Tone wood debate (yet again, I know, I know, I know), and musical perception

zedhex

Let's start with a contentious statement: The people who say that an electric guitars constituent material does not matter and that it's all down to the pickups and electronics, usually have terrible taste in music.

Now why would I say that? I recently looked at a few YouTube videos which asked people to do blind tests to see if they could tell the difference between an Epiphone Les Paul and a Gibson Les Paul. I have also seen a whole series of videos where Rob Chapman can apparently tell the difference between a remarkable range of different guitars simply by the sound.

How is that possible? Is it faked? I don't think so - I think that it all comes down to human auditory perception. 

Some people are completely tone deaf, they can't tell if a guitar is in tune or not, they can't tell whether two notes are in harmony, they can't differentiate between interesting melody and something utterly tedious. Listening to them trying sing/play music is quite painful. There are other gifted people who have perfect pitch and can tell you exactly what a note is simply by hearing it. People with perfect pitch coupled with enormous amounts of musical creativity are extremely rare (Mozart? Beethoven?) Most people have a musical ear somewhere between those two extremes.  I'm not talking about the ability to hear specific frequencies - there is something much more subtle going on than that. Most of our musical ability has very little to do with our ears, and a great deal to do with how our brain perceives sound, melody, rhythm and harmony. Melody is just harmony with a time component (it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing). 

Like many people with lots of experience of playing in live bands in loud environments, I have a hole in my hearing range at 16 -17Khz. But this has no effect on my ability to hear harmonics within the frequency ranges that I can hear. It is these harmonies that dictate whether I can differentiate between a pleasing tone, and an unpleasant tone. It's also the relative harmonies together with the absolute frequency that allow someone to have perfect pitch. I would say that I have pretty good relative harmony, but I certainly don't have perfect pitch. It is the ability to discern pleasing tones and harmonies that I would refer to as musical perception. The average human being probably has worse musical perception than the average musician (which probably explains the existence of pop music), and some musicians musical perception will be better than others.

So let's go back to tonewoods. Resonance is a very well established physical property of almost all physical objects. Hard dense objects resonate at higher frequencies, softer less dense objects resonate at lower frequencies. Fibrous materials will have distinct highly resonant frequencies, whilst more uniform materials will have more evenly distributed resonances. Soft squidgy materials will have almost no resonance at all.

If I attach a guitar string suspended between a composite material with certain resonant frequencies, that guitar string will be louder at those resonant frequencies, and may contain many harmonic resonances. This is perceived by the human ear as a difference in timbre and volume. This is the major error that many people make when they think about how a guitar string vibrates. The vibration is not independent of the material that the string is suspended over. It's actually in a feedback loop where the vibrations pass through the suspending material, and then feedback to the vibrating string. 

To illustrate this, imagine I stretch a string between two enormous monster truck tyres. What do you think the sound would be like? My guess would be that there would be almost no harmonic frequencies, and the sustain would be very short indeed as the rubber would absorb the energy of the string very rapidly. Now imagine the sound of the same string of the same length but suspended between the ends of a U-shaped block of granite. In this case we would have much longer sustain, and lots of high frequency harmonics. If we place a guitar pickup next to both of the previous string experiments, they would most definitely not produce the same sound even if the pickups were identical.

That's a rather fanciful example, but let's take a rather more real-world approach. 

If I have two identical electric guitars one made from a hard wood such as mahogany, and another made of a much lighter wood such as ash. If we put both of them through exactly the same pickups, we should not expect them to sound exactly the same - but how big will that difference be? My contention is that it depends on the musical perception of the person hearing it. There will be a sizeable percentage of the population who will not be able to tell the difference in the tone of the guitar at all. Most of those people will be in the half of the population who can't tell a good note from a bad one, as they have very weak musical perception. A further sizeable percentage would be able to perceive a tiny difference in tone, and so they won't think that the wood matters very much. 

The more musically gifted members of the population will be able to tell the difference quite clearly.

So now we are back to my original statement: if you honestly cannot perceive the difference between guitars constructed of different tonewoods, then I think the problem is in your head and ears rather than anything to do with the guitar. That might also be related to your terrible taste in music, but now I'm just speculating. 

GoldenEraGuitars

*pulls up seat, pours a beer and opens the popcorn*

Right, I’m ready. Proceed

springhead

It's the waiting I can't stand... 

TTony

zedhex said:

So now we are back to my original statement: if you honestly cannot perceive the difference between guitars constructed of different tonewoods, then I think the problem is in your head and ears rather than anything to do with the guitar. That might also be related to your terrible taste in music, but now I'm just speculating. 

Putting aside your rather crude attempts to spark an argument rather than a - another - discussion, if another discussion was really necessary on this tired subject, I'd say it's more a question of one person having a heightened ability to recognise and differentiate tones rather than one person or another having a problem.

That heightened ability might be a natual, born-in ability, or it might be something that's been practised and trained with years of effort.  Just because one person can do it, doesn't mean that everyone should be able to do it, or would want to do it.  That doesn't mean that they have a problem, just a different set of interests, abilities or priorities.

zedhex said:

 I think that it all comes down to human auditory perception. 

That's really all you needed to say.  The rest is unnecessary - unless its purpose was to be argumentative.

simonhpieman

I think everyone can distinguish different timbres/tonal qualities. The good melody point is moot - that's not what quality everyone judges good music by and I don't think it's right to pigeonhole all music with a simple/rudimentary melody as low-brow or of poor quality.

Your "average pleb" is more perceptive than you are snobbishly giving them credit for, too. They might not be able to vocalise why a sound is dead, muffled, displeasing but they'll know it doesn't sound right. If you took all the delay and reverb off an Edge solo they'd know it was wrong, if not exactly why. They may have no musical ability but they'll spot a shit singer from a mile off.

Stop trying to create some imaginary super-enlightened/philistine black and white divide.

Adam_MD

TLDR

Philly_Q

Might as well call him in the hope it gets this over and done with more quickly.... paging @Three-ColourSunburst

koneguitarist

zedhex said:

Let's start with a contentious statement: The people who say that an electric guitars constituent material does not matter and that it's all down to the pickups and electronics, usually have terrible taste in music.

The more musically gifted members of the population will be able to tell the difference quite clearly.

So now we are back to my original statement: if you honestly cannot perceive the difference between guitars constructed of different tonewoods, then I think the problem is in your head and ears rather than anything to do with the guitar. That might also be related to your terrible taste in music, but now I'm just speculating. 

Do sod off and take your opinion with you. 

No one doubts woods make a difference, but the difference is not quantifiable, as no two bits of wood sounds the same. 

Kittyfrisk

Awww, come on people.
Regardless of how we feel about what was said, @zedhex has only been a member for a couple of weeks.
Maybe be just a little gentler in the responses?

thegummy

Whether something is in tune or not (or is a specific note or not) is an objective fact.

Whether a melody is interesting or a piece of music is pleasing or not is completely subjective. No one has a better taste in music than anyone else.

Your post seems to suggest you believe otherwise but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you were just being inflammatory rather than believing that.

It would say something about a person if they genuinely believed some people's taste was superior to others'.

Jez6345789

One of the things often not discussed when comparing wood is simply how wet it is, just kiln dried to a specific level the maker needs to build then its resonance will be different to the same species that is old and completely dried. 

I don't think you need to have bat ears to hear the differences between say 6 identical Strats through a clean amp and the longer you listen, the more difference you will hear. 

Adey

All my guitars seem to have been built using Toneless woods, and oddly, so do those of everyone else's that I have played.

Conclusion - Tone wood is a myth....

koneguitarist

Kittyfrisk said:

Awww, come on people.
Regardless of how we feel about what was said, @zedhex has only been a member for a couple of weeks.
Maybe be just a little gentler in the responses?

Don’t need no snob to tell me what I can or can’t hear is down to my musical tastes, guy is an idiot. 

bloomer

wood moisture level varies with relative humidity, older wood does not dry out more. Once it's been through the drying process, be that in a kiln or air dried, it's probably around 8%. When the relative humidity goes up so will the wood moisture content and vice versa. A 100 year old piece of wood in the same environment as a 5 year old piece of wood will be no drier.

p90fool

You might be surprised at what audio detail the average punter can hear. 

The BBC had a load of emails from listeners a few years back complaining that Desert Island Discs on Radio 4 had started sounding different and they didn't like it. 

It turned out that it was the last BBC studio to stop using Coles ribbon mics for the presenter. 

Even though they'd switched to the same high quality large diaphragm condenser mics all the other presenters and newsreaders were using a large number of people with no audio expertise whatsoever immediately picked up the subtle difference between two very expensive pieces of equipment.  

viz

I think the premise sounds reasonable, and possibly there is a correlation with musicianship. 

My opinion is that if there’s a correlation at all I’d say it’s more to do with hearing ability, rather than musicianship per se. So for example a non-musical audiologist or sound engineer might be able to discern the difference where someone musical may not. Not saying there isn’t a correlation with musicality too, mind. 

NelsonP

My contention is that stupid people can't tell the difference between various tone woods.

Intelligent people can. Easily.

Me? How do they make wood?

;-)

Jez6345789

bloomer said:

wood moisture level varies with relative humidity, older wood does not dry out more. Once it's been through the drying process, be that in a kiln or air dried, it's probably around 8%. When the relative humidity goes up so will the wood moisture content and vice versa. A 100 year old piece of wood in the same environment as a 5 year old piece of wood will be no drier.

Not disputing this, as its logical and my understanding but what is interesting is if the wood is kiln-dried why do many guitar companies redry it to a there specification and also I seem to remember a video on You Tube of I think the guy from Crimson in a shop with a non-invasive moisture meter getting a whole different range of readings which following your logic if they had all been in the shop they should all be the same.

Sassafras

I lost the will to live after the 4th paragraph.
Sorry, but I really did.

SlopeSoarer

I quite enjoyed the read, I've not been around as many of you so what may feel old hat to one person may be of more interest to the next.

If you are fed up with the same topics why bother even opening the thread, just ignore it: )

rossi

Dont worry ,there will be another one along in minute .There always is .