Billy Corgan thinks paint colour affects tone.

Three-ColourSunburst

OK, so people clearly want to discuss this further. Mods, don't blame me!

Well, I can certainly feel vibrations on the neck and the body of my guitars when I play a string. Therefore some of the energy in the string is passing into the wood of the neck and the body.

Put a clip on tuner on the selector switch of your guitar. Can you still tune it? If yes, then this proves that there is transfer of the energy from the string into the body.

Most of the energy from the strings goes into the wood.  Why do you think that an acoustic guitar needs a soundboard?  If the energy from the strings went directly into the air as a wave (rather than being wasted as friction) then an acoustic guitar doesn't need a soundboard.

Yes, some of the energy carried by the string clearly is dissipated through the body, which is why a clip on tuner will work, and why a solid-body guitar produces some acoustic sound. It is also true that in the case of an acoustic guitar most of the energy of the string is dissipated through the soundboard, producing sound - which is its job. However, none of this means that in the case of an electric guitar 'most' of the energy goes into the wood.

First of all, a decent electric guitar will have much better sustain that an acoustic, although the low volume of sound produced acoustically by a solid body guitar might make it hard to appreciate just how much longer the sustain actually is. A pretty reasonable guide to how much more energy is retained on the string by an electric guitar as compared to an acoustic is the difference in volume between the two. I.e. a big difference. With an electric guitar, the decay of the string through air displacement and internal losses is likely to be of a similar magnitude to that lost via the coupling points, and most of that energy will be lost via the fret/nut interface, not the body.

The key point here is that, even if there is some loss of energy to the body this does not show that there is any sort of 'selective damping of harmonics' going on.

Hopefully the images below will illustrate why is seems perfectly reasonable to conclude that the timbre of an electric guitar is not caused by the body wood selectively damping certain harmonics. I have obtained these traces by running my Yamaha RS620 straight into an FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) analyser, or by feeding the signal, via a microphone, from the speaker of my Blues Cube Hot into the same FFT window. The amp gain was set to give a clean sound with no apparent distortion.

The first image shows the direct signal. Firstly, it is apparent that no harmonics are 'missing', so there is no evidence of the body woods "absorbing energy from the strings selectively, leaving a more or less pleasing vibration pattern in the string to be captured by the pickups". Yes, the amplitude of the various harmonics varies. However, the balance between them can easily be changed (and by a large degree) by selecting a different pickup or by changing the plucking position. I.e there is no evidence that there is some sort of consistent pattern of harmonics that is characteristic of the timbre of the guitar, independent to those variations caused by pickups selection and / or picking position and style.  Overall, the pattern of harmonics is exactly what one would expect from a mathematically-modeled FFT trace of a vibrating string, with no sign of the body wood having any effect.

http://imgbox.com/k5dCbluW

Moving on to the second FFT trace. This is what was produced via the microphone pointing at the speaker. What is interesting here is how the amplifier has not only added a large number of additional higher harmonics, which will add colour to the timbre, it appears that there has been a large amount of smoothing, with harmonics that were 'weak' in the direct trace being enhanced, and the higher harmonics, which typically carry less energy, all having their strength increased. All in all, the timbre appears to be more a function of the amp than the direct signal - and this is with the amp set up to give a 'clean' sound. Again, there is no sign that certain harmonics have been suppressed and / or enhanced, so leaving only the 'mahogany and maple' sounding ones to be sensed by the pickups.

http://imgbox.com/uEAFGpIy

Both traces were obtained using the neck pick up, playing an 'A' note on the 2nd fret of the 3rd string. No trickery, no multiple passes and subsequent selection of traces to support what I am saying. In fact I only downloaded the software this afternoon (SignalScope) to see what would happen if I did this little experiment.

Overall, I would suggest that above indicates that the vibrations on the string of an electric guitar play a minor role in determining the final sound and timbre, and what really matters is how the pickups interact with the amp - which is why no one would think that even a '59 Les Paul sounded good through an amplifier that simply produced a hi-fi reproduction of the signal on the string.

thegummy

I don't understand why people are arguing that the wood on an electric guitar vibrates when the strings are plucked - no one is denying that obviously, we all play guitars and feel it every day.

I don't believe the idea that the wood somehow extracts energy from the strings, like if the wood wasn't there the energy would stay in the string.

The issue of tone wood isn't whether or not the string affects the vibrations of the body - it's whether the body affects the vibrations of the strings because the pickups don't pick up vibrations from the body, they pick up the vibrations of the string.

fandango

It goes beyond colour. It’s all about the day of the week and where it was painted. Tuesday’s gone. Friday’s gone as well. And we all hate Monday’s. Where does that leave us? Ah a guitar painted Sheffield, Wednesday.

JerkMoans

fandango said:

It goes beyond colour. It’s all about the day of the week and where it was painted. Tuesday’s gone. Friday’s gone as well. And we all hate Monday’s. Where does that leave us? Ah a guitar painted Sheffield, Wednesday.

Now we’re into wine territory. South facing slope?

Bigsby

NelsonP said:

Put a clip on tuner on the selector switch of your guitar. Can you still tune it?
If yes, then this proves that there is transfer of the energy from the string into the body.

Since energy can be transferred from the strings to the body then the opposite is also true.

I'm wondering, does a clip on tuner track notes perfectly when playing quarter or eighth notes at 120bmp? If not, then do these vibrations in the wood ever make it back to the string in time to influence the vibrations the pickup is detecting? Generally, we're not talking about 'tone' in terms of endlessly sustaining notes where vibrations may be transferring around various parts of an instrument, but the tone of an instrument that's actually playing music. This is what really puzzles me about the tone wood arguments. 

Three-ColourSunburst

NelsonP said:

Since energy can be transferred from the strings to the body then the opposite is also true.

Just like the way, because water will boil if you put it in a pan over a flame by absorbing the heat,  a warm cup of coffee will get hot if you put it in a fridge, once again by absorbing heat energy from its interior?

Surely, in a guitar the string is in a higher energy state than the rest of the system, so the energy of the string can only be dissipated?

This is why the phenomenon of true wolf notes is limited to bowed instruments, as the bow can keep on adding energy to the system, thereby driving the resonance between the string and the body, with this transfer of energy being facilitated by the low impedance of the bridge that couples the two.

JerkMoans

Dear God: are you lot still at it?!

*goes back to Greta Van Fleet Record and Rioja *

Philly_Q

JerkMoans said:

Dear God: are you lot still at it?!

*goes back to Greta Van Fleet Record and Rioja *

Things aren't that bad, surely..?

thegummy

@Three-ColourSunburst if I may ask you a question, since your understanding of logic seems agreeable with my own and you appear to have done plenty of research - is it just the wood species you've found not to affect the tone the pickup puts out or would the size and shape of the body also make no difference on an electric guitar?

E.g. in your opinion, would a very thin, lightweight superstrat type guitar sound the same as a very thick, heavy Les Paul - given the same pickups?

deano

Okay. First of all, let's remember you can't break the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is why you can't patent anything that claims to be a perpetual motion machine. Every loses energy, and it ultimately gets converted into heat.

This is physics.

A vibrating guitar string cannot vibrate indefinitely. It must give up its energy into the air, which is why we hear electric guitars played acoustically or into the metal and wood of the guitar body itself.

The string must be given energy in the form of a pluck from a plectrum or finger, which is mechanical energy, and it dissipates that same energy - exactly the same amount of energy in fact - by transferring it to the air or to vibrations in the guitar body, and ultimately into heat energy.

The wood, being a natural product, is different between species and indeed between woods from different trees of the same species. Speciation is a man made construct based on DNA sequences. Woods have similar properties, but also distinct differences, either genetic or environmental. So maple is genetically different from mahogany but some maple trees are genetically the same but different from other maple trees based on the environment in which they grow. Indeed a piece of wood from the top of a maple tree may well end up being very similar in structure to a piece from the bottom of the same tree, but different in the way that the fibres twist and warp.

So I don't expect any two pieces of wood to be the same. Just as I wouldn't expect a piece of flesh from my head to be the same as from my foot.

So I would expect wood to obey the physical laws of thermodynamics and convert vibrations into heat, but to do so with a different fingerprint than steel or polycarbonate does, and indeed with a different fingerprint to other woods, either of different species or of the same species. The fingerprint will be more markedly different between species but different even between woods of the same species, and even between woods taken from the same tree, just as the skin on my head feels different to the skin on my foot. Genetically they are the same, environmentally they are different because one has lived for fifty odd years crammed into a leather shoes, and the other has been exposed to the weather.

Why would we expect wood to be different from out own bodies?

Wood does absorb energy from a vibrating string, and converts it into heat. That is simple physics and I would expect someone claiming it doesn't to provide the evidence as that is the greater claim. The only debate is whether woods off different types absorb energies of different frequencies at different rates. I maintain they do, and I would love to see evidence to the contrary because I think biological differences substantiate my understanding.

Three-ColourSunburst

thegummy said:

in your opinion, would a very thin, lightweight superstrat type guitar sound the same as a very thick, heavy Les Paul - given the same pickups?

Depends what you mean by 'sounds the same'. The more massive and stiffer the structure of the guitar the greater the impedance mismatch between the string and the body is likely to be and the less the amount of energy that is likely to be wasted as a result of the body flexing. This is likely to increase the sustain. In turn there might be a perceived increase in brightness as the higher partials tend to decay more quickly, and the increased sustain would preserve those higher partials for longer.

Then again, even if it has a stiff and massive body the Les Paul might have areas of lower impedance on the neck, creating sustain-killing dead spots that overall gave the Superstrat the edge, sustain-wise, so from a mechanical point of view the wood used to build a guitar does matter.

It's much the same effect as fitting a heavy brass bridge, a brass tremolo block, or having a guitar with a brass sustain block in the body, like the Ibanez AR2619. Again, this extra mass will increase the impedance of the bridge so more of the energy in the string will be reflected back along the string.

One interesting aside I came across when reading up about impedance was the development of loudspeaker drivers made of the rare earth Terbium that are able to transmit impulses of a high enough energy so as to enable any solid resonant object, such as a door or window, to be used as a loudspeaker.

Normal speakers are low-impedance devices, using a small force to move a lightweight cone a large distance, much like the weak force of a guitar string is able to flex the thin soundboard of an acoustic guitar. In contrast Terbium loudspeakers are high impedance devices, using very strong forces over a very short distance to excite rigid, massive objects. (Feonic Technology are a leader in this field). Impedance matters, which is why the large impedance mismatch between a guitar string and the solid bridge and body of an electric guitar means that the degree of string-body coupling that is possible with something like a violin or acoustic guitar simply doesn't apply in the case of electric guitars.

More on conductance and the effects of body flex in guitars in this paper:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Helmut_Fleischer/publication/282790879_Fleischer_H_und_Zwicker_T_Mechanical_vibrations_of_electric_guitars/links/5736092808ae298602e09e42/Fleischer-H-und-Zwicker-T-Mechanical-vibrations-of-electric-guitars.pdf

thegummy

deano said:

Okay. First of all, let's remember you can't break the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is why you can't patent anything that claims to be a perpetual motion machine. Every loses energy, and it ultimately gets converted into heat.

This is physics.

A vibrating guitar string cannot vibrate indefinitely. It must give up its energy into the air, which is why we hear electric guitars played acoustically or into the metal and wood of the guitar body itself.

The string must be given energy in the form of a pluck from a plectrum or finger, which is mechanical energy, and it dissipates that same energy - exactly the same amount of energy in fact - by transferring it to the air or to vibrations in the guitar body, and ultimately into heat energy.

The wood, being a natural product, is different between species and indeed between woods from different trees of the same species. Speciation is a man made construct based on DNA sequences. Woods have similar properties, but also distinct differences, either genetic or environmental. So maple is genetically different from mahogany but some maple trees are genetically the same but different from other maple trees based on the environment in which they grow. Indeed a piece of wood from the top of a maple tree may well end up being very similar in structure to a piece from the bottom of the same tree, but different in the way that the fibres twist and warp.

So I don't expect any two pieces of wood to be the same. Just as I wouldn't expect a piece of flesh from my head to be the same as from my foot.

So I would expect wood to obey the physical laws of thermodynamics and convert vibrations into heat, but to do so with a different fingerprint than steel or polycarbonate does, and indeed with a different fingerprint to other woods, either of different species or of the same species. The fingerprint will be more markedly different between species but different even between woods of the same species, and even between woods taken from the same tree, just as the skin on my head feels different to the skin on my foot. Genetically they are the same, environmentally they are different because one has lived for fifty odd years crammed into a leather shoes, and the other has been exposed to the weather.

Why would we expect wood to be different from out own bodies?

Wood does absorb energy from a vibrating string, and converts it into heat. That is simple physics and I would expect someone claiming it doesn't to provide the evidence as that is the greater claim. The only debate is whether woods off different types absorb energies of different frequencies at different rates. I maintain they do, and I would love to see evidence to the contrary because I think biological differences substantiate my understanding.

Just to clarify what you're actually saying - are you claiming that if you suspended the string in air and plucked it, the string would retain more energy than if you introduced a block of wood near it and plucked it?

thegummy

Three-ColourSunburst said:

thegummy said:

in your opinion, would a very thin, lightweight superstrat type guitar sound the same as a very thick, heavy Les Paul - given the same pickups?

Depends what you mean by 'sounds the same'. The more massive and stiffer the structure of the guitar the greater the impedance mismatch between the string and the body is likely to be and the less the amount of energy that is likely to be wasted as a result of the body flexing. This is likely to increase the sustain. In turn there might be a perceived increase in brightness as the higher partials tend to decay more quickly, and the increased sustain would preserve those higher partials for longer.

Then again, even if it has a stiff and massive body the Les Paul might have areas of lower impedance on the neck, creating sustain-killing dead spots that overall gave the Superstrat the edge, sustain-wise, so from a mechanical point of view the wood used to build a guitar does matter.

It's much the same effect as fitting a heavy brass bridge, a brass tremolo block, or having a guitar with a brass sustain block in the body, like the Ibanez AR2619. Again, this extra mass will increase the impedance of the bridge so more of the energy in the string will be reflected back along the string.

One interesting aside I came across when reading up about impedance was the development of loudspeaker drivers made of the rare earth Terbium that are able to transmit impulses of a high enough energy so as to enable any solid resonant object, such as a door or window, to be used as a loudspeaker.

Normal speakers are low-impedance devices, using a small force to move a lightweight cone a large distance, much like the weak force of a guitar string is able to flex the thin soundboard of an acoustic guitar. In contrast Terbium loudspeakers are high impedance devices, using very strong forces over a very short distance to excite rigid, massive objects. (Feonic Technology are a leader in this field). Impedance matters, which is why the large impedance mismatch between a guitar string and the solid bridge and body of an electric guitar means that the degree of string-body coupling that is possible with something like a violin or acoustic guitar simply doesn't apply in the case of electric guitars.

More on conductance and the effects of body flex in guitars in this paper:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Helmut_Fleischer/publication/282790879_Fleischer_H_und_Zwicker_T_Mechanical_vibrations_of_electric_guitars/links/5736092808ae298602e09e42/Fleischer-H-und-Zwicker-T-Mechanical-vibrations-of-electric-guitars.pdf

Thanks for the reply, very much appreciated.

Have to say that, ignoring the weird one about males and females, I've found your posts in this thread to make so much sense that, while I'm still staying neutral on the tonewood debate, I may well have switched from "I'd guess they probably do make a difference" to "I guess they probably don't", albeit without any feelings of certainty either way.

JerkMoans

Philly_Q said:

JerkMoans said:

Dear God: are you lot still at it?!

*goes back to Greta Van Fleet Record and Rioja *

Things aren't that bad, surely..?

Mate. You have no idea  

Three-ColourSunburst

deano said:

The only debate is whether woods off different types absorb energies of different frequencies at different rates. I maintain they do, and I would love to see evidence to the contrary because I think biological differences substantiate my understanding.

Even if different woods did absorb different frequencies at different rates you are overlooking the importance of the high level of impedance between the string and the bridge/ body of an electric guitar, with only minimal energy being transmitted to the body. I have already posted about this numerous times, as with this diagram, drawn from the paper by Fleischer (which I linked to above) showing the bridge impedance values for a violin (top) acoustic guitar (middle) and electric guitar (bottom).

http://imgbox.com/1s4NpnOf

When so much of the energy in the string  - and so the various harmonics / partials - remains in the string for so long, giving the guitar its sustain, how could the little that is passed through the bridge alter the timbre, certainly to any perceptible degree? 

What you argue also suggests that the timbre of the instrument should change over time as the body drains away the magic 'not sounding like mahogany' harmonics, leaving only the 'mahogany like' ones on the string, with this effect being greater than that caused by the initial transient and the more rapid decay of the upper harmonics due to internal losses in the string. I see no evidence for this happening at all.

Also look at my earlier post when I compared a FFT for a direct signal from my guitar with one recorded from the speaker of an amplifier. Read my post, look at the FFTs and then tell me that it isn't the amplifier that is creating the timbre.

Three-ColourSunburst

thegummy said:

Have to say that, ignoring the weird one about males and females, I've found your posts in this thread to make so much sense...

Not sure why what I said should be thought of as 'weird', given that the post-modern ideologies I mentioned have come to dominate the way people think these days - in fact the whole social domain - as much as the ideologies of neo-liberalism have come to dominate the economic domain.

Perhaps to be fully aware of the process one had to be involved in the education sector - especially the higher education sector - during what has come to be known as 'The science wars' or 'The culture wars', when the academic left, and especially the feminist movement, set out undermine the whole legacy of the Enlightenment, replacing it with it's own 'socially constructed' version of reality. Lots of books documented this process for example:

Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt (1994).

Intellectual Impostures
 by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
 (1998)

The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (1987)

This quote is from the introduction to Bloom's book. I love the irony of his '2 + 2 = 4' example, which surely must be a reference to the famous quote from Orwell's NIneteen Eighty-Four, ''Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows'. And yes, some of the more hard-line post-modernists and feminists have indeed tried to argue that 2 +2  need not make four, given that they do is (supposedly) merely a construct of 'male' logic.

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students' reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4. These are things you don't think about.

Richard Dawkins' review of Intellectual Impostures gives a good insight into what the hoo-ha was all about

https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html

Also worth a read:

...the feminist Sandra Harding contends that science as it has been pursued until now, is patriarchal, sexist and homophobic. She also claims that the very ideas of objective reality and of value-neutrality are myths invented by neurotic males to satisfy their perverted psychological needs. Therefore, she urges that science as we know it be overthrown and replaced by another kind based on female ways of knowing.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/After_the_Science_Wars

All this might seem to be very abstract and only of any relevance to those living in academic 'ivory towers', but as I said this sort of thing has come to dominate the way people 'think' these days. As a great fan of Orwell, and someone who lived through the 'Science wars', I just can't help but kick back against this descent into irrationality and 'my truth is as good as yours' relativism which, as Orwell recognised, is an open door to totalitarianism. This is why nonsense of all kinds winds me up so much, including all the voodoo and mojo associated with the electric guitar!

Deep-down I do realise that I am just a dinosaur, clinging on to the outmoded 'White western European male' values of the Enlightenment (such as reason, logic and empiricism) in a world that seemingly once read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and instead of regarding it as a warning, saw it as offering a blueprint for society.

thegummy

Three-ColourSunburst said:

thegummy said:

Have to say that, ignoring the weird one about males and females, I've found your posts in this thread to make so much sense...

Not sure why what I said should be thought of as 'weird', given that the post-modern ideologies I mentioned have come to dominate the way people think these days - in fact the whole social domain - as much as the ideologies of neo-liberalism have come to dominate the economic domain.

Perhaps to be fully aware of the process one had to be involved in the education sector - especially the higher education sector - during what has come to be known as 'The science wars' or 'The culture wars', when the academic left, and especially the feminist movement, set out undermine the whole legacy of the Enlightenment, replacing it with it's own 'socially constructed' version of reality. Lots of books documented this process for example:

Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt (1994).

Intellectual Impostures
 by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
 (1998)

The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (1987)

This quote is from the introduction to Bloom's book. I love the irony of his '2 + 2 = 4' example, which surely must be a reference to the famous quote from Orwell's NIneteen Eighty-Four, ''Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows'. And yes, some of the more hard-line post-modernists and feminists have indeed tried to argue that 2 +2  need not make four, given that they do is (supposedly) merely a construct of 'male' logic.

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students' reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4. These are things you don't think about.

Richard Dawkins' review of Intellectual Impostures gives a good insight into what the hoo-ha was all about

https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html

Also worth a read:

...the feminist Sandra Harding contends that science as it has been pursued until now, is patriarchal, sexist and homophobic. She also claims that the very ideas of objective reality and of value-neutrality are myths invented by neurotic males to satisfy their perverted psychological needs. Therefore, she urges that science as we know it be overthrown and replaced by another kind based on female ways of knowing.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/After_the_Science_Wars

All this might seem to be very abstract and only of any relevance to those living in academic 'ivory towers', but as I said this sort of thing has come to dominate the way people 'think' these days. As a great fan of Orwell, and someone who lived through the 'Science wars', I just can't help but kick back against this descent into irrationality and 'my truth is as good as yours' relativism which, as Orwell recognised, is an open door to totalitarianism. This is why nonsense of all kinds winds me up so much, including all the voodoo and mojo associated with the electric guitar!

Deep-down I do realise that I am just a dinosaur, clinging on to the outmoded 'White western European male' values of the Enlightenment (such as reason, logic and empiricism) in a world that seemingly once read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and instead of regarding it as a warning, saw it as offering a blueprint for society.

I think if we're going to be off-topic regarding paint colour, we should at least stick to things affecting guitar tone

All I'll say is that I largely agree with what you're saying regarding truth being wrongly seen as relative but not that it has anything to do with gender.

But, again, I think some people will be finding it bad enough that the thread got turned in to a discussion about different things that affect guitar tone other than colour lol.

deano

Three-ColourSunburst said:

deano said:

The only debate is whether woods off different types absorb energies of different frequencies at different rates. I maintain they do, and I would love to see evidence to the contrary because I think biological differences substantiate my understanding.

Even if different woods did absorb different frequencies at different rates you are overlooking the importance of the high level of impedance between the string and the bridge/ body of an electric guitar, with only minimal energy being transmitted to the body. I have already posted about this numerous times, as with this diagram, drawn from the paper by Fleischer (which I linked to above) showing the bridge impedance values for a violin (top) acoustic guitar (middle) and electric guitar (bottom).

http://imgbox.com/1s4NpnOf

When so much of the energy in the string  - and so the various harmonics / partials - remains in the string for so long, giving the guitar its sustain, how could the little that is passed through the bridge alter the timbre, certainly to any perceptible degree? 

What you argue also suggests that the timbre of the instrument should change over time as the body drains away the magic 'not sounding like mahogany' harmonics, leaving only the 'mahogany like' ones on the string, with this effect being greater than that caused by the initial transient and the more rapid decay of the upper harmonics due to internal losses in the string. I see no evidence for this happening at all.

Also look at my earlier post when I compared a FFT for a direct signal from my guitar with one recorded from the speaker of an amplifier. Read my post, look at the FFTs and then tell me that it isn't the amplifier that is creating the timbre.

This is from that very academic, university level BBC Bitesize physics page....

Sound through different materials
Sound travels faster through liquids and solids than it does through air and other gases. The table gives some examples.

Substance	Speed of sound
Air	343 m/s
Water	1493 m/s
Steel	5130 m/s

This is because the particles of gases are further apart than liquids and finally solids. Sound waves move more slowly when particles are further apart.

There is nothing on that page that suggests wood is an exception. It does not suggest that wood is somehow an exception to the rule that sound will travel faster through wood than air. The sound - which is the vibration of the string, and will travel through the steel bridge at 5130 metres per second until it hits the wood of the body. Then it will travel through the wood and somewhere either less that the speed through water (if the wood in question is less dense than water and so will float on it) or faster than water (if the wood is denser than water and will sink in it). The sound waves will travel through the wood of the body, until they reach the air or your own body, and it will transfer the vibrations to the air or to you, which is why you can feel it.

This is GCSE physics. Nothing complex at all. The energy in the string is put their when it is plucked. That energy is transferred at varying speeds through air (that surrounds the string), steel (the bridge), bone (the nut), wood (neck and body), air again (where the neck and body meet the surrounding air molecules), and your clothing and flesh (where the body meets you). These all attenuate and dissipate the energy. Some of those things will transfer the energy faster and therefore with less dissipation than other things in the chain.

The wood, being biological, will have different densities of fibres and resins, and as the BBC's page states, when these things are further apart then the sound travels more slowly. This difference in the speed of transmission, through different parts of the body, mean some of the sound energy is dissipated as heat in the wood. But the sound waves are taken from the bridge and the string, so when they hit the wood, some frequencies (which have different energies) will begin travelling though the wood at different rates. So the sound waves of the string will be reduced - selectively - at different frequencies, as they pass through the wood more or less speedily.

You have put words in my mouth by suggesting I am talking about "magic". Please do not do that. I make no comment on how wood aging affects tone. Whether the wood changes its internal structure as it ages, or doesn't, is irrelevant to this discussion. Properly dried - to ensure stability - wood is all that is needed. If you feel the need to avoid the basic science and resort to accusing people of advocating magic then you have already lost the argument.

You have not explained how you account for sound waves change their nature as they pass thorough materials of different densities. That they do is beyond doubt. The sound of children shouting at the side of a pool is not heard perfectly when we hear it at the bottom of a swimming pool, even though it is transmitted more efficiently through water. How do you account for that simple result. I say it is because there are more molecules to transmit the sound, but also more molecules to absorb some of the sound energy. Perhaps you think this is "magic". I don't. I think it is science. If sound can be transmitted selectively through water and change its nature, it can do the same but in a more complex way through wood, which is a more complex substrate. This absorption of energy from the string into the wood is done slowly and not in one large leap (which is why the string vibrates for a long period and doesn't go dead instantly) and some frequencies will be transmitted more efficiently through the densely packed fibres of maple than the less dense ones of mahogany. These will be removed from the string first.

I am willing to bet that the initial string pluck, where none of the frequencies in the string have yet been transferred to the wood, would show a broader spectrum of frequencies present at the pickup, rather than when the string has been ringing out for a second or so and some of the frequencies have been dissipated more efficiently to the body wood than others.

One last point, then I am done. You claim that the impedance between the string, the steel of the bridge and the wood represent a barrier to the sound waves being transmitted. Consider this. Strike a tuning fork and hold it in the air. It is very quiet. Now strike it and place it on your guitar's body. It will sound louder because the vibrations of the steel tuning fork and transmitted very nicely thank you through the wooden body, which sets up more vibrations in the air, and you hear it louder.

The impedance between metals and wood is perfectly adequate for sound waves to propagate through, but they will do so at different rates due to compositional differences in the woods.

Three-ColourSunburst

thegummy said:

All I'll say is that I largely agree with what you're saying regarding truth being wrongly seen as relative but not that it has anything to do with gender.

It has a lot to with gender in so much as the whole anti-science, social constructivist movement that was dominant throughout 'The science wars' (and since) has been driven by feminist theory and politics, which has always viewed science as playing a central role in the continuation of 'male power'.

For example, it was thought crucial for the feminist movement to undermine any idea that gender differences have anything to do with genetics or evolution, instead arguing that even the concept of 'gender' is nothing more than a 'social construct'. In turn it was deemed that the only way to undermine science effectively was to attack its foundations, such as reason, logic and empiricism. (It is also interesting that this approach seems to validate the notion that reason and logic are somehow characteristically 'male' traits, but it is not 'sexist' for feminists to suggest such things, only men!)

This is not something I have made up, and there are numerous feminist tracts that lay out this programme perfectly clearly. One common theme is to argue that, now the idea of objective truth has been thrown in the bin, all that matters is the instrumental power of a theory. For example,

"...in order to be revolutionary, feminist theory cannot claim to describe what exists, or 'natural facts.' Rather, feminist theories should be political tools, strategies for overcoming oppression in specific concrete situations. The goal, then, of feminist theory, should be to develop strategic theories - not true theories, not false theories, but strategic theories."

Kelly Oliver 'Keller's gender /science system'. (Hypatia 3, 1989, pp. 137-148)

Anyhow, back to the irrational fantasy world this sort of thinking has led to, and whether a white guitar sounds better than a blue one.

NelsonP

Three-ColourSunburst said:

Even if different woods did absorb different frequencies at different rates you are overlooking the importance of the high level of impedance between the string and the bridge/ body of an electric guitar, with only minimal energy being transmitted to the body. 

But your clip on tuner still works, right? So the energy is definitely transferred to the body at a sufficient magnitude for your tuner to detect it. Or your ear for that matter, if you put it against the guitar body

The design of an experiment that could determine whether tone wood has a noticeable effect would be very tricky, since you need to be able to isolate one variable (i.e. the body material) and exclude ALL others. And since this is an electric guitar we are talking about what you are ultimately interested in is the audible impact on the amplified signal, in the presence of an amplifier and loudspeaker. That is a complicated system with a lot of variables and would be tough (although not impossible) to manage.

You could just measure that signal on an electronic device, but how can you be sure that any differences in what you observe actually have an audible impact on tone = you can't so you have to use your ears. Actually you would need to use the ears of those who have the proven acuity and training to detect small differences in guitar tone.

All of this sounds bloody hard and I think it would be a brave student who took it on.

Anyway, overall I would say that my white guitar does sound very slighty better than my blue one. I'm now gassing for another white guitar as a result of this thread. Although at the same time I'm asking myself whether Mr Corgan has ever actually played a gold one. Because those gold ones look cool. And if they look cool then they probably sound better too.