The influence of the neck on tone?

[00-28]

Originally Posted by Mark Stone

For example, Gibson uses hot hide glue at the dovetail (instead of titebond or bolting) because of how hard it dries and its ability to transmit vibration. Also it seems that nut material is always critical in guitar specs. Or, is rick-slo correct that it only effects sustain?

The type of glue used at the neck joint would only have effect in tone if the joint had a lot of slop and glue was used to fill the gaps. Only then could I see a dampening of sound. Normally, the joints are so tight and the glue used is so small, barely a film, that the negligible difference in hardness of the glues won't have an impact. If there is enough glue used where it is important for the glue to be able to transmit vibration, you have a bad joint.

The nut material does make a difference, but only while playing an open string.

.....Mike

[devellis]

Originally Posted by lennylux

No matter how this is answered it's going to be opinion based, tone is subjective and people often hear what they want to hear, the only way to really do it would be to take a bunch of guitars, record them for a spectrum analysis, detach the necks from these guitars and rotate them around each box, repeating the recording process again each iteration, then take the detailed spectrum analysis results and base comparison results on a final report that would cover exactly those guitars that had participated in the test alone, no others.

Everything else is waffle and fodder......

No, that's not the only way. A much simpler way is to get a few hefty C-clamps and attach them to the headstock. People have done this and, as I recall, volume is diminished and sustain increased as mass is added. I may have the details of the results wrong but I'm pretty sure about the methodology (slapping on C-clamps), and apparently, with enough mass, the results were quite obvious. The nice thing about this approach is that with the right size and number of clamps, you can vary the added mass fairly easily and in fairly small gradations (if some of the clamps are small).

Now, there are still lots of variables this doesn't address but it does tell something about the impact of neck mass on how a guitar sounds.

[00-28]

Originally Posted by devellis

No, that's not the only way. A much simpler way is to get a few hefty C-clamps and attach them to the headstock. People have done this and, as I recall, volume is diminished and sustain increased as mass is added. I may have the details of the results wrong but I'm pretty sure about the methodology (slapping on C-clamps), and apparently, with enough mass, the results were quite obvious. The nice thing about this approach is that with the right size and number of clamps, you can vary the added mass fairly easily and in fairly small gradations (if some of the clamps are small).

Now, there are still lots of variables this doesn't address but it does tell something about the impact of neck mass on how a guitar sounds.

This will change the mass if the guitar overall, but it doesn't change the density/mass of the neck shaft. Mass and density are different things. You can have a pound of cotten and a pound of lead, their volumes will be very different. You might as well put clamps around the body, it will tell you how putting clamps around the body changes tone, nothing about the tonewoods used to build the guitar. ...Mike

[epaul]

The design and composition of the neck does have an effect (noun) on the tone of the completed guitar. Whether the effect of this particular neck design and composition affects (adjective)((edit-I mean verb)) the guitar's tone in a way you prefer, or even notice, is another question entirely.

If you feel the guitar neck vibrating, you could ask yourself, where is this energy that is making the neck vibrate coming from? If the energy is coming from the body of guitar, the soundbox, which it most likely is, then that is energy that is being drained, stolen, pilfered, absconded from, the sound box itself. A guitar only produces so much energy at the bridge, and the less of it that leaks out to the neck in an attempt to vibrate a solid chunk of not very acoustically efficient wood, the better. Or so one might think.

There are rules to the universe. The more you get of something here, the less of you get of something else over there. A particular guitar bridge produces a fixed amount of energy. How that energy is dispersed and projected is determined by the guitar's design and composition. The more of this energy that is released in a nice whumph of an initial attack, the less there will be for sustain later. Conversely, the more sustain a guitar produces, the less of an initial "Whomp" it will have at the attack, the initial attack energy having been stretched out, spread out and thinned.

Everything about a guitar is a balance and a trade-off, and most guitars fall safely within accepted parameters of sustain and whomph. Which end of this spectrum most appeals to you will probably depend on what you most want out of your guitar. I actually find myself palm muting my bass strings more often than not and I much prefer a nice big fat initial whomp all across the board. If I were playing slow, touching, lingering Celtic melodies in DADGAD, instead blues and MJH tunes, I would probably be inclined towards a sweet, lingering sustain.

Of course, I really want it all. In one guitar. For $300. Along with a Porsche 911 and a personal jet, complete with ............. ahh, sweet dreams...


.

[Alan Carruth]

One of the problems with this is that it's so easy, and so false, to draw a parallel with solid body electric guitars: everybody knows how important the neck is on those, so it must be similarly so on acoustics.

In theory, the string works best (produces the purest signal) when both ends are 'fixed' so that they don't move at all. Of course, on an acoustic, you'd get no sound if the bridge and top couldn't move, but at least you'd like the neck to be 'rigid', and massive enough to keep the nut from jumping around too much. For the most part, any neck that's stable enough to be usable will do this. The top moves so much more than the neck or the nut that any effects on the tone of neck movement will be secondary at best. The issue comes in with that little phrase 'for the most part'. What happens is that there are resonant modes of the entire instrument that can alter the tone a bit, at specific frequencies, in some cases, and these are tied in with neck stiffness and mass (particularly the headstock mass).

The most important of these 'whole body' modes on an acoustic is the lowest pitched one, and then only sometimes. Basically, the whole guitar can vibrate like a xylophone bar, with the head and tailblock going one way while the upper bout goes the other. There are two stationary 'nodes' for this mode of vibration; one at about the nut or first fret, and the other across the lower bout near the line of the bridge. If you hold the guitar up at the nut and tap on the back of the head you can usually hear this.

Generally, it's quite low in pitch: often around C below the low E note, so it doesn't make any particular difference. However, if the neck is particularly stiff, and the head is light, this 'neck mode' can be pitched high enough to interact with the 'main air' ('rum jug') resonance, and this will affect the tone. It's most common to get this match on Classical guitars, and uncommon on steel strings, since they tend to have longer necks and often use heavier machines. The frequency match has to be exact for there to be any noticeable difference in the tone, and sometimes things like swapping machines, or even replacing metal buttons with wood ones, will be enough to bring things into line. That's why some folks are convinced that changing machines makes a big difference, and others are not: it all depends on the details of their particular case.

There are several other such 'whole body' resonant modes on acoustics, but they tend to be weaker, quite variable in pitch, and high enough up so that they don't seem to matter too much. This is the opposite of what happens on solid body guitars, where the lower three or four such modes are low enough, and active enough, that they can really alter the sound; usually by stealing energy from the strings. The worst case is solid body basses, where the bridge is perched 'way out at the end of the body, where the motion and energy loss are greatest. That's why they tend to have so many 'dead' notes. On an acoustic there's usually so much else going on that it would be pretty hard to pin any specific dead note or wolf note onto a 'neck' vibration.

The bottom line, then, is that the neck does influence tone, but less than a lot of other things. At any rate, what really counts on an acoustic is not so much any particular detail, but, rather, how it all works together.

[drtedtan]

Originally Posted by epaul

...the more sustain a guitar produces, the less of an initial "Whomp" it will have at the attack...

Is that the technical term, epaul?

[WordMan]

Alan - wow; interesting. It is always great to hear from someone with your experience on stuff like this.

One question: isn't the neck joint a big variable here? Meaning - the neck does the stuff you describe, but does it "better"/more effectively if the neck joint is big, with a lot wood-to-wood connectivity? Aren't sloppy/lower-contact neck joints going to not transfer vibrations as efficiently, as part of the whole vibrating unit?

Ultimately, I think we all have biases - I have a mental rule of thumb that a bigger neck with a great neck-body connection tends to sound better, most other things being "equal-ish." I have a confirmation bias because I like big necks and no technical/luthier training, but have loved the guitars I have ended up with when this criteria was used, so have no complaints

Interesting answers everyone.

Thanks.

[devellis]

Originally Posted by 00-28

This will change the mass if the guitar overall, but it doesn't change the density/mass of the neck shaft. Mass and density are different things. You can have a pound of cotten and a pound of lead, their volumes will be very different. You might as well put clamps around the body, it will tell you how putting clamps around the body changes tone, nothing about the tonewoods used to build the guitar. ...Mike

It certainly won't change the density of the neck but I'm pretty sure it will change the mass of the portion of the guitar beyond the body (although the concentration of that mass increase isn't uniformly distributed along that region). To me, the portion of the guitar beyond the body is pretty synonymous with "the neck." If it changes the mass of the whole guitar, as you suggest, then it's hard to see how it wouldn't change the mass of the neck (considering the headstock as part of the neck).

But you're absolutely right about it having no impact on density. And it will change the tone, as those who've done it have reported. That's not to say that it has all that much relevance to how neck wood choices affect tone. The suggestion was simply intended to support the idea that you could observe some changes in tone arising from changes in neck mass without swapping necks from guitar to guitar.

This is pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if adding mass at the headstock would influence low frequencies more than others. Adding mass at the end of something, it seems to me, makes it act sort of like a pendulum and the farther the weight on a pendulum is from the fulcrum, the more slowly the pendulum oscillates. But that's just a hunch.

So, that underscores an important difference between what might happen by adding C-clamps versus switching to a denser neck wood, which may have been your point. I happily concede that they're not equivalent, which wasn't what I was trying to suggest.

[NY NY]

Just curious and no offense. Is anyone who has answered so far a luthier or tech?

[000-18GE]

I guess none of this discussion or conclusions that may be drawn would have any impact on how I select a guitar. I cant imagine using neck density or weight, and their potential tonal impacts, on selecting a guitar. Now neck profile and comfort?....absotively! I'm just saying that I buy a guitar based on how the guitar sounds....not how the neck sounds, so to me this discussion is for entertainment purposes only

[mercy]

play a guitar with a rosewood neck and you will believe

[mjz]

Originally Posted by rick-slo

Regarding acoustic guitars it has some affect on sustain (stiffer = increase). Most of the rest of the talk on tone is pretty much imaginary thinking - IMO.

2 D-18s. Built the same. One after the other.
One has a honking, old-school neck with T-bar
The other is a thinner P series neck.
Everything else is the same.

Would the tone change?

max

[Michael-Robert]

Originally Posted by epaul

The design and composition of the neck does have an effect (noun) on the tone of the completed guitar. Whether the effect of this particular neck design and composition affects (adjective) the guitar's tone in a way you prefer, or even notice, is another question entirely.

If you feel the guitar neck vibrating, you could ask yourself, where is this energy that is making the neck vibrate coming from? If the energy is coming from the body of guitar, the soundbox, which it most likely is, then that is energy that is being drained, stolen, pilfered, absconded from, the sound box itself. A guitar only produces so much energy at the bridge, and the less of it that leaks out to the neck in an attempt to vibrate a solid chunk of not very acoustically efficient wood, the better. Or so one might think.

There are rules to the universe. The more you get of something here, the less of you get of something else over there. A particular guitar bridge produces a fixed amount of energy. How that energy is dispersed and projected is determined by the guitar's design and composition. The more of this energy that is released in a nice whumph of an initial attack, the less there will be for sustain later. Conversely, the more sustain a guitar produces, the less of an initial "Whomp" it will have at the attack, the initial attack energy having been stretched out, spread out and thinned.

Everything about a guitar is a balance and a trade-off, and most guitars fall safely within accepted parameters of sustain and whomph. Which end of this spectrum most appeals to you will probably depend on what you most want out of your guitar. I actually find myself palm muting my bass strings more often than not and I much prefer a nice big fat initial whomp all across the board. If I were playing slow, touching, lingering Celtic melodies in DADGAD, instead blues and MJH tunes, I would probably be inclined towards a sweet, lingering sustain.

Of course, I really want it all. In one guitar. For $300. Along with a Porsche 911 and a personal jet, complete with ............. ahh, sweet dreams...


.

not to be a grammar nazi, but "affect," synonymous with "influence," is actually a transitive verb, not an adjective

[epaul]

Arrgh! Verb, I meant to say verb. I was rushed. The cat was trying to get out the window screen. The dog was barking. The water was boiling over. All these chaotic events affected me, or had an effect on me. Something like that.





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