In rough order of significance, electric guitar tone is influenced by:
- technique (absolutely the most important)
- amplifier
- pickups + strings
- everything else (debatable whether you can even notice it)
I don’t know if there’s hard evidence but I think folks who think wood and nut types and whatever make a difference are nuts. The relative difference in stiffness between the strings and the body is so huge that believing that the neck and body effect tone seems to me like believing that asphalt vs concrete effects how a tennis net vibrates.
Most people don’t have a lot of speakers to swap in and out so don’t notice it, or they use combo amps, or they just leave an amp hooked up to the same speakers. If you switch between an open-back 1x12 and a closed-back 4x12 stack with completely different speakers, the difference is HUGE.
That's a good point, I've only ever used small 1x10 and 1x12 combos (Fenders). I've wanted to try a 4x12 Marshall stack for a while but have yet to find the opportunity.
If you're ever tempted to buy a 4x12, you may want to give the 2x12 format a shot first. It's a lot easier to deal with. I got a 2x12 from Avatar and I'm super happy with it.
In terms of the actual soud you hear, pickups, pedals and amps are going to make the most difference.
In terms of whether you want to listen to it, technique reigns.
The best gear in the world won't make you a good player and a good player can make even crap gear sound ok, but I'm not sure I agree with technique being most important to tone.
Not saying that technique isn't important
(obviously it is), but the same player with the same technique is going to sound completely different on a single coil going into a vintage combe versus an active humbucker going into a hi gain stack.
Keyboard wood choice creates subtle a difference. Bridge structure changes sustain amount, also the guitar building method changes the outcome.
I have an Ibanez BTB670 bass with neck through construction. In practice it's a very long, 35" neck with two big blobs of wood glued for body. Its sustain is amazing. It just goes on unless you mute it with your fingers.
Similarly pickups have a default tone, but it can be tuned upto a point. Out of the box, a BTB670 and Fender Jazz Bass sounds so different in their default, direct to amplifier configurations. Everything has an influence in that tone. Some things have bigger influence, some less, some negligible.
It’s a very complex dynamic system: the strings pull the neck, the neck pulls the body, the body is also pulled by strings. The pickups make noise because they vibrate with the body while the strings vibrate in their magnetic fields. And this means pickups influence the way strings vibrate closing the loop. Add the details of the way PUs are wound, the way their cores warp over time, the way wood dries (or doesn’t) depending on how and what lacquer was used, different woods laminated together etc. and the result is a very complex dynamic system. With all such systems, predicting behavior dependence on a minuscule parameter change is a fools errand without modeling. I certainly can’t make any claims about wood affecting things or not. All I know is, that otherwise identical instruments feel and sound different to me and that’s all that matters. Maybe psychology, maybe physics, maybe math plays a role. Let others work on that while I play the blues on my favorite LP.
> I think folks who think wood and nut types and whatever make a difference are nuts.
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume that you meant “solid body electric guitar” and not just “electric guitar”.
However, anyone who has even come close to an archtop knows your statement to be false - any guitar which does not sound good acoustically will generally also sound poor electrically. This is definitely _more_ noticeable on guitars with air inside them, but is also true of solid guitars.
Yes, I meant solid body guitars. As soon as acoustic resonance becomes part of the sound, you start getting feedback on the strings and a lot of other phenomena. Wood makes a huge difference with acoustics, or else all acoustics would be made of plywood.
It does matter though.. you can tell that a strat is a strat whether it has humbuckers or single coils, and you can tell that a les Paul is a les Paul with any pickups too. The body of a guitar does resonate; you can feel it vibrating against your body. Whereas as long as they’re new, clean strings I can’t hear much difference between brands. Clean vs dirty strings makes a huge difference though.
Of course, you can make something rather NOT like a Strat that sounds like a Strat, too.
I've got a guitar that is pretty unlike a Strat headless, neckthrough, full floating trem with a wide range...and it sounds pretty straty. Of course, I specced it with single coils, a maple neck, an alder body.
The type of wood the guitar is made of seems to make a big difference, from what I can tell. The shape, less so. I’m on the fence about bolt on vs set necks.
BB King used his whole big body: his guitar resting on his belly with only one finger holding the note and doing a vibrato let the entire entity vibrate in unison.
Tried to second your comment about playing quietly on a very loud amp but looks like it was deleted. So I'll say it here: at some point I tried playing out of a very high headroom amp, fingerstyle, and it completely changed my playing and understanding of the guitar. I "wasted" so many years on small tube amps that break up right away.
Get a decent acoustic guitar. If it sounds good on it you’ll probably be able to make it sound excellent on an electric. Every little imperfection in technique shows on an acoustic. Being more difficult to play only helps when moving the piece to an electric.
Pickups and amps are by far the biggest difference. In an acoustic guitar, sound is produced by the whole body of the guitar resonating. In an electric, sound is produced by the string vibrating in an electromagnetic field above the pickup poles. The ideal guitar string contacts the body at three points along the body (nut, fret, saddle), on ideally as narrow a surface as possible at each of those points.
Energy transfers back and forth between the strings and body, which is why the body can generally be expected to have some impact on tone. How much energy transfer goes on? I don't know, but you can use a mechanics stethoscope to at least hear what the vibrations sound like when they transition into the neck and body.
I also suspect that bridge placement makes a big difference in the amount of energy transfer that goes on. Electric guitars generally have the bridge near a node, so that limits the energy transfer somewhat. Basses have the bridge further back; partly that's due to ergonomics, but it also has the effect that more vibrations transfer to the body, which ought to reduce sustain. In a guitar you usually want more sustain, but in a bass too much can be a problem.
Nut material makes more of a difference on open strings, but in general a plastic nut is squishier and it absorbs more energy than something like bone, causing the note not to sustain as long. The saddle is the same way, but plastic saddles aren't typically used in electric guitar so it's not usually an issue.
If you ever get the chance, try putting together a strat with one of those cheap paulownia bodies and compare it to.. well, anything else that is exactly the same except for the body material. To me, the difference is glaring; the paulownia is so treble-heavy it's intolerable.
By what principle does it make it more treble-heavy? This is the part that I haven't had explained to me and I don't understand it. I have a basswood Mustang and it sounds fine with decent humbuckers in it.
- technique (absolutely the most important)
- amplifier
- pickups + strings
- everything else (debatable whether you can even notice it)
I don’t know if there’s hard evidence but I think folks who think wood and nut types and whatever make a difference are nuts. The relative difference in stiffness between the strings and the body is so huge that believing that the neck and body effect tone seems to me like believing that asphalt vs concrete effects how a tennis net vibrates.