateful because I am a hobbyist guitar builder and modder. I am about to launch into building some custom designs, and this information really helps me with determining wood selection, etc. for my builds. You rock, my friend!
I love your testing methodology, and how you just present the findings, and leave the viewer to make his\her own conclusion. And not focusing at all on how you felt they compared.
As someone who works in electronics repair, this was the result I expected. Your thought process and thoroughness were a pleasure to watch.
Yeah also have a background in electronics and similarly my first thought was anything affecting the electronic line is going to be the most important next to the player.
@@larryboles5064 the sound in an electric comes from the pick up configuration and the way the strings are setup, so scale and tension & bridge/trem setup. Body type does has an effect as why an archtop has a different sound, but for solids not as much, there's a slight influence in timbre and sustain but it's trumped by the pick up config and bridge setup.
The thought process was the scientific method.
Awesome to see someone finally crush the nonsense theory of “tone wood” as pertains to electric guitars. I’ve owned Strats and Teles with both maple and rosewood necks, ash and alder bodies (as well as Les Pauls with chambered and solid bodies) and always found there to be a bigger difference in tone between two IDENTICAL guitars than two versions of the same guitar. It always came down to pickup / string height, tolerances of the tone caps, and even slight differences amongst pickups from the same manufacturer.
Excellent and entertaining video !
Well, maybe the wood doesnt affect the sound that much, but, they do play a very important role in tune stability, how it gets old, comfort, the looks, i mean, as seen on this video, the tone is the least important thing if were talking about wood, but it is important in some other aspects as an instrument.
They forget the reason gibson and fender sounds very different unplugged is Because of the construction.
Scale length and neck joint.
Also fender telecaster/strat has cavity under the pickguard unlike the les paul/sg which is completely solid which is why they sound more resonant.
@@franciscobravoortiz566 sure but the discussion here is only about tone, the whole theory about how much wood affects tone. Aesthetics and stability are not so controversial as the tone.
@@melodica5407 my strat is more resonant than my Les Paul.
@@melodica5407 are u gonna play your electric guitar unplugged tho? No so it doesn’t matter
This is my favourite TH-cam clip of all time, great work mate
Great work you have done here. Congrats
This is THE best, most detailed yet quick and straight to the point tone testing investigational video I've ever seen. This is borderline a scientifical university-funded study on guitar tone, just...wow amazing man
I would say Warmoth's test is much more accurate and scientific because they keep the variables down to one thing only, the body wood. When you have more than one variable there is no way to determine if one item or the combo of the items, what percentage of each combo items, are what is changing tone. You need to limit variables to accurately determine what is changing the sound.
@@skoneal007 By the same token, Warmoth's test involves the use of human hearing to determine results. Fundamentally that is flawed because there is a great variety not only in the human hearing apparatus itself, but in human perceptions of what is heard. A dry signal running directly into a high quality interface and then analyzed for quantitative numbers would provide a higher standard of evidence. It would also be helpful if the experiment was double blind, or even better if the "player" was a robotic apparatus that could precisely recreate each stroke of the pick.
However, at that point what is the point? The important thing about sound and music is what people think they hear. When it comes to the video above and the results, the best that can be concluded is that either an old garage workbench as a guitar body is the equal of a Tom Anderson chambered swamp ash body OR the body wood matters so little as to be entirely inconsequential to the final sound.
What I am interested in would be his results in testing strings. I personally find them to make a huge difference, but I am willing to concede the potential for my own biases to have a big influence on my perception of that difference. Will be interesting to see.
@@ERWebster You definitly could go down the "scientific" rabbit hole deeper, but I do think the Warmoth test was accurate enough to come up with a definite conclusion. My take away is that yes "tone wood" can make a difference, but only subtlety. In a complete mix it would be very difficult to tell the difference and a mixing engineer could EQ it to make it sound like what ever wood you want.
@@skoneal007 I agree for the most part.
Regarding the scientific merit of either the Warmoth video or this one, drawing a conclusion based on a handful of data points is correlation at best and incidental happenstance at worst. A few hundred or even thousand points of carefully vetted data would get us to where statistically we could isolate a significant trend, if one existed.
I have also been long in the camp of tonewood has a small effect on tone, but as time goes by and evidence mounts, I am finding that my internal estimate of how much effect it has is ever dropping.
Fortunately, I don't need broad scientific consensus to arrive at a personal opinion, just sufficient demonstration and personal experience to strongly suggest a trend.
After this video and others I am thinking that the effect of wood is extremely low, and as you said can easily be EQ'd away or entirely over-ridden by the tone of a pickup, if it can be heard at all.
Scientific in my view. The guy is checking hypotheses linking different Independent Variables with the Dependent Variable. Does not matter that he’s not putting numbers on the data. Data just means ‘that which is given’. A police detective is also scientific, posing and testing hypotheses. What’s going on here is Qualitative Positivism. The Technique is Qualitative and the Epistemology is Positivistic. These dimensions of methodology are wholly orthogonal (independent of each other). Great work
As an engineer, I approve your process. I have always predicted that the pickups are at least 99% of the tone. The only idea I have had on how much a role the wood has on the tone is that the vibration you feel in the wood is energy lost from the string. So a guitar that vibrates more pulls more from the strings. This has been my guess on why something like a carbon fiber guitar would have more sustain, less energy is lost from the string to the body.
Paul Reed Smith in some video used the phrase "Guitar building is a subtractive equation" which makes perfect sense. Your materials and construction only ever remove frequencies.
Yes, and a lot of folks tell you the difference: A vibrating guitar also means a long sustain! Wood vibration is only important with acoustic guitars.
As a rocket scientist i don't really approve of his methods. Hold on , I'm going to call my buddy, he's a chef i need to know his thoughts on this.
Ok I'm back,he wasn't too convinced so he called his buddy, he's a astro physicist so he believes makes him even more qualified to make observations about guitar tones.
He said that his conclusions after carefully removing them from his human exit hole match up with yours.
You sir or Madam are a genius.
@@AllCarsUnited just saying that as someone who spends all day determining the effects different variables impact on an overall system, his process was solid. Unlike alot of other videos where people change multiple variables without thinking it through.
What rockets do you work on?
@@MCTGFoSheez red rockets for sure
The air guitar sounded surpisingly close, but had a sympathetic resonating note that made it sound extra glorious! Thank you for using such a well controlled testing methodology!
Lol kinda feels like. Upon rewatching, the guitar is a glorified weird harp? I'm still curious about sustain and how that comes to be. I know strats die super quick compared to les Paul's.
I know scale length is huge or I think very big as well. Feels like get something that's comfy with pickups you like
The problem is that this video is trying to say that woods/substrate/guitar body doesn't matter.. and basing that whole argument on the fact that everything but the pickups, the strings and the tuners have been replaced... but that's not the case. Strings need something solid to resonate with to maintain their oscillation... plugging this rig into a bench does not demonstrate that.. you're just replacing the guitar body with a bench.. so, of course the strings will resonate the same - maybe better! Replace it with stale bread and you might have a point. :-)
Lol @@crazyjack9voltbatteryamps
@@crazyjack9voltbatteryampsso it's not an 'air guitar', but instead is a 5-ply MDF fiber board guitar. Which happens to sound the same as the tele which has a solid alder body. Point being that tonewood is snake oil. It makes no *appreciable* difference to the sound. But I feel we're at the point where it's become an article of faith, there is no analysis that would change people's mind, because they have an emotional investment in the product.
Great work all around!! Bravo! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👍🏻
I guess Brian May together with his father had this figured out back in the 70’s. Legend. Thank you for the great content.
Leo Fender probably had it figured out too!
@@redsky1433 In fact, he did. Leo chose the woods he used for his guitars because they were sturdy without being too heavy, and they were cheaply available in 1951.
@@zhiracs yeah, certain guitar woods have still benefits. I dont personally like basswood much cause it get dings and chips way too easy compared to mahogany. Every Ibanez RG I have owned have their paint chipped pretty quick and sometimes I dont even recall hitting them anywhere but still the dings appear out from nowhere
@@zhiracs like the first tele ... it was pine wood
Loved your tests. As a retired Luthier I was always amused by all the things I used to hear from customers as well as comments made on guitar forums. My own personal experience taught me that there was far more BS out there than facts. I even "blind ear" tested some people to see if they could tell the difference in sound between some HB pickups and Gibson PAFs--they thought they'd have no trouble determining which was which. Boy were they wrong LOL! Likewise, a guitar I built with different wood species than a typical Les Paul fooled them as well. I particularly loved it when they'd pick my guitar as the better sounding one 😄 I did experience better resonance and slight differences in sustain with different body construction. Pickups do make a difference as does the circuitry when it comes to sound and that's the best way to upgrade a low end model (or a Partscaster). But, in the hands of a good player, and plugged into a decent amp, even a low end guitar can sound much better. It reminded me how often people would rave about a brass nut sounding so much better--I would then say to them "So, you play a lot of open strings when you play?" They would be puzzled, until I pointed out to them that you take the nut out of play when fretting chords and individual notes LOL!
What an awesome comment :)
Love hearing opinions from experienced luthiers. I imagine guitars and wines are similar in the sense that the “connoisseurs” usually can’t pass a blind test. I always thought pickups made the biggest difference, then body size. I really only care about the type of wood for acoustic guitars.
@@CYON4D Thanks--the truth is, it's easy for people to buy into the hype about guitars because we all wanted to demystify why some guitar players and their guitars sounded so awesome (I was no different when I was a young guitar player and eager to play and sound better). Now that I'm an old fart I play and sound much better LOL! Van Halen always sounded better than the folks who tried his guitar and amp--it wasn't the wood or the pickups--it was the man behind the axe!
@@owenmoore7340 And I can agree with that for acoustic guitars--the wood and the finish on them makes a difference, as does how they made, bracing, sound holes, etc. I agree on the wine too--I'll never be a wine snob and I loved it when the palettes of the so-called experts were fooled years back by the superb wines from California and even in Canada and other countries LOL! As with all things, it also comes down to what you like. E.G. when it came to guitars, I was a Fender lover first, and so the first quality guitar I bought was a pre CBS Telecaster (swamp ash body with a maple neck and fingerboard). I stupidly sold it to buy a car in the 70s and the closest I found to it after that was a Japanese made Squier that I still own today. It sounds as good as I recall but the neck is slightly different than my original--but still a pleasure to play. RIP Leo Fender! I always wanted to build guitars as great, (or better), than George and Leo--that was my goal, but I really don't feel that I did any better than to match what they did. But I had a lot of fun trying!
Honestly, I'm no where near experienced enough to believe I could pick it out blind, but the no body guitar seemed to have a much rounder sound (other than when he strummed hard, but that could do with the difference in force). Hearing that difference through TH-cam's compression leads me to believe that IRL it's a larger difference. With that said, I'm a firm believer that the player makes the biggest difference in tone, followed by the amp, followed by the type of pickup. There's also no doubt in my mind that different constructions has a HUGE affect on sustain. My Gibson Les Paul Standard has never ending sustain - I'm guessing due to fixed bridge alongside of the weight of the guitar (it's one of the old non weight-relieved ones), and the set neck - and for some reason, my EBMM Majesty has surprisingly good sustain. The neck through design has to be the biggest contributing factor because the guitar itself is insanely light, and it has a floating bridge. It definitely doesn't have as much sustain as my LP, but especially considering the floating bridge, it's truly insane to think about what they were able to do! One of the other things that I truly believe that people forget is that people are going to typically hear the guitar either live, or in a mix, and it's going to be almost impossible to hear the nuances. IMO, the most important thing for a guitarist's guitar is that they're playing a guitar that they're comfortable with, one that gives them the feel they like, and one that inspires them.
Brilliant man, and beautiful playing!
This video is fantastic, great work!
Excellent work. As an electonic engineer, i am not surprised :-) But I AM pleased someone has finally called (and proved) BS on the nonsense wood debate on electric guitars :-)
I've been playing guitars for nearly 40 years. IMO the tone wood argument is ridiculous. It's about pickups, strings, and electronics. I think you've done a great job demonstrating that. Don't mention this to PRS though. "The best tone comes from our 200 year aged stock of Brazilian pappy burly wood. Its unique character comes from the Bashiva Beetle which burrows its dung deep into the trunk of the tree. For this reason it's an additional $3000 per linear square inch, but WELL worth it!" Got to love marketing.
😂 so true. My only counter-argument is that my first experience with a PRS was 25ish years ago where i picked one up at a Sam Ash, bent the F*CK out of the whammy bar all the way down to the fret board and popped it back up to a perfectly in tune guitar!?!? Their stock locking nut system on the headstock tuners is pretty incredible.
I'm no one to judge if wood makes a difference and I don't care as much as other people do, if I like the guitar I like it and I don't care about wood nor anything. Paul is an ass but PRS guitars are amazing. Their super expensive models are bullshit tho.
I wish they were just honest and say, "Hey look these are expensive collector items, akin to furniture, but they can also be used to play music every once in a while." :D
Hahaha yesss
Thanks so much for this. I’ve done similar tests but nothing this complex. Great stuff
You are the Man Jim Lill :) Absolutely love this video!!!
Excellent findings! This pretty much reaffirms what I believe attributes most to tone. Acoustic guitars might be slightly different in terms of tonality, but electric guitars pretty much only sound as good as their electronics.
And their hands
of course, considering the point of the pickups are to pickup ONLY the movement of the strings
Check out difference between GOOD guitars (not some random pieces of wood) - th-cam.com/video/n4puGOEmGjs/w-d-xo.html
@@david_lynch Sounds like you missed the point. The 2 x 4 sounded damn close to the Anderson with the same pickup, pickup placement and distance, and same electronics. Other “good guitars” would have different pickups, with different pickup height and positions, etc... I think Jim shows definitively that the woods have very little effect on the tone.
@@david_onbass There are many ways to test the idea that the wood of an electric guitar affects tone. What I call "good guitars" are guitars whose wood really affects the tone, in a good way. In the video I provided, the author tests the sound of two identical guitars (the same year and the same model) with the same set of pickups. The difference in tone is really audible, moreover, in a blind test (try it). This is clearly audible on video, in reality the difference is even more significant, especially if you take Gibson Les Paul guitar made from the 1950s to 1968 (may be 1969) and compare with some made in 2012, for example.
There are a lot of dudes with 10k guitars that are pretty pissed they stumbled upon this video. Or they are choosing to live in the denial zone.
You are a hero to all mankind.
Haha you don't buy an expensive guitar because you think "the more I spend the better it will sound." You buy an expensive instrument because you can. It's a status symbol. And there a definitely major differences between 2300$ guitar and a 300$ guitar. Tuning stability, resonance, neck shape, quality of hardwear, fit, and finish to name a few. But yes, the duncan double stack sounds like a duncan double stack. Wherever you put it.
@@spylingual8573 There _better_ be a difference in build quality for that extra $2000... !!!
But the TS was referring to those guys who buy the more exotic stuff due to the supposed better sound of the wood those guitars are made of. And that's a myth.
And regarding the quality, the rule of diminishing returns always applies. So up to a certain point you do get a better quality instrument. This applies to upgrading from a $300 instrument to one that costs let's say $2300. But after that, if you opt for a $4300 guitar it's more about the exclusivity factor. Like gold tuners, etc.
@@MrClassicmetal i mean, i knew pretty much everything that was in the video, but i would still like to have a more "premium" guitar simply because of how different it feels to play
fret ends, the feel of the neck, tuning stability (theres a pretty big difference even between a normal double locking bridge and a german floyd rose original), weight distribution, having stainless steel frets that last longer and dont need as much cleaning/polishing just to name a few things that are nicer on "expensive" guitars
when i got into guitar a couple of years ago a friend told me "if you just care about sound, get a 300$ guitar. if you want a guitar that plays nice and feels good - spend 1k - 1,5k. everything that comes after that is brand name and looks"
if you want a james hetfield signature snakebyte, you get the LTD for 2k and the ESP for 5-7k depending on where/when you buy it, the only difference between the two is the neck radius, the ESP is a singlecut mahogany while the LTD is 3 piece, and they have the different logos - thats it
if you specifically hold the guitar in the perfect angle in the light, nobody could tell the singlecut from the 3 piece body, the neck radius is personal preference and the logos are just for show - wheres the 3-5k price difference?
thats right, the name and the tiny amounts of better QC you get on an ESP
@@spylingual8573 Hmm, so my 300 Euro guitar has locking Grovers, tusq nut, a pretty normal maple neck with a pleasant modern shape and rosewood fretboard and has a ridiculous tuning stability. You spend like 300€ if you want some Duncans. Based on your logic, what I am getting 2k extra? A name on the headstock and maybe a slightly better fretwork or is there something more to it?
@@MrClassicmetal Generally speaking it's the vintage pickups in those guitars that people are after. This video proves that point..but yeah...also a status symbol.
Wow, I've thought some along those lines. Thank you for the tests & time
This is brobably the best video ive whatched all year. Keep up the good work!
it brobably is
I remember Les Paul proving to Gibson that he didn't need a hollow body on an electric to get good tone and used a 2x4 with a detachable 2 part body on the sides. That's how he got them to make him the solid body electric
Ah yes, the broomstick.
I think it was 4x4
"The Log"!! Like the other commenter, I recall it being a 4 x 4?
@@LRM12o8
A 4x4? It must've been great for going up mountains.
@@RaymloR well it was a broomstick, meaning you could fly up the mountain and around the mountaintop on it if you're privy to the dark magic
@@DailyBrusher Just checked Rob Scallons video on it again to make sure I don't have to delete my other comment.
you're right, "The Log" is the 'official' name under which it is displayed in the museum, but the people at the Gibson factory mocked it as "The Broomstick"
And ofc, it was a 4x4
Absolutely STELLAR video! Fascinating and shocking. I’m gonna be paying a LOT more attention to pickup height now! Thank you!
a 2x4 guitar would make a good step-dad guitar.
Cool seeing you here step-dad.
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One of the best videos on YT. Love your attitude man.
puff 🤯this videos man! This channel.. ❤ I found you by chance and love it.
Thank you for all the research you do and the valuable contribution to the community by debunking myths under technical testing and especially recorded A-B samples.
You confirmed alot of things I've been thinking for years when it comes to electric guitar.All the myths that people hang on to seem to come from the world of acoustic guitar that just don't make a big difference on electric.
The electronics will change more than any mass or wood choice. That being said. I like fancy wood.
My biggest takeaway is that a great setup, strings, and pickup can make any guitar sound expensive. It's an amazing time to play guitar... amazing quality is available at any budget.
This was fantastic. Thank you for your service to logic!!!
The problem is that this video is trying to say that woods/substrate/guitar body doesn't matter.. and basing that whole argument on the fact that everything but the pickups, the strings and the tuners have been replaced... but that's not the case. Strings need something solid to resonate with to maintain their oscillation... plugging this rig into a bench does not demonstrate that.. you're just replacing the guitar body with a bench.. so, of course the strings will resonate the same - maybe better! Replace it with stale bread and you might have a point. :-)
That IS the perfect video !! Thank you so much !! awesome Jim. Helps me a lot to explain this to my customers. Cheers
I think the bench with the Honda engines had more sustain! Awesome video!
i wonder if its “neck” has more or less give
@@bad1080 I prefer a Harley at the low E, and a Norton at the high E. More oomph in the bottom end and clearer highs.
I hope Epiphone buys him and comes out with a more affordable variant of the bench
I would hazard a guess it's because less energy is being lost in the neck
Honda engines last longer, so yeah, stands to reason....
Well done, man!! Bravo!
You know the pups are the king of the tone on an electric.
And that speaker, it really does affect the sound of the amp, because, well, obviously.
Now you have a great video to direct morons and bass players to.
Glen, it‘s clearly the tone wood that makes the difference 😏🙈🤘
Awesome. I was just going to link you to this video!
Although wood is useless for changing the actual tone, a guitar made of better quality wood will stay in tune more consistently through temperature and humidity changes in the environment. And what good is a guitar with a great tone if it doesn't stay in tune for a whole song? (ask Gibson LOL). If you're gigging indoors, outdoors, summer, winter, etc you need something that will be reliable.
Maybe we should shift fully into making guitars out of synthetic materials, since it doesn't affect the tone anyway, and they won't be affected by the environment.
@@SpotlightKid83 That's really not a terrible idea. It might even be cheaper to make guitars with synthetic materials.
I love it. Keep up the good work.
I love this!
Cleared up a few things for me and gave me many great ideas. Creativity is life.
That was the most important experiment ever done for electric guitar players and electric guitar builders!! I'm sure it took a ton of time but the results were priceless!!!
No, it wasn´t really.
Only for the ones who now - falsly - see themselves proven right in their believe that wood doesn`t matter (meaning having a significant impact) in electric solid body guitars.
If we are honest and go by the scientific method, this was not falsified by this video, was it?
While I agree the method isn’t 100% scientific, it’s the most scientific comparison I’ve ever seen. Jim never concludes wood doesn’t matter. I personally hear a fairly significant difference between the Anderson and all the other variations. The biggest difference is definitely the air guitar.
Modestoney. I guess I don't understand what you're saying. Don't know if you're dissing me or Jim or if you're agreeing with him😄 But it doesn't matter anyway. I hardly ever make comments on utube but this experiment was really phenomenal and I'm sure took a lot of time. So, good on you Jim. Keep up the good work.
@@modestoney1577 Not really bro. First of asll, the fact that he got three companies to answer with 5 answers was astounding.
And second, they said themselves that body wood wasn't as big a factor as weve thought.
Certainly weren't factoring in neck wood all this time. Well, I wasnt. Nor anyone else Ive ever seen in my life.
Plus, did you even watch it? He put so much into it..making sure everytihng was trh same even how hard he strummed and everything. But all that swtuff he dide wasnt enough for you huh?
I think you've been preaching body tone wood for so long...thats what you dont like about it.
Nope.
For years I've been arguing the only thing that matters in an electric guitar is the electronics. The rest is just myth. Everybody, and I mean everybody, says I'm crazy. I'm so glad to see someone approaching this methodically for a change.
I'd love to see more. Maybe showing the plucked strings in iZotope RX9 spectral analyzer to see they are the same.
I know people who claim they can hear the difference in the finish. They're never going to believe this, even if they see it; but, the more evidence you provide the more they sound like "flat-earthers".
Thanks again,
Will
My Les Paul was refinished in unplasticized lacquer and it made that guitar a LOT more resonant. I personally notice a huge difference based on that also but it’s not super drastic the guitar just feels and sounds livelier. I do notice the difference though but this is just this one case I can’t speak for everyone and every other guitar and such
@@ben23232 I tend to notice strings significantly change how my electric guitars feel; but, not really how they sound to my ear.
Luckily, Jim Lill has done a strings vs tone video too, so you can see his results for yourself.
cheers,
Will
@@TheTrollMastah could be a case of correlation =/= causation. Assuming they took the guitar apart to refinish it, perhaps a luthier carefully putting a guitar back together (attention to detail like pickup height?) will provide a superior sound. As opposed to the guitar assembled quickly in a production shop. Just a guess though
@@bobbymelehes732 That and possibly a large dose of placebo. When you invest money into something you'll totally have a confirmation bias that it was worth it...
People hear what they want to hear. Especially the audiophile community. They'll hear silver core USB cables sounding better, I shit you not. And that's physically impossible.
You could probably sell gold plated Bluetooth antennas to them.
@Will I'm not saying you're wrong, just that it's quite possible. It's more likely that Bobby is right, though. In any case, whatever gave your guitar a different sound, it's definitely not your new lacquer. Unless it's now under your pickups and that's what pushed them closer to the strings...
@@bobbymelehes732 Thinner laquer will allow the body and neck to resonate more freely. When the body resonates more freely it will become acoustically louder but sustain less because energy is lost through acoustic projection. The waves of vibration travel through a circuit formed by the guitar and the actual sound being projected means energy is lost from the circuit with each cycle. The louder the acoustic resonance, the faster the note will decay. This isn't myth or myth busting, it's wave physics. It's much more noticeable in acoustic guitars than in electrics but the same process occurs in both and the materials that make up the guitar dictate it. The signal chain, unless the pickups are close enough to deaden the strings, has no effect in the process beyond being a bit of material for vibration waves to cycle through. The problem is, when people try and "debunk" the tonewood "myth" they only look at the part of tone easiest for them to understand or they purposefully disregard other parts because it doesn't suppourt their assertion.
Awesome video, man. Great work!
Great video, man! This was amazing! Impressive!