It's not the guitar, it's the player...

[Doug Young]

The perpetual question. My answer is that it's a multiplication problem:

player X guitar = final tone.

So a perfect player (make that a 1) and a perfect guitar (1) equals perfect tone (1). A player who gets 50% (.5) of the potential tone out of a perfect guitar scores 50% (.5 X 1 = .5). A perfect player with a 50% guitar also equals 50%.
Give a 50% player and 50% guitar and you get 25%, and so on.

It's not really that precise of course - and I know when we took up guitar they said there'd be no math :-) But the concept generally holds in my experience. Some players will get more tone out of any guitar, and a better guitar (usually) will allow any given player to get more tone.

But note that a lot of what we hear as "tone" is really phrasing. It's not just a matter of someone doing one "plink" on a string. It's how the note is used musically in the tune. A good musician uses whatever sound he has to work with, and that can actually be a pretty nasty sound in the raw sense (think of a highly distorted electric sound), and makes it become great tone when used in a musical way.

[Guitarplayer_PR]

It's both, period.

A proper guitar can make X player be better, if only because such player feels better from playing it. There are great guitars, there are great players and a good player can make a guitar sound better than the other guy, but it also works the other way around. If a player feels in love with a guitar, even if other guitars are equal or better, he (or she) will sound and play better because of the intangible connection between a guitar and its player.

[BT55]

Originally Posted by HHP

So why does Joe spend so much money on guitars and amps?

Because he can!

[Tony Done]

IMO there is a synergism in many cases - the player drives the guitar drives the player to try harder. You have to want to pick the guitar up and play it. So it's P+G+P.G. However, there seem to be a lot examples, eg in country blues, CBGs, where the guitar didn't seem to matter much at all. - The music is all in the notes, not the sounds.

[Toby Walker]

It's the player.

A great player will knock out the audience on a mediocre guitar.

A bad player will be even worse on a great guitar because every guitar player in the audience will wind up feeling sorry for the guitar.

[HHP]

Its clearly a combination of the pick and the bridge pins.

[jpbat]

The player.
And the listener.

It's the player who plays the music. Not the instrument.
It's the listener who is pleased or not by the music. By and large, the listener don't care a whit about the instrument.

If the instrument plays any role, it's to -partly- inspire the player.
And, strangely enough, it's not necessarily the *sound* of the instrument that brings that part of inspiration.

(I'm always a bit baffled with the concept of good -or bad- *tone*, as an absolute and measurable quantity, outside of the music itself. There is no good or bad sound. That doesn't exist. Some instruments may have a larger palette, or be more sensitive to a player touch, or whatever, and so can be considered as *better*. Maybe. But any piece of 2 x 4 with rubber bands can produce astonishing *music*. This entirely depends on two things : the guy(s) who create that music, and the guy(s) who listen to that music.)

IMO.

[guitar george]

You could be the world's best guitar player, but, without a guitar you might not sound so good.

[jaybones]

For me, the action and intonation have to be at least workable for me to play well. If it can't be tuned or intonated, might as well use it as a canoe paddle.

[Ozzy the dog]

Originally Posted by guitar george

You could be the world's best guitar player, but, without a guitar you might not sound so good.

You could be the world's worst guitar player, but, without a guitar you might sound much better.

Does this mean it's the guitar after all?