Factors that effect electric guitar tone

[AX17609]

I'd like to draw your attention to a series of YouTube videos on the factors that really affect electric guitar tone. These videos are done by a young Nashville guitarist named Jim Lill, who approaches the subject with a scientific researcher's sense of experimental design. They're amazingly thorough, and his dedication to the subject appears to be inexhaustible.

Guitar tone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE
Scale length: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqBDIaZ0BE
Sustain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muVzwbkUUnM
Strings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiFcw-H5DN8
Amplifiers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcBEOcPtlYk
Cabinets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eeC1XyZxYs

Things that have the most effect on tone included 1) fundamental left-hand playability, 2) pickup type, placement, and height, 3) volume pot electronics, 4) speaker type and 5) cabinet size.

The list of things that didn't affect tone very much is longer than your arm and include most of the things that guitarists revere and manufacturers advertise, including wood type, body shape, weight, finish, scale length, strings, amplifier type and amplifier components.

Taken together, the series suggests that the best strategy for approaching electronic guitar equipment is to buy the least expensive playable guitar you can find, equip it with upgraded pickups that are properly adjusted, and play it thru an amplifier with a basic set of controls attached to a cabinet whose sound you like. The only way to choose the cabinet is to A/B them against each another.

It's been a long time since I played electric guitar seriously, but these videos are exactly in line with my experience. The one aspect I never put to good use back in the day was pickup height. I was just uninformed about that aspect of setup. However, I was made painfully aware of the importance of cabinets, when bought a Marshall head expecting all kind of wonderful tone and got nothing. I ended up running around looking for a suitable cabinet, which I eventually found in a 4x12 Hiwatt. That was an expensive piece of misjudgment.

[LFL Steve]

I love his videos!

[Gordon Currie]

That was both entertaining and informative.

I enjoy that the guy is a good scientist by nature, and willing to make his own jigs and modifications.

I love the air guitar - nothing but strings and pickups, but is able to match the control guitar quite well.

Clearly, there are all kinds of factors that affect the 'feel' that will lead a sensitive player towards different tones, but this does a good job illustrating how much control one has by choosing/adjusting pickups and electronics.

[lowrider]

I just watched the first one, very cool.

I'll check the next one later.

[JPCary]

Originally Posted by AX17609

Scale length: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqBDIaZ0BE

Things that have the most effect on tone included 1) fundamental left-hand playability, 2) pickup type, placement, and height, 3) volume pot electronics, 4) speaker type and 5) cabinet size.

The list of things that didn't affect tone very much is longer than your arm and include most of the things that guitarists revere and manufacturers advertise, including wood type, body shape, weight, finish, scale length, strings, amplifier type and amplifier components.

Thanks for the video

I just watched the scale length video as I have been looking at putting a 24.75" neck on a tele body I am finishing. I could not hear a difference between the 24.75 and 25.5 with the strings at the same tension. I think he was using 10s on the 25.5 and 10.5s on the 24.75. Even with the same gauge strings the difference was marginal.

[FrankHudson]

I like watching those videos just because the presenter does a great job on camera and seems clever and energetic in his fabricating and testing.

I have a Warmoth Gibson scale conversion neck on a Squire Tele body with a Bigsby and a conventional Tele bridge pickup.

Overall, yes it sounds Tele-like. I've got a neck P90-ish style pickup on it too. Yes, it sounds a little like an LP Jr. I haven't tried to equalize string tension. The feel while playing is perceptively different, and of course the Bigsby makes certain kinds of vibrato easily accessible. One thing I like about shorter scale guitars is that my less than great fingers can make some chord reaches easier. This coincides with the video guy's conclusion that pickups are a larger/largest contributor to differences in timbre (other than the player themselves).

It was interesting that he noticed that pickup position vs. the string was a factor in scale length changes. Besides the feel, the biggest thing I still notice is a certain kind of initial snap in the attack that I get from Fender scale instruments. The way the note continues after that attack is less distinctive between scale lengths. It was interesting too in the video in the series on sustain where he measured the attack envelope, which I think is part of the difference scale brings to things.

[AX17609]

Originally Posted by JPCary

Thanks for the video

I just watched the scale length video as I have been looking at putting a 24.75" neck on a tele body I am finishing. I could not hear a difference between the 24.75 and 25.5 with the strings at the same tension. I think he was using 10s on the 25.5 and 10.5s on the 24.75. Even with the same gauge strings the difference was marginal.

I didn't hear any difference, either, except insofar as it affects pickup location.

Scale length appears to affect tunability, however. In a Rick Beato video on Gibson guitars, Dave Ornato (guitar technician) comments that the Les Paul's "well known" tuning problem could have been easily solved by a modest change in scale length. I don't really understand that comment. Les Pauls have a scale length of 24.75". The PRS Les Paul copies that were designed by Ted McCarty have a scale length of 24.594". I don't know if that change was intended to solve the problem or not, but it was deliberate, not an accident.

The only guys who say scale length affects tone are the ones who detune long scale-length guitars down to D or C. That sure does it!

[mr. beaumont]

Strings don't influence tone? Try some flatwounds.

[rmp]

wait,...

so,,, it's all been a pack o' lies??

oh the humanity!!

!LOL!


Interesting vids from this guy

[Bob Womack]

The "myth of tone wood" myth has been around for a long, long while. I've seen this guy's work. There are some problems to his methodology:

While claiming to look for knowledge, he is actually engaged in iconoclasty, an attempt to tear down a belief. Those are two different pursuits that often have two different levels of evidence required.

Rather than standardizing a test platform and then altering one detail at a time, he zeros in on a few details that are important to him and then changes others, often in combination in a blur of activity.

He gets fixated on the comparison between his kit bash and his Anderson and all the while misses and doesn't address a HUGE, HUGE difference between them. He never installed the neck pickup on the kit and his Anderson still has its neck pickup. Why does that matter? Proponents of the Fender Esquire and Gibson Les Paul Junior have come to the conclusion that a large factor shaping the unique sound of those guitars is the absence of a neck pick. They feel that the magnetic influence of the neck pickup fundamentally alters the vibration of the strings.

And the air guitar? If that demonstrates anything at all, it demonstrates that his air guitar can make a sound similar to an Anderson Tele on ONE CHORD when both are tuned to an open E. If you've played guitar, you know that the guitar responds and sounds differently at every fret as you go up the neck, with different resonances at play.

Like most session players, when a song needs a different color, I reach for a different guitar. I don't just wade in with one guitar, crank around on the tone control, and call it "good." Why? Because in music, use of timbre isn't about matching tones, it is about creating tones and harnessing them to the music. I started out my guitar journey thinking that all you needed was the same pickups to have the same sound. Not true. Through experience, I learned that even with the same pickups, a mahogany Gibson SG and a maple Gibson ES-335 have fundamentally different sounds, different attack, different sustain. The same goes for either of those two and a mahogany/maple Les Paul. In fact, early '70s LPs with mahogany necks are more mellow sounding than later maple necked LPs. Strange but true.

In fact, tone wood is quite important to the sound of Fender guitars as well. A poplar body/maple fingerboard combination sounds quite different from an ash body/rosewood combination in either Tele or Strat. The latest craze to have gone through has been pine bodies on teles. They provide a different sound as well.

Ah, well.



Bob

[JPCary]

Originally Posted by AX17609

Guitar tone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE

wow watched this video after the scale video and it's better than the scale video.

[AX17609]

Originally Posted by Bob Womack

While claiming to look for knowledge, he is actually engaged in iconoclasts, an attempt to tear down a belief. Those are two different pursuits that often have two different levels of evidence required.

Rather than standardizing a test platform and then altering one detail at a time, he zeros in on a few details that are important to him and then changes others, often in combination in a blur of activity.

Actually, what he's doing is science. I can say that as a card carrying, internationally published scientist. Iconoclasm is dedicated to the destruction of religious or political beliefs. What this kid is doing is evaluating features of a guitar that are testable and measurable. That's what science does. I spent 4 decades overseeing the research of engineers and physicists at an organization whose letters you would know. So, if we want to lay our credentials on the table, those are mine. I would hire this kid tomorrow. With essentially zero training, he is using organized methodology that was above the level of many of the people with whom I worked. He's also doing it with a level of humor that escapes many members of this forum.

[clintj]

I've watched a couple of his videos, and did find one truth: as distortion increases, guitars become less and less distinguishable from each other. I've yet to see one where he ran his experiments through an ultra clean amp that more faithfully reproduces the pickups' signal, or ran spectrum analysis to see what effect these changes have on the basic harmonic content of the guitar.

[rokdog49]

All I know is there is a local band in our town who uses Les Pauls and Marshall Amps on songs where a Tele and a Fender Amp were used on the record. Cringeworthy… Yuk!

[LFL Steve]

Originally Posted by mr. beaumont

Strings don't influence tone? Try some flatwounds.

Watch the Strings video. He does test flatwounds.