The undeniable proof that... well... tonewood is a thing?

[mistermikev]

thing you have to be a member of The Electric Guitar Builders Resource to see this... but looks pretty interesting.  Haven't heard it yet... but I'm pretty sure he proved it.  tone wood is a thing.  (hehe).  always something new to consider anyway... good to keep an open mind.

 

https://www.facebook.com/820235642/videos/pcb.10158967814319508/10165846790340643

[Crusader]

Yes it seems you need to be a member

And by the way what I think about the whole thing is, of course the timber makes a difference and there's no need to go to great lengths to prove one way or the other. We know Strats with a RW fretboard sound different to Maple, A solid Mahogany Les Paul sounds different to one with a Maple cap, and an all-Maple guitar most definitely sounds different. So the experimenting has already been done

HOWEVER

I think its all a bit over-rated, its one of those things that people become too engrossed in. Like drag car racing, you have to spend ten times as much to shave another second off your time. Whenever I compare the guitars I've built with my Gibson 59 Reissue Les Paul they don't sound quite as good, but for goodness sake they still make a sound and what does it really matter? As long as the tone is reasonable and balanced. When you play accoustically then plug into an amp the electronics play a major role in the resulting sound, but to say the wood has no effect at all I think is ludicrous

[Drak]

I will tell you what I think after reading tonewood threads for ~30 years.

I learned to psychologically diagnose and evaluate posters based on their answers for their various personality schisms.

Its a hella lot more fun than reading, or worse, responding to tonewood threads.

Its like a Rorschach ink-blot test thing, or a personality evaluation thing.

You can tell a lot about a person by how they answer 'the tonewood' question!

[Bizman62]

It would be nice to see the methodology of that very test without having to sign on FB. On YouTube I've seen some "tests" that have a ton of other variables other than the body wood, and I've seen a couple that try to restrict the testing to the body wood only.

Looking at @Drak's recent posts I think I have a vague hunch about his opinion, looking at my builds same can be said about mine...

[mistermikev]

12 hours ago, Crusader said:

Yes it seems you need to be a member

And by the way what I think about the whole thing is, of course the timber makes a difference and there's no need to go to great lengths to prove one way or the other. We know Strats with a RW fretboard sound different to Maple, A solid Mahogany Les Paul sounds different to one with a Maple cap, and an all-Maple guitar most definitely sounds different. So the experimenting has already been done

HOWEVER

I think its all a bit over-rated, its one of those things that people become too engrossed in. Like drag car racing, you have to spend ten times as much to shave another second off your time. Whenever I compare the guitars I've built with my Gibson 59 Reissue Les Paul they don't sound quite as good, but for goodness sake they still make a sound and what does it really matter? As long as the tone is reasonable and balanced. When you play accoustically then plug into an amp the electronics play a major role in the resulting sound, but to say the wood has no effect at all I think is ludicrous

well, the interesting thing about his post (at least for me) is that he is trying to prove scientifically that the pickup itself vibrates.  so... no string even being plucked... he's got a tuning fork mounted in a piece of wood with a pickup in it... and a string nearby... hitting the tuning fork is actually being picked up by his strobe. 

i agree... $10k will net you .0000001%.  more importantly, I don't think you are guaranteed a good sounding guitar if you use the best of the best woods... because there are so many variables and IMO it's the mixture that is the magic.  I don't think anyone can "KNOW" the right mixture... you just have your intuition and have to follow it.  it IS all a bit overrated because the mixture of masonite and lipstick tubes is EPIC to me!!  that said... I like good lookin' wood so wouldn't really want to build with something else.

anywho, for the record... not trying to prove anything... just admiring it.

[mistermikev]

11 hours ago, Drak said:

I will tell you what I think after reading tonewood threads for ~30 years.

I learned to psychologically diagnose and evaluate posters based on their answers for their various personality schisms.

Its a hella lot more fun than reading, or worse, responding to tonewood threads.

Its like a Rorschach ink-blot test thing, or a personality evaluation thing.

You can tell a lot about a person by how they answer 'the tonewood' question!

or any question really.  I think one of the smartest things you can say is "I'm a dumbass".  I keep saying it but it doesn't seem to make me smart.

[Bizman62]

3 minutes ago, mistermikev said:

no string even being plucked... he's got a tuning fork mounted in a piece of wood with a pickup in it... and a string nearby... hitting the tuning fork is actually being picked up by his strobe.

Hmm... If the tuning fork is firmly mounted to the same piece with the pickup the effect is pretty much similar to a plucked string. That'd not be about measuring the vibrations of the pickup only as it would also measure the sustain of the tuning fork and the effect the wood has to it.

[mistermikev]

6 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

It would be nice to see the methodology of that very test without having to sign on FB. On YouTube I've seen some "tests" that have a ton of other variables other than the body wood, and I've seen a couple that try to restrict the testing to the body wood only.

Looking at @Drak's recent posts I think I have a vague hunch about his opinion, looking at my builds same can be said about mine...

see above.  he's some sort of engineering student and this is his thesis.  Had a long conversation with him, nice guy.  Prior to seeing this I wouldn't have given much thought to the idea that the pickup itself vibrates... I've always thought the body influences the strings by bouncing sound back (reverb) and that in turn changes teh strings vibration... and in turn effects the change in magnetic field... but he's convinced me that the pickup vibration is yet another variable that def makes a dif. 

in summary - does tone wood matter?  well, yes, EVERYTHING matters.  how much?  doesn't make sense to answer that q for anyone else -as it's subjective.  it matters ENOUGH for me.  that said... i think 90% of wood is tone wood by my own def.  it is also a subjective term.  if you build a guitar out of wood and it sounds good - it's then tonewood.

[Bizman62]

5 minutes ago, mistermikev said:

one of the smartest things you can say is "I'm a dumbass".  I keep saying it but it doesn't seem to make me smart.

I tend to look at the mirror and keep saying "I'm smart." The guy on the other side of the glass seems to smile somewhat pityingly.

[mistermikev]

Just now, Bizman62 said:

Hmm... If the tuning fork is firmly mounted to the same piece with the pickup the effect is pretty much similar to a plucked string. That'd not be about measuring the vibrations of the pickup only as it would also measure the sustain of the tuning fork and the effect the wood has to it.

there is no microphone in the room.  the tuning fork is 3 feet away and on a dif axis.  the pickup is def not being influenced by the tuning fork.

[Bizman62]

2 minutes ago, mistermikev said:

he's convinced me that the pickup vibration is yet another variable

Without a doubt it is. As you said, EVERYTHING matters. As Arnold says, "if it wiggles, it's fat" which in guitars means "if it's affected by the vibrations, it'll affect the thing that makes it vibrate".

[mistermikev]

Just now, Bizman62 said:

I tend to look at the mirror and keep saying "I'm smart." The guy on the other side of the glass seems to smile somewhat pityingly.

one can only be smart relative to the other people in the room!  if the other person in the room is you... and he is smarter... then you are probably doing allright!!

[Bizman62]

2 minutes ago, mistermikev said:

the tuning fork is 3 feet away and on a dif axis.  the pickup is def not being influenced by the tuning fork.

Thanks, that makes it more scientific!

[mistermikev]

Just now, Bizman62 said:

Without a doubt it is. As you said, EVERYTHING matters. As Arnold says, "if it wiggles, it's fat" which in guitars means "if it's affected by the vibrations, it'll affect the thing that makes it vibrate".

well said.

[curtisa]

18 hours ago, Crusader said:

We know Strats with a RW fretboard sound different to Maple, A solid Mahogany Les Paul sounds different to one with a Maple cap, and an all-Maple guitar most definitely sounds different. So the experimenting has already been done

Extending that to a practical application, if someone played you 5 recordings of 5 different Strats playing the same thing do you think you could identify the one with the rosewood fretboard? How about if those Strats we're being played in a band setting?

I'd say 95% of the tonewood experiments I've seen are largely irrelevant. Not because they prove one way or the other that it makes a difference, but because the differences they aim to highlight get buried by the practical application of the outcomes. No-one plays their guitars by plucking one note or strumming an open-E major chord and listening to whether it sustains for 34 or 37 seconds. No-one plays a guitar direct into their recording equipment and looks at a sepctrum analyser to see where the frequency response starts to dip at 4kHz. Very few players play their instruments in the same way as each other. Sometimes the biggest variable in those experiments is the guy holding the guitar trying to illustrate that the body material alone makes a significant sonic difference.

 

6 hours ago, mistermikev said:

thought to the idea that the pickup itself vibrates... I've always thought the body influences the strings by bouncing sound back (reverb) and that in turn changes teh strings vibration... and in turn effects the change in magnetic field... but he's convinced me that the pickup vibration is yet another variable that def makes a dif. 

I thought that was already an accepted behaviour of some pickups? - a microphonic pickup is one where the windings are loose enough for vibration to translate into sound...or squeal like a pig when the gain gets too high. The two questions in my mind from proving that the pickup can be vibrated and impart something to the sound is how can that be controlled and predicted to affect the outcome of building an instrument in a way that you plan it to, and how much impact can it have in comparison to the sound you want to pick up (ie, the strings). If the impact is tiny compared to the actual signal you want or the effect is unpredictable and uncontrollable, it's not that it doesn't make a difference to the sound but that it doesn't help lift the tonewood debate beyond the realms of pseudo-science. That's where the Facebook video experimenter should focus his work on.

If I stand on 15 sheets of paper I'm taller, right?

[mistermikev]

1 minute ago, curtisa said:

Extending that to a practical application, if someone played you 5 recordings of 5 different Strats playing the same thing do you think you could identify the one with the rosewood fretboard? How about if those Strats we're being played in a band setting?

I'd say 95% of the tonewood experiments I've seen are largely irrelevant. Not because they prove one way or the other that it makes a difference, but because the differences they aim to highlight get buried by the practical application of the outcomes. No-one plays their guitars by plucking one note or strumming an open-E major chord and listening to whether it sustains for 34 or 37 seconds. No-one plays a guitar direct into their recording equipment and looks at a sepctrum analyser to see where the frequency response starts to dip at 4kHz. Very few players play their instruments in the same way as each other. Sometimes the biggest variable in those experiments is the guy holding the guitar trying to illustrate that the body material alone makes a significant sonic difference.

 

I thought that was already an accepted behaviour of some pickups? - a microphonic pickup is one where the windings are loose enough for vibration to translate into sound...or squeal like a pig when the gain gets too high. The two questions in my mind from proving that the pickup can be vibrated and impart something to the sound is how can that be controlled and predicted to affect the outcome of building an instrument in a way that you plan it to, and how much impact can it have in comparison to the sound you want to pick up (ie, the strings). If the impact is tiny compared to the actual signal you want or the effect is unpredictable and uncontrollable, it's not that it doesn't make a difference to the sound but that it doesn't help lift the tonewood debate beyond the realms of pseudo-science. That's where the Facebook video experimenter should focus his work on.

If I stand on 15 sheets of paper I'm taller, right?

SHUT UP AND JUST ACCEPT MY TRUTH - hehe, just kidding! 

accepted... well it's accepted that the actual pickup wire can be vibrated in really high volume situations... true... but this is not that.  he's doing this at really low volume and amplifying the heck out of it.  also, showing it on a strobe.  literally shows tapping on the wood is being picked up by a magnetic pickup. 

controlled/predicted... i was trying to acknowledge that very point in the sentence regarding "at the end of the day... yada yada... too many variables... yada... impossible to predict...yada... so you just have to go with your intuition and develop your own recipe".  iow, building out of mahog and maple is a lot more established than concrete so it is predictable in the sense that the outcome is much more likely to sound good with the std pickups/strings/amps/etc available. 

I think he set out to prove that it does MATTER in a way that is less subjective -and on that mark he hit the spot.  as so many have eluded... most of these types of 'proof' videos can be easily refuted by so many variables... ie "that difference can be explained by how hard you hit the string here vs there" etc... and he really did a good job eliminating variables.  it is the only video of this type that I think I have ever seen where someone actually proved something.  what did he prove?  that the magnetic field of a pickup is in fact influenced by the vibration of the wood and subsequently the pickup itself.

[Bizman62]

7 minutes ago, curtisa said:

Very few players play their instruments in the same way as each other. Sometimes the biggest variable in those experiments is the guy holding the guitar trying to illustrate that the body material alone makes a significant sonic difference.

There was (is no more, I'm afraid) a video with the guy having cloned himself, on the left side was the stiff guy telling how tonewood and pickups matter, on the right the clone was showing his "bright maple", "muddy mahogany", "sparkling single coil", "beefy humbucker" etc. sounds all with the same guitar, same pickup, just altering his picking style and position. Can't remember if he used the volume and tone knobs or not.

Way back I saw Carl Perkins on TV, telling how they had seen Les Paul play. Not knowing anything about tape delays or other fancy gear they just learned to play the slapback echo with their left hand! He showed how and it was not a trick, he really could mimick the delay-lay-lay just by tapping the frets with the left!

[curtisa]

7 hours ago, mistermikev said:

literally shows tapping on the wood is being picked up by a magnetic pickup. 

Admittedly I cannot see the original video so I'm only going by what you're describing for me on his behalf, but I'm pretty sure that you can do a similar thing on a regular guitar. Just remove all the strings and tighten down all the potential sources of noise (bridge, trem claw, tuners etc), plug into your favourite Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier set to stun and knock on the body of the guitar - I'm fairly confident you'll hear the thud of the body being tapped. What that proves I don't really know, but whenever these kinds of experiments pop up I always feel like a conclusion has been made by missing a few steps in the middle of the working out.

 

7 hours ago, mistermikev said:

I think he set out to prove that it does MATTER in a way that is less subjective

He may have proven that it does something, but I don't actually know if it does matter or not. If he has to amplify the living piss out of the signal to detect it in a lab environment, would that same sonic imprint still mean anything when you plug in to a dimed Fender Twin Reverb with Vintage 30 speakers, miked with a Shure SM57, with a wah pedal, Tube Screamer, Dynacomp, Echoplex and God knows what else in front of it, while competing with a drummer, bassist and singer? Saying it is detectable under 'clean' conditions is one thing. Saying it still means something in the real world is another - that's what he should be establishing with his tests.

 

7 hours ago, mistermikev said:

what did he prove?  that the magnetic field of a pickup is in fact influenced by the vibration of the wood and subsequently the pickup itself.

Did he? Again, I can't see the video, but from your decription it sounds like he attached a pickup to a plank of wood, placed a tuning fork on one end of it while it was vibrating and was able to detect the sound of the tuning fork through the wood using the pickup over a distance of several feet. Is the wood vibrating the pickup windings? Is the tuning fork motion being detected by the pickup as an electromagnetic signal? Was the pickup particularly microphonic to begin with? Single coil? Humbucker? How much gain in the preamp? What happens to the detected signal if the pickup is decoupled from the wood while the tuning fork is in motion?

[curtisa]

Years ago I went to a Porcupine Tree concert in Sydney while they were on their 'Fear of a Blank Planet' tour. The support act was a three-piece outfit called The Sleeptime Parade. I don't remember much about their set, but one thing that does stick in my mind is a short section of one of their sings where the singer screamed a few lines into the pickups on his guitar, which with all the distortion and effects he was using was clearly audible through the PA as that typical 'telephone effect' vocal sound. Was his voice magnetic?

[Bizman62]

2 hours ago, curtisa said:

Was his voice magnetic?

LOL! It must have been Animal Magnetism a.k.a. Mesmerism...

In reality he made the strings vibrate with his voice, making the strings act similarly to the foil inside a microphone. Of course you knew that, but someone may not.

[curtisa]

Nope. He had his hands over the strings muting them. It's something I've since been able to replicate. Try it for yourself when you get a chance!

[mistermikev]

8 hours ago, curtisa said:

What happens to the detected signal if the pickup is decoupled from the wood while the tuning fork is in motion?

honestly I don't think it's needs to go any further than the fact that something is being picked up thru the wood.  One way or another it proved the medium the pickup is mounted in has an influence.  he's not proving anything we didn't know... it's obvious to me - that if you build a hollowbody it's going to sound like a hollowbody to some degree.  vs a semi hollow, vs a solid body.  the 'why' do they have that characteristic sound is only described in more detail by his efforts - the medium does have some influence on the sound.  you take that hollowbody and play it thru a marshal at 11 and it really doesn't sound like a hollowbody anymore (rev horton heath).  i actually like the fact that he's not trying to prove mahog sounds dif than pine... it doesn't really matter in this context.  

the singer into the pickup - well that's an interesting one I hadn't thought of.  an experiment of it's own.  why DOES that work... well it def suggests to me that the idea that it is only the pickups that matter in a solidbody is not accurate.  the argument that the pickups are not microphones and they only pickup the disturbance in the field made by the metal strings.  are they still probably the biggest factor in determining the sound of a guitar - well yes.  but they are def not the only factor.

[Bizman62]

6 hours ago, curtisa said:

Nope. He had his hands over the strings muting them.

Hmm... Despite the strings being muted they'd still vibrate to an extent, similarly to the plucking sound when you strum a muted string. Don't know if there'd be enough energy in the singing to make the muted strings act as an acoustic screen, though. Another option is that the pickups were more or less microphonic, no wax potted at all.

[Gogzs]

After all the discussion and science, question is... if the pickup vibrates, is it beneficial or counter productive? same as if you place two speakers facing each other playing a sine wave, depending on the frequency/distance, they could either amplify or cancel each other out. Same here, what if the pickup vibrates just like the string that was plucked. So you'd lessen the induced current in the pole piece under the plucked string, but due to the pickup vibrating, you'd also induce current in the pole pieces vibrating under strings that are not played. 

So how do you know if you nailed it and they resonate and amplify each other, or they cancel each other out?And then there's the question if it's beneficial, do you lose some of the benefits by mounting the pickups onto pickup rings instead directly screwing them into the body? 

And the biggest question of all... DID YOU JUST ASSUME MY MATERIALS? What about tonecoffeebeans? Or toneepoxy? Hell, my current builds are like, 80% bamboo... can I coin the term tonegrass?

There are so many factors in this one, and I'd totally understand the discussion if this was about acoustic guitars, but electric... it's easier to EQ the difference out on a good amp, rather than chase tonewood benefits. 

[Drak]

OMG, I'm replying to a tonewood thread!

Must analyze self, must analyze self! Danger Will Robinson!

Right around 5 min. in he just gets right to the point of it all.