guitar parts affecting sound and stuff

[Emory]

So im a noob at this kind of thing. I was wondering how the different woods guitar parts are made from effect sound like brightness, sustain, etc. Also things like bolt on, set neck, and thru neck effect it.

[38thBeatle]

There are so many opinions about this, I suppose you could say to someone to try them all out but that is impracticable for many reasons. Personally I don't get too hung up in the maple sounds like this, mahogany sounds like that and instead would try to look at the overall guitar. I am stating the bleeding obvious here I know. All you can perhaps do is to start by looking at construction methods ( i.e. glued in neck, bolt on etc) and then the woods used. I sometimes wish I could take two  Strats ( say) identical apart from body wood and see if there is any great difference. I happen to think that there is more to it than that and that all the factors come into play. Conversely, I once knew a very experienced electrical engineer/sound engineer. He would argue long and hard about there being no relevance in the woods used to make an electric guitar and that it is purely down to strings and pickups. He is dead now but I often think of him when I see debates to the nth degree about  tonewood. There are some guys here who will offer up their views too.

[WezV]

can of worms ... stepping away before i write 3 pages worth of useless rant

the tone of my guitars comes from the glue.. its all in the glue joins

[ailean]

I'm no expert at this as I'm a noob myself. But I've formed the following opinion, while intuitivly it would seems like it should just be down to strings / pickups / amps my practicle expirience is that it isn't, and it seems the prevailant opinion that the wood / shape / build does have an effect. The only way I see this working is in the feedback between the guitar and the strings. When you hit a string you can feel the vibrations running through the guitar, that energy must feed back into the strings and therefore effect the sound. The energy and type of feedback has to be dependant on the type of material it's travelling through, therefore I can't see how the wood and joins (as Wez rightly says) could not effect the sound, this also follows for the other hardware, bridge, nut etc.

Feedback and harmonics aren't simple, they bounce backwards and forwards, interfere, cancel and boost each other, so again the structure of the guitar must effect the vibrations that feed back into the strings.

This is only my opinion and it's how the whole thing fits together in my head and I may be wildly out.

One last point, all of these things are subtle, you are going to need pups / amps and speakers that are capable of reproducing this level of subtlety or you'll not really be able to tell the difference. I've just upgraded my amp and I'm hearing levels of detail I've never heard before and I'm really starting to appriciate that maybe changing the nut will change the tone of my guitar, but if I played through a microcube (my first amp) I'm pretty sure I'd be hard pushed to tell a Gibson from a block of wood.

[Elliot]

How is it that my JV Strat (made of alder, rosewood board, poly finish) is noticeably quieter (although better sounding) with Mother's Milks than my Fender Mex 60s Strat (made of alder, rosewood board, poly finish) with Apaches?  Is it the pickups or is it the wood?

[ailean]

I'd say it's the pups as the MM is a slightly hotter pickup than the Apache, but I'm going to wave my noob flag again.

[WezV]

just to elaborate what i said slightly i dont really feel my tone comes from glue... but if i was building more acoustics suddenly glue type would become a very important issue to me.  hot hide glue obviously sounds better than normal wood glue.  Its just an example of where this kind of idea can go if you take it too seriously.

wood type, and constructions type do all make a difference.  the danger is that we say things like mahognay is dark and muddy and maple is overly bright.  both are generalisations you will hear quite often, both will be disputed by almost everyone that has and likes a mahogany or maple guitar.  the generalistations are broadly usefull.. i.e if i ant a dark sounding guitar i may start with a mahogany body... but i still need to pick the right piece of mahogany to get that sound - wood is organic and every piece is different

people tend to associate neck join with sustain.. you hear things like a through neck must have more sustain because the wood goes all the way through.  again its not a very usefull since a bolt on neck can have just as much sustain in real terms.

the best way to find out about these things is to go and play as many guitars as you can, sure, they all make a difference but pinning down the difference can be hard.

i think i have an idea about some of these things now - but there is still going to be loads of guitars in the world that disprove what i think i know

...damn, started on the rant after all

[Philly Q]

wood is organic and every piece is different

Absolutely, guitars are not like toasters or TV sets - no two will ever be exactly the same (if there are any Eric Johnsons of the toaster world out there, I apologise).

As Wez said you can generalise but there are so many factors.   Not just wood and construction style but finish, hardware, all sorts of things.  I often change tuners and bridges on my guitars and they do have an effect - sometimes insignificant, sometimes quite dramatic.  Replacing a zinc tailpiece with an aluminium one, for example, makes a noticeable difference (but in an unpredictable way, it seems!).

And these are just factors which affect the acoustic tone - they don't necessarily translate into the amplified tone.  Acoustically, my Thinline Tele is much louder than a solidbody, with more noticeable bass and treble, but amped the difference is a lot less noticeable.  And I have an LP copy which is quite lively and resonant acoustically, but amplified it's very dark and smooth - could be the pickups, but I think it's the way everything works together.  It's mojo.

[Prawnik]

How is it that my JV Strat (made of alder, rosewood board, poly finish) is noticeably quieter (although better sounding) with Mother's Milks than my Fender Mex 60s Strat (made of alder, rosewood board, poly finish) with Apaches?  Is it the pickups or is it the wood?

Could also be because of differences in shielding, strings, or string height?

[Elliot]

I should add same strings, same height, same pickup distance, same shielding, same manufacturer of bridge, same manufacturer of tuners.  I can only conclude its to do with the body wood.  But I have been told on these boards that wood has nothing to do with a poly finished bolt on neck guitar.  So the only differences are a) two different bits of the same type of wood b) different pickups c) possibly difference pots d) 20 years in time of manufacture.

[gwEm]

obviously the amp is the most important factor determining tone. next is the guitar your playing being in tune. but these are clear ;)

wish i knew more about guitars to answer your question properly. changing pickups and string type have all given me big tonal improvements in the past. clearly - looking at my collection, constuction method and woods does have a massive effect. but i dont know enough to say if pickups/strings affects the sound more - i dont have the same pickups in two guitars.

upgrading my epiphone floyd to a proper OFR improved tone a lot too. but something like fitting better quality electronics: pots/jack etc didn't really help as much as i was hoping - i mean they made a difference, but not much.

[PhilKing]

I was staying out of it, but I think the wood, the pickups, the strings, the amp, the speakers and the player are what determines the sound.  You change any one of these and the tone changes.

In general though, the acoustic sound of the guitar is critical.  If it is dead acoustically, then nothing will revive it - even BK's!  

I have many guitars which are similar, but even deciding which pickups to put on a guitar sometimes is a task.  I have had more than one set on about half my electrics, and have kept changing them sometimes (even BK's).  

Elliot, did you ever try the pickups the other way around (JV Apaches, MIM Mothers Milks)?  It would be interesting to see if that makes a difference.  Also what is the acoustic difference between the two?

Wood types make a huge difference too, but it is hard to generalize because each piece is so different.  Wez had some mahogany for a neck, and two pieces which were bought at the same time from the same place wieghed totally different amounts (one felt like twice the other).  

All of it makes a difference.  That's why I like to hear a guitar acoustically before I buy.  When I bought my Goldtop, I played it acoustically for about 10 minutes and then said I would buy it.  The guy was shocked that I hadn't plugged it in, but as I explained to him, it had Tom Holmes pickups (which I had never used), he didn't have an amp like I used in the shop, and I could change the pickups and eeletrics anyway if I didn't like the sound.  Acoustically it sounded great so I was happy to buy it.  So the wood has a big part in the sound.

But all the rest are factors.

[WezV]

Wez had some mahogany for a neck, and two pieces which were bought at the same time from the same place wieghed totally different amounts (one felt like twice the other).

 i think i weighed them because i couldnt quite see how they were so different.  Like phil says, same supplier, same time, same species, same colour, same dimensions, same moisture content.. visually they were completely identical.  cant remember the exact weights but one was 80% heavier than the other. - very close to twice the weight.   I am used to the variability in wood but this took the biscuit

both would make very good guitars - but if i made two identical guitars with them they would sound noticably different.

[FELINEGUITARS]

I have built identical guitars where two guitars were built from the exact same planks of wood but the end results were different
A good example of this was with two of my Tabby Guitars: same plank of American red alder for the bodies, and again same maple for the necks, and the rosewood was from the same batch. All the hardware was the same too...

But the guitars ended up with slightly different tones- go figure :roll:

The logo on the sapele version got changed later, but the Zebrano one didnt because it had already sold- it got reviewed in Guitar Buyer magazine too!

[Will]

Lol, If remembering correctly, the mag reviews only managed to mark you down on the block logo :P they really wanted to find fault didn't they