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Old 11-06-2013, 10:12 AM
blaren blaren is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2011
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Default How much does the neck affect tone?

Been reading a lot and thinking a lot about whether or not..rather how MUCH a neck has to do with tone.
Whether one is glued-in or bolted-on doesn't seem to make a GREAT DEAL of difference as long as the actual fit is good.
However...the girth and species seem to be important tone determiners (?) where a more massive mahogany or rosewood neck can help a guitar (I'm talking mostly electrics here) sound warmer and have more sustain than say an ultra-thin maple neck and board.

A lot of members here have dog ears. They can hear minute (maybe even non-existent) changes that bridgepins make or how much better a bone nut makes their bar chords sound so much more transparent :roll eyes . Not much talk of how much difference the neck can make.
If neck mass and material can help determine how a guitar is going to sound on a solid body electric with magnetic pups that should only be "hearing" the string itself, well...on an acoustic guitar, where the guitar itself is the mic and amplifier, surely the neck must be a KEY ingredient of the tonal recipe...the big picture?

Any luthiers or builders out there ever tried different necks on an acoustic build? Did they make an appreciable difference in the guitar's tone?
Seems like a very important but highly overlooked component in the final voice of any guitar no?

The two custom builds I had done both have very thin necks (same as my Stonebridge...thinner than Larrivee's necks and maybe thinner than Taylor's too? But there is a LOT going on in my 2 customs and even with the thin necks they sound huge, loud, warm and AWESOME.
Hey did you just catch that? Taylors have thin necks and...how do they sound? Bright, thin, sparkly...
Martins (the traditional models with traditional neck profiles) sound warmer and louder and more muscular(?) than Taylors generally speaking...except probably the new(ish) Martin Performer series that have more "modern neck profiles" (thinner)...they sound closer to Taylors. Larrivees, with necks that are probably in between the Taylor and Martin thickness sound...well kinda in between the Martin and Taylor tones.?

Maybe necks don't have quite as dramatic an effect on tone as I'm insinuating but I do believe that neck mass and material can play a pretty important role in determining how a guitar sounds and that it is an area that we all too often overlook.
Whip em out fellas. Do some A/B/C/D/E and F comparing and see if you notice a pattern where your guitars with the bigger fatter necks sound..well..bigger and fatter and warmer than those thin necked gits.

We know that mass of the headstock can change a guitar's voice. They even used to sell slip-on headstock weights to increase the headstock's/neck's mass and provide warmth and sustain (coulda been just another useless gizmo). PRS's latest locking tuners (for electrics again) are kinda hybrid half open back and half enclosed. They say they are the new "low mass" PRS open back Phase3 machine heads.
Is "low mass" just a term they coined in the boardroom? Rather than just calling them open back, which might seem like a cheap cost-cutting feature to all the PRS corksniffers (I'm the president of that club) and so they came-up with the term "low mass" which makes it seem like the company made the change in order to improve tone and not just for cosmetic or profit driven reasons.

So again, what are your acoustic guitar experiences as far as neck size/mass/material versus tone and volume?
They say there is a pretty big tonal difference between a solid rosewood neck on a stock PRS CU24 and the same guitar with the standard mahogany neck. I have never had the opportunity to try a solid rw neck so I can't confirm that but...an acoustic guitar's neck probably weighs as much as the body. Surely it plays a BIG role in the guitar's tone?
The late '50s Gibsons with PAFs seem to be much more desirable than the '60-'62 PAF equipped Gibsons. We'll use ES335s as an example since the Les Pauls turned into SGs for a while in the '60s.
Maybe part of the reason is that the '50s Gibbys had the baseball bat profiled necks and the ones from the '60s had the '60s slim taper profiles. Yes magnets changed in the PAF line but not right at 1960. From what I hear, they were all over the map with all PAFs regardless of the year of manufacture. You can get a '58 PAF with A2 mags and others from '58 might have A5. A '62 PAF ...oops..a GOOD sounding '62 PAF will sound the same as a GOOD sounding '57PAF.
And not every '57-'59 PAF sounded awesome.

IDK.
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GONE!! 2006 Stonebridge G24SR Sitka/EIR Cutaway JJB SBT
2012 Halcyon AJ Adi/EIR 25" scale Fishman Infinity
2012 Halcyon OOO Lutz/Quilted SA Hog 12fret 25"scale JJB SBT
2019 Halcyon SJ Cutaway Lutz/Flame walnut JJB SBT
Several PRS electric guitars and good old tube amps.
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