Wanted : actual science in the "wood affects tone" debate

[Nag]

I'm still watching the long video posted above, but seeing how he uses Duncan Designed pickups, I'mjust waiting for someone to say "with bad pickups, of course he measures no difference"

Just kidding, hey. Like I said, still watching.

 

[Nag]

okay so AFTER watching the video. I'll say this. Between these two guitar bodies, I hear no difference.

But that video isn't exactly what I'd have wanted. I'd have loved something with high-quality pickups, and two body woods that people consider polar opposites, say mahogany and alder/ash. He used two random bodies made of random woods and maybe he just picked two similar sounding bodies . Polar opposites would have been a funkier choice for such a comparison.

I don't think there's a reasonable end to the debate if wood affects the tone. I believe it does, and I won't think bad of people who think it doesn't.

Like I said first, I just wanted to know how, physically, the wood interferes with the sound waves and the string vibrations to possibly affect the electric signal that comes out of the guitar. And I got that answer on page 1.

Thanks for finding that video though

 

[Vede]

okay so AFTER watching the video. I'll say this. Between these two guitar bodies, I hear no difference.

But that video isn't exactly what I'd have wanted. I'd have loved something with high-quality pickups, and two body woods that people consider polar opposites, say mahogany and alder/ash. He used two random bodies made of random woods and maybe he just picked two similar sounding bodies . Polar opposites would have been a funkier choice for such a comparison.

I don't think there's a reasonable end to the debate if wood affects the tone. I believe it does, and I won't think bad of people who think it doesn't.

Like I said first, I just wanted to know how, physically, the wood interferes with the sound waves and the string vibrations to possibly affect the electric signal that comes out of the guitar. And I got that answer on page 1.

Thanks for finding that video though

Here's another video from that same guy where he removes the guitar neck and replaces it with a plastic tube filled with sand and water and there's no perceptible difference.

Electric Guitar Resonance: Relevance to Tone, Sustain etc - YouTube

 

[AwDeOh]

When we disregard species, and all the subconscious 'want' and 'do not want' that can be attached to a species such as Ebony, and start talking instead about material density & grain orientation, then we might start getting closer to scientific debate. There's too much attached to some woods that seem to up their 'value' as a tonewood, which have nothing to do with guitar tone.

 

[TRENCHLORD]

IMO all woods are tonewoods, just depends what tone you're after for that guitar.
The common generalizations regarding various wood-types are for the most part true IMO, but in real life the interactions between the selected wood pieces, the size/thicknesses, construction methods, and of course the quality all play a big role.

It stands to reason that the more separate pieces a guitar is made of, and the more wood-types involved, the less noticeable the differences are going to be.

An all maple guitar (fretboard included) is much more likely to comply with the commonly held generalization of "maple tone".

If the guitar is a smorgasbord of wood-types with 5-7 neck pieces,
a fretboard wood, 2-3 body pieces and a separate top-wood like the typical guitar on seventring.org, well then of course it's more of an unpredictable outcome.

 

[Jzbass25]

Vibration will affect the material, I think the generalizations aren't perfectly accurate so it causes this whole confusion. Imo this debate is dumb, just find the guitar that you like the sound of and maybe even buy the wood you like the look of (I personally try and go for more sustainable woods, like how I support Taylor because of their work with ebony)

 

[groverj3]

My personal opinion has always been that if wood actually affected the sound it would be extremely minor compared to every other factor. Sure, the pickups vibrate with the body when you pick a string but that vibration is much smaller in magnitude than the string in the magnetic field.

I would like to see an actual double blind, statistically significant, study though.

Five bucks says that if all signs pointed to it not mattering there would still be people clinging to their precious tonewoods.

 

[Given To Fly]

I think the difference between different types of wood will be much more noticeable when you're the one playing the guitar, since you have that auditory feedback to what your hands are doing. If you're listening to someone else play, the differences will be minimized.

It's amazing how rarely the player gets brought into the equation. Youtube videos and "experiments" that are nothing but tomfoolery half the time carry more weight than the person who actually plays the instrument.

Acoustic instruments were around long before electrics, origin of tonewood lies with them.

Wisdom above...

 

[Navid]

Here's a funny little blindtest.

I used two different guitars :

Skervesen (milvus)

- bridge pickup is a BKP Sinner (single coil alnico)

Vigier (excalibur)

- bridge pickup is a S. Duncan Custom (humbucker ceramic)

The problem with your test is that those 2 are completely different guitars.
Both of them sound great though.

What bothers me is that I've never heard anyone daring to say "Your custom guitar sounds bad, it must be that thick macassar ebony top". But this is for another thread...

 

[MF_Kitten]

It's obvious that there is VERY little vibration going from the wood and into the pickups. Technically there is SOME, but it's negligible at best. The difference would have to be in the interplay between strings and wood, meaning the resonant frequencies of the woods reinforce those frequencies in the string, while dampening other frequencies. In other words, it changes how the string vibrates. This is easy to do. If your bridge was made out of rubber you would get a really dark and dull tone.

Now, these differences don't translate very well through the pickups. That much is certain. But it's another factor in the whole equation.

A scientific test would require identical bodies CNC'd out of different woods, and most importantly, out of many different cuts of each wood. Then you would have to mount the same pickup, neck, and bridge into each one of them, and have an automated strumming machine do the actual playing. This would be easy to make, just a pick mounted on a little "cart" or whatever you'd call it, traveling along a rail at a set speed. It would have to pick at the same location on the strings every time. New strings would have to be used every time. Setup would have to be identical.

If you did this, and you then measured the EQ differences between all of the different samples (double blind, of course!), you could get a very good indicator as to whether or not it makes a difference.

The most important thing is build quality though, as far as I can tell. A very solidly put together guitar with a great setup and high quality parts/electronics will sound and feel great regardless of specific wood selection. If wood makes a difference in output, then it can only go up from there.

 

[shikamaru]

is he just trying to say that the pickup is the ONLY thing that matters? I don't know if I agree with that, I think everything will contribute - maybe not entirely noticeably, and then only on raw signal - just that choosing a wood for its tone won't yield any predictable, repeatable results ie. you can't guarantee two different pieces of maple will affect the tone in the same way.

I don’t think he’s trying to prove that, just that the material used to build a guitar contributes little to nothing for a guitar tone. BTW try nylon strings, there won’t be a sound, it proves that the sound comes from the string, pickups and electronics, the rest is just a construction around those things.

I do believe construction matters though. I mean, where you place a pickup for instance, I saw an experiment of a test guitar where the pickup was on a mobile piece, moving that piece created sort of a phaser effect*. For the same reason, because strings are attached to the guitar, strings pick up some of the vibrations transmitted through their endpoint. I think it’s rather a question of sustain rather than a question of tone. But if there were some tone contribution I think it would come from there. So yeah, with two guitars with the same pickups and electronics you might have a different sound, for a number of reasons, just not the wood used.

* I think it was this one but can’t check right now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F00J_Ez0CU

 

[OWHall]

As a Physicist, I would say that the perceived change in sound between woods can only be a result of the difference in densities and actual structure (ie the way the wood grew, on a molecular level). These characteristics will definitely effect the way certain woods react/resonate by comparison to others.
There's the science.

 

[Konfyouzd]

We came to that conclusion w/o a physicist...

I took enough physics in college to deduce that.

 

[redstone]

The problem with your test is that those 2 are completely different guitars.
Both of them sound great though.

What bothers me is that I've never heard anyone daring to say "Your custom guitar sounds bad, it must be that thick macassar ebony top". But this is for another thread...

How is that a problem, if only the pickup matters ?

You can hear minor changes from one pickup to another, the Sinner sounds a bit thinner with a bit more upper range .. But the main, overwhelming differences come from the guitar itself and match its acoustic tone.

The Skervesen doesn't sound crisper because of its pickup and circuitry, it's due to its materials and how they influence the string vibrations.

If I compared my fender and vigier, since they sound the same unplugged and their pickups are extremely different, of course only the pickup would make a difference.

It's a 50/50 ratio, crisp guitars need fat pickups, fat guitars need crisp pickups.. If my test cannot convince you, then nothing will.

 

[OWHall]

We came to that conclusion w/o a physicist...

I took enough physics in college to deduce that.

And I'm agreeing with you haha. To be honest it was a question that didn't need asking

 

[Halowords]

It's obvious that there is VERY little vibration going from the wood and into the pickups. Technically there is SOME, but it's negligible at best. The difference would have to be in the interplay between strings and wood, meaning the resonant frequencies of the woods reinforce those frequencies in the string, while dampening other frequencies. In other words, it changes how the string vibrates. This is easy to do. If your bridge was made out of rubber you would get a really dark and dull tone.

Now, these differences don't translate very well through the pickups. That much is certain. But it's another factor in the whole equation.

A scientific test would require identical bodies CNC'd out of different woods, and most importantly, out of many different cuts of each wood. Then you would have to mount the same pickup, neck, and bridge into each one of them, and have an automated strumming machine do the actual playing. This would be easy to make, just a pick mounted on a little "cart" or whatever you'd call it, traveling along a rail at a set speed. It would have to pick at the same location on the strings every time. New strings would have to be used every time. Setup would have to be identical.

If you did this, and you then measured the EQ differences between all of the different samples (double blind, of course!), you could get a very good indicator as to whether or not it makes a difference.

The most important thing is build quality though, as far as I can tell. A very solidly put together guitar with a great setup and high quality parts/electronics will sound and feel great regardless of specific wood selection. If wood makes a difference in output, then it can only go up from there.

I think a lot of us would like that sort of scientific study determining how much difference it really makes. The problem is probably a mixture of time & money. Pretty obvious, I suppose. The most I have seen tend to be two guitars. Myka did one with a classic Les Paul setup, and one made from Black Limba and Walnut (Rosewood fretboards on both I believe). From the clips, they sounded different, however it was kind of subtle (at least on my crummy computer speakers), yet in real life they were apparently different-yet-similar.

The problem is, that really proves nothing. You had a fairly controlled build where everything that could be kept the same was. However, even if everything was identical sans materials, that is still a fair amount of time and money to make two guitars. Hardly the number to make some sort of functioning scientific theory. Couple that with the density/properties of different pieces of wood even within the same species and the vast quantity of finished guitars and control measures to run a full-blown experiment and this could cost a decent chunk to test this. Even then, the results are probably going to be pretty subtle. Not necessarily insignificant or unimportant to an audiophile or the guitarist, but not necessarily an obvious (much less preferable) difference, one way or the other.

So I am guessing the actual science in terms of evidence-based testing done in numbers lending it statistical significance is probably non-existent.

-Cheers

 

[JPhoenix19]

I don't have a lot to add to this discussion- much that could be said has already been said. I will say that I now take everything into account in selecting guitars- scale length, tuning, action, hardware, electronics... and somewhere at the end is the type of wood. I've had an RG7321 that I thought sounded almost as good as a Carvin.

TL;DR - I'm less concerned about what a slab of basswood sounds like, and more concerned about what *my* slab of basswood sounds like. I care more about other features that effect playability and variety of tones I can get.

 

[callankirk]

Obviously this thread is largely pertaining to solid body instruments, and I think that the concept of "tonewoods" within the realm of acoustics is well understood, but this article, albeit a bit math-heavy, offers some insight into how frequencies are able to not only vibrate wood, but vibrate through wood (pgs. 45-46).

The characteristics of some woods will amplify/resonate sounds differently than others due to their cellular makeup. This is a species-by-species difference, but not even woods within the same species can have identical properties (dried vs. wet wood).

Lots of stuff here about psychoacoustics and electrical engineering principles (taking me back to my live sound days), but it gets the point across. And these guys thought of a lot of inconsistent variables in the mix that they addressed as well, such as the own listener's perception of acoustic volume.

It all comes down to math, and I suck at math. This is why I teach anatomy for a living.

 

[stevexc]

Lots of stuff here about psychoacoustics

This makes me not want to read the article because there's no way the actual definition of that term is as awesome as the definition my mind jumped to.

 

[pondman]