3 Pieces Vs 2 Piece Body

[sb guitars]

I'm doinf business with gilmer woods, and I just got a curtiousy call from one of their reps. He told me about the pros of a 3 piece body in omparison to a two piece...

the topic is: thoughts on 3 peiceV.S. 2 pieces.

[Mattia]

Makes little to no difference.

[Xanthus]

Seconded. Even if you build 2 EXACTLY identical guitars, save number of wood pieces, you'd never hear the difference.

[Kenny]

honestly my opinion on this is

solid 1 peice, 2 peice, 3 peice, even as far as 4 peices sadwiched

you wouldnt hear a difference unless it was differnt kinds of wood

the way the sound changes is the differnt densities of wood that it goes through and the prousness of those woods. so theoretically if you sandwitched 10 peices of the same mahagony together the only density diffence would be very small thin glue joints

not nearly enough to hear a noticable differnce.

maybe i missed the topic but thats my opinion on the subject

[Mattia]

Look, basically, every single thing you do with a guitar affects how it sounds. Wiring. Glue. Wood selection. Number of glue joints. Scale length. Neck joint. Mass. Damping properties. hardware. Headstock angle. Shape.

The thing is...which one of these changes affects the guitar's sound in an audible, significant way, and which of them don't? And how do these things interact? Different design choices will also influence the relative impact of various other constructional aspects; active, hi-gain pickups can - for example - take some of the influence of wood, resonance, construction details away compared with passive, vintage-style, possibly even slightly microphonic pickups which are often a little more sensitive to subtle variations.

Another example: take the Les Paul. Easily 5 to 7 times the amount of glue surface in a single body blank (bookmatched halves, and the entire top to the back), and most folks seem to think they out-sustain fender-style bodies with their 1-piece body holy grail concept. Or any high-end bass you care to name, with 5 to 13 neck plys, body wings with 4 layers of veneer and laminates, the list goes on. When the woods are exotic, and contrast nicely, a multi-piece body suddently becomes desirable and expensive. If it's cheap and plentiful, like alder, basswood, or ash, suddenly it's clearly tonally inferior.

As far as I'm concerned, it's about using the best possible wood, which means the right weight (for the design; doesn't mean lightweight, doesn't mean heav), good resonance (I don't measure it, but a ring is preferable to a thud), and if possible quartered, if only because it's often a little more stable, and frequently a lot more attractive to me. You can be picky about 7-8" wide boards, because there are more of them. Even pickier about 4-5" wide boards for the same reason. The percentage of boards wide enough for a 1-piece body is small, and nowhere near all of those is ideally suited to becoming an electric guitar.

Most importantly, however, is this: at a certain point you have to stop reading, and start building. Make a few guitars. See what works for you. Find your own understanding of how your instruments work, and remain skeptical of pat explanations at all times; if you don't question and test your own theories, you're not likely to learn much. Maybe a slightly ironic statement from someone like me who can hardly be called a prolific builder (median output of between 1 and 3 guitars per year, increasing steadily), but spending time tapping, listening, flexing, building s'more, tapping s'more, listening to similar instruments you've built with slight differences (different chambering, different shapes, different weights, different body composition) will put you on the right track.

Edited October 24, 2007 by Mattia