Body wood affects tone

DaevidJ

Was it cotton or cotton blend sock?

bobliefeld

To the wood tappers, flickers, etc..  

Have you ever tapped a bit of wood, not got the kind of sound/response you associate with a good bit of wood and then went on to build a guitar with it that sounded crap ?

Not trollin' , genuinely curious.  I'd have thought wood tappers wouldn't bother building with wood they think is crap so we really don't know if that wood would make a good guitar or not or if the wood they think is good really is good ?

koneguitarist

Come on boys give it up, there is no such thing as tone wood only wood in a good guitar or bad guitar. 
The build quality dictates how good guitar is, and not one person can prove anything else. All that matters is does the guitar resonate ok for sustain. 
what does Rosewood,Ash,Alder,Pine, Mahogany, Walnut etc sound like when made into a tele body, surprise surprise a tele! End of argument. 
So called tone wood is just marketing and to make a guitar look pretty. 
Sorry to all solid body guitar builders, but facts are facts. 

Roland

bobliefeld said:

To the wood tappers, flickers, etc..  

Have you ever tapped a bit of wood, not got the kind of sound/response you associate with a good bit of wood and then went on to build a guitar with it that sounded crap ?

Yes. I refer you to a post several days back about two guitars made using B&Q "furniture board". The one with a @GSPBASSES neck sounded lively. The one with a cheap Chinese neck sounded dead. 

EricTheWeary

bobliefeld said:

To the wood tappers, flickers, etc..  

Have you ever tapped a bit of wood, not got the kind of sound/response you associate with a good bit of wood and then went on to build a guitar with it that sounded crap ?

Not trollin' , genuinely curious.  I'd have thought wood tappers wouldn't bother building with wood they think is crap so we really don't know if that wood would make a good guitar or not or if the wood they think is good really is good ?

I think people have always known about this, the Wood Tappers and Shunters Social Club was a big thing in the 1970s.

Ravenous

EricTheWeary said:

I think people have always known about this, the Wood Tappers and Shunters Social Club was a big thing in the 1970s.

"On behalf of the commit-tee..."

EricTheWeary

koneguitarist said:

Come on boys give it up, there is no such thing as tone wood only wood in a good guitar or bad guitar. 
The build quality dictates how good guitar is, and not one person can prove anything else. All that matters is does the guitar resonate ok for sustain. 
what does Rosewood,Ash,Alder,Pine, Mahogany, Walnut etc sound like when made into a tele body, surprise surprise a tele! End of argument. 
So called tone wood is just marketing and to make a guitar look pretty. 
Sorry to all solid body guitar builders, but facts are facts. 

Just to reiterate something from earlier - a lot of the decisions about why woods were chosen for the classic electric guitar designs almost certainly had little or nothing to do with tone. Issues like availability, price, how easy they are to work, weight, looks, durability or traditions taken across from non solid body instruments. 


Years ago I was having problems with my strat and showed it to my mate who didn't play guitar but knew his music and was an engineer. When he looked inside the pickup cavity he was completely gobsmacked to find out that electric guitars were made of wood - with all those shiny colours he'd always assumed they were made of plastic. Certainly he couldn't tell tone woods! 

Megii

I admit to having a bit of an OCD thing about prime numbers - as a result, I was kind of hoping this thread would come to an end on page 23. But now it's onto page 24, and the next prime number is 29, another 5 pages away...

professorben

Megii said:

I admit to having a bit of an OCD thing about prime numbers - as a result, I was kind of hoping this thread would come to an end on page 23. But now it's onto page 24, and the next prime number is 29, another 5 pages away...

It's Fibonacci

Page 34..... 

WezV

koneguitarist said:

Come on boys give it up, there is no such thing as tone wood only wood in a good guitar or bad guitar. 
The build quality dictates how good guitar is, and not one person can prove anything else. All that matters is does the guitar resonate ok for sustain. 
what does Rosewood,Ash,Alder,Pine, Mahogany, Walnut etc sound like when made into a tele body, surprise surprise a tele! End of argument. 
So called tone wood is just marketing and to make a guitar look pretty. 
Sorry to all solid body guitar builders, but facts are facts. 

It's a totally different point to what most of us are talking about. I agree tonewood is an unhelpful term to the electric guitar builder.
 
Most of us are not trying to perpetuate guitar shop mythology, but instead understand how material choice affects that resonance you admit is important.

Ravenous

Megii said:

I admit to having a bit of an OCD thing about prime numbers - as a result, I was kind of hoping this thread would come to an end on page 23. But now it's onto page 24, and the next prime number is 29, another 5 pages away...

Bad news; there's an infinite number of primes. (There's an excellent proof of this, unfortunately this box doesn't have space to write it.)

Lescaster

Please stop, please.

To clarify, the debate as WezV has stated, is about whether body wood affects tone and not whether tone woods exist. All except one of us agree that different woods affect the tone of a guitar to one degree or another. 

This debate is reminding me of the one of religion, you will never ever change the mind of someone who's answer is 'but I have faith'. Strangely the one who has faith in this debate is the one looking for definitive scientific proof.

Great post too Cirrus!!!

NelsonP

I'll just leave this here......

Arthur Pate. Lutherie de la guitare electrique solid body : aspects mecaniques et perceptifs.
Acoustique [physics.class-ph]. Universite Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris VI, 2014. Francais. <
NNT : 2014PA066461
https://hal.inria.fr/tel-01127562/document

p144
Recent studies showed that the sound of the instrument also depends on its mechanical behaviour. As a matter of fact,
the pickup converts the string velocity into a voltage supplying the electronic chain. Just like in purely acoustic string instruments [Gough 1981; Woodhouse 2004a], the string couples with the structure of the instrument. The lutherie quality therefore alters the sound of the instrument. A way to describe this coupling is to study the vibratory behaviour of the structure [Fleischer & Zwicker 1998 1999; Paté et al. 2014c]. In these latter articles, the input admittance of the structure is used to predict and characterise the string vibration. In particular, the modal frequencies, damping ratios, and effective masses of the structure are directly related to the output sound of the electric guitar.

@Megii - this report has 281 pages. Which, as I'm sure you know, is a prime number.

Sassafras

Megii said:

I admit to having a bit of an OCD thing about prime numbers - as a result, I was kind of hoping this thread would come to an end on page 23. But now it's onto page 24, and the next prime number is 29, another 5 pages away...

Some time this evening, then.

koneguitarist

@WezV I totally agree body material makes a difference to resonance, I just think it's negligible in the scheme of things. The material be it Plastic, cardboard, wood or steel all makes a difference, how much I'm not sure, but the difference between two pieces of wood as long as they are strong enough for the job is neither here nor there. 
I don't have the wood working skills and knowledge some of you have, but after owning a guitar shop and having owned over a 100 guitars, mainly strats and tele's, one thing you learn is to forget all preconceptions and just listen to the instrument. 
I did a deal years ago to get a 54 tele with original case. Had to part ex some guitars including a 62 MIJ reissue tele. I had to have that Tele, all my heroes played 50's tele's Albert Lee James Burton, Danny Gatton etc, after I had owned it for a couple of weeks I realised it was just a tele, nothing special and certainly not as good as my 62 reissue. But I convinced myself into buying it as old guitars are best. A guitar is a guitar, and myths about "Tone" wood etc is just that a myth. You could use any wood in a guitar and as long as it's decent seasoned wood it will be fine. 

NelsonP

One more (and this one is for the wood tappers):

Modal parameter variability in industrial electric guitar making: Manufacturing process, wood variability, and lutherie decisions
Arthur Paté,, Jean-Loïc Le Carrou, Benoît Fabre
Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Univ Paris 06, UMR 7190, Institut Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, équipe LAM, 11, rue de Lourmel, F-75015 Paris, France

Abstract

Recent studies showed that mechanical coupling between structure and strings can alter the sound of the

solid body electric guitar. Modal frequencies and damping ratios of the structure can explain some sound

differences between instruments. These vibratory parameters can vary because of lutherie decisions (e.g.

intentionally fitting guitars with different woods for sound quality purposes), wood intrinsic variability,

or making process variability. Yet the vast majority of solid body electric guitars comes from an industrial

mass-production: the manufacturing process is designed for producing guitars that are the most similar

possible. However, musicians and makers know that guitars of the same model both share features, and

still have some individual properties. The experimental quantification of the modal parameter variability

of nominally identical electric guitars in an industrial context is the aim of this article. This variability is

assessed on one guitar set, and compared to other industrial objects. A second guitar set is investigated: it

consists of guitars with maple or rosewood fingerboard, all other specifications being identical. This sec-

ond set allows the comparison between making process and wood variability, with the variability due to

an intentional lutherie decision: the change of the fingerboard wood.

Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275241621_Modal_parameter_variability_in_industrial_electric_guitar_making_Manufacturing_process_wood_variability_and_lutherie_decisions

WezV

koneguitarist said:

@WezV I totally agree body material makes a difference to resonance, I just think it's negligible in the scheme of things. The material be it Plastic, cardboard, wood or steel all makes a difference, how much I'm not sure, but the difference between two pieces of wood as long as they are strong enough for the job is neither here nor there. 
I don't have the wood working skills and knowledge some of you have, but after owning a guitar shop and having owned over a 100 guitars, mainly strats and tele's, one thing you learn is to forget all preconceptions and just listen to the instrument. 
I did a deal years ago to get a 54 tele with original case. Had to part ex some guitars including a 62 MIJ reissue tele. I had to have that Tele, all my heroes played 50's tele's Albert Lee James Burton, Danny Gatton etc, after I had owned it for a couple of weeks I realised it was just a tele, nothing special and certainly not as good as my 62 reissue. But I convinced myself into buying it as old guitars are best. A guitar is a guitar, and myths about "Tone" wood etc is just that a myth. You could use any wood in a guitar and as long as it's decent seasoned wood it will be fine. 

We are all mostly in agreement then.  The thread title does not mention tonewood in any way.

Does the body wood affect tone?  Sounds like most of us are saying "yes, but it's importance is up for debate"

discussions about tonewood just muddy that.  I have typed my definition of tonewood numerous times.  It doesn't cover electric guitars at all

i judge the individual piece, but use species to get me close.... I talk about this in some of my build threads.  I mention weight, grain direction and tap tone as much as species.

Skipped

Rodrigo: So are we going to listen to the 9 Telecasters?

Thiago: "No. We will use a Fourier to determine if the harmonic spectra is consistent."

Rodrigo: Okey Dokey. Can he get my wife a Mink coat? And also.....what will happen if I like one of the Telecasters much more than the others?

Thiago: "We will retire you from the project. It will be just like that double-blind test when you failed to differentiate between Chicken Curry and Tofu Curry but then refused to stop buying Chicken. We will have a vote and decide that you are an idiot."

Rodrigo: Okey Dokey. Also....I have been wondering about that other test where 15 Stradivarius owners failed to identify their own violin when played back to back with a Violin made on a 3-D printer.
Did those 15 owners sell their Stradivarius violins?

Thiago: "No."

Megii

NelsonP said:

I'll just leave this here......

Arthur Pate. Lutherie de la guitare electrique solid body : aspects mecaniques et perceptifs.
Acoustique [physics.class-ph]. Universite Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris VI, 2014. Francais. <
NNT : 2014PA066461
https://hal.inria.fr/tel-01127562/document

p144
Recent studies showed that the sound of the instrument also depends on its mechanical behaviour. As a matter of fact,
the pickup converts the string velocity into a voltage supplying the electronic chain. Just like in purely acoustic string instruments [Gough 1981; Woodhouse 2004a], the string couples with the structure of the instrument. The lutherie quality therefore alters the sound of the instrument. A way to describe this coupling is to study the vibratory behaviour of the structure [Fleischer & Zwicker 1998 1999; Paté et al. 2014c]. In these latter articles, the input admittance of the structure is used to predict and characterise the string vibration. In particular, the modal frequencies, damping ratios, and effective masses of the structure are directly related to the output sound of the electric guitar.

@Megii - this report has 281 pages. Which, as I'm sure you know, is a prime number.

I had no idea - I don't know my primes up that high. But delighted to hear it!

Three-ColourSunburst

NelsonP said:

One more (and this one is for the wood tappers):

Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275241621_Modal_parameter_variability_in_industrial_electric_guitar_making_Manufacturing_process_wood_variability_and_lutherie_decisions

This contents of this paper have already been discussed, and if you think it supports the 'tone wood' hypothesis, you clearly haven't read through it properly, because it doesn't!

The research they refer to in order to justify their supposition that the 'mechanical coupling between structure and strings can alter the sound of the solid body electric guitar' actually had nothing to do with the timbre of the instrument, so their use of the term 'timbre' in this context is disingenuous at best.

The studies they refer to actually looked at the way high neck conductance creates 'flat spots', and the role harmonics play in increasing the decay rate for certain fretted positions.  The paper by Arthur Patéa et al. had a similar focus and noted that 'coupling effects arise only in case of coincidence between the string playing frequencies and the structure modal frequencies'. If anything this paper undermines the 'tone wood' hypothesis, given that 'coupling' is not something that affects all notes, and when it does, flat spots are the usual result.

As to the paper itself, it did not look at any differences in sound through the pickups that might arise as a result of different body woods. Rather it took complete instruments, weighed them and then recording the way they resonated when tapped with a hammer. They then suggest that differences in modal frequency and damping ratio found might affect the sound, but this was not tested. They also acknowledge that 'the string/structure coupling occurs mainly on the neck' (as Fleischer notes) which itself undermines the suggestion that there is a strong, direct coupling between the strings and body