Does tonewood matter if you are playing amplified?

[Rosewood99]

I've always been curious if you are plugged in (as opposed to a mic) if tonewood matter as much.

[Michael Watts]

That would depend on the sensitivity of your pickup system, the quality of your sound reinforcement, and the ears of your audience.

[Goodallboy]

Originally Posted by Michael Watts

That would depend on the sensitivity of your pickup system, the quality of your sound reinforcement, and the ears of your audience.

The elusive perfect answer. Rarely sighted in the wild, and highly prized for its succinct brevity.

[TBman]

Not from experience of playing live, but as an audience member; the song, the musicianship, the vocals is what makes or breaks a song, not the tone woods of a guitar being used.

Walnut, rosewood, mahogany, maple, sitka, engelmann, cedar, redwood..... All stuff we geek over when we're too tired to practice anymore.

[bufflehead]

My only acoustic/electric has a red-cedar top. There's no way you could tell this by it's plugged-in tone. However, I can tell when I play the instrument in terms of such things as sustain, acoustic headroom and overtones. I therefore play that instrument differently than I would play one of my sitka-topped guitars. In this way there's a difference: the guitar influences how it is best played. This doesn't stop happening when the guitar is plugged in.

So yes, tonewood matters. But any influence tonewood has an a plugged-in guitar is going to be fairly subtile.

[Lakewood_Lad]

There's a lot of difference between an undersaddle piezo, a magnetic pole soundhole system and a microphone based pickup.

A microphone system will usually give the truest representation of the timbre of the guitar. Or a couple of actual microphones pointed at your guitar.

[mcduffnw]

Originally Posted by paulzoom

I've always been curious if you are plugged in (as opposed to a mic) if tonewood matter as much.

If you are playing for an OCD/AR technically "woke" and deeply interested audience...like fellow players and guitar forum fanboi types, then yes...yes it does.

For the vastly more typical not so woke and nor deeply interested crowds...no...no it doesn't. It's all about does the audience like the songs you are playing and how well you perform them on the whole.


duff
Be A Player...Not A Polisher

[Methos1979]

From my admittedly limited experience as a gigging guitarist, the answer is no. Or, at least not nearly as much as many other far more important factors.

[Rosewood99]

The next question is can you tell the difference between a $500 guitar and a $5000 one if they are plugged in?

[vindibona1]

It depends. Different pickup systems do different things. A magnetic mic would obviously pick up frequencies differently than any other. A sensor system like the K&K would be different than an UST piezo.

It seems to me that different tonewoods sustain and dampen different freqencies, hence tonal differences. Those too can be modified by strings saddles and bridge pins. Let's not forget about picks and technique.

Now add in any number of basic or sophisticated preamps or tone enhancing electronics. The depth of the possible sonic palette from any guitar is quite large. And then there is the factor of the guy running the sound board. I rarely if ever play live unamplified and often question why I have more than one expensive guitar and if any of them matter once plugged in?

[rpatkin]

In an odd way, Fender has answered the question with its Acoustosonic line ... and the answer would seem to be “no”

[Christian Reno]

The question of “tonewood” makes this a harder question. I can say without any doubt whatsoever that after having played amplified acoustics for many, many, years, the acoustic quality of the guitar is very relevant to the amplified sound quality. I say this for all of the systems I’ve ever used in a wide variety of guitars. These systems include the old hot dots, as well as USTs, internal mics, blended, mag, etc. The inherent sound of the guitar (good or bad) will come through.

If the question is whether mahogany vs. rosewood or any other tonewood matters (which is a bit ambiguous) when plugged in, my answer is it matters in the same way it matters unplugged. If you think a particular tonewood is your preference regardless of the build etc. (you just prefer one or the other overall) chances are you’ll find that same preference plugged in.

[RP]

Originally Posted by Goodallboy

The elusive perfect answer. Rarely sighted in the wild, and highly prized for its succinct brevity.

Minimally if at all.....

[charles Tauber]

Originally Posted by Christian Reno

I can say without any doubt whatsoever that... the acoustic quality of the guitar is very relevant to the amplified sound quality.

It's an interesting question. I think the answer might be a definitive, "Maybe".

It is a similar question to asking whether or not the quality of the camera matters in producing digital images. That depends. For example, one can take a very high quality/high resolution photograph, but then view it on a low quality screen, or print it on paper as a low quality/low DPI image, did the original photo quality matter much to the finished image as viewers view it? Similarly, one can start out with a poor quality photograph - poor lighting, poor contrast, inaccurate color ... - and digitally manipulate the image to produce something that looks quite good. Then there is the issue of changing or replacing backgrounds in the original photo to produce an image that no longer accurately reflects the original scene, but does produce a desirable image.

Similarly, if one starts out with a guitar producing a "high quality" sound, then listens to it amplified through small, "bad" speakers, with poor equalization, did it matter how good the original guitar sounded to those hearing the amplified sound? Conversely, if one started out with an inexpensive "low quality" sounding guitar, can one they equalize it, and add various "corrections" and effects to produce something that sounds "good" through good speakers/headphones, similar to replacing the background to "enhance" a photographic image?

In this day and age of electronics, where one can take a sound and manipulate it to sound like anything from a train whistle to chorus of human voices to a dog barking, how important is it what the original, un-manipulated sound was?

[Bob Womack]

There's an aspect of this that is often forgotten: feedback. The louder you play, the closer you get to feedback. As you approach the threshold of feedback, the mechanical rigidity of your guitar system as a whole begins to matter. The lighter, more flexible, more resonant, and less rigid your guitar box, the quicker it couples to the external waves coming back from the P.A. system. We all know that laminates are less resonant. They should be great as back and sides for feedback rejection. But then think of top woods: sitka is stiffer than Engelmann which is stiffer than cedar, and the thicker and more heavily braced a top is the less susceptible to feedback it will be.

I've got an older Taylor k14c grand auditorium, koa/cedar, that is the lightest guitar I've ever played. It is incredibly resonant. While it is great in the studio it is tough to handle at high SPLs. My less resonant 314kce grand auditorium, koa/sitka, is built with heavier, denser, stiffer wood and does quite well as a guitar in a loud combo.

Think on.

Bob