Bolt on Les Paul

[Cagey]

I agree with what you're saying about "sustain".  I think one wants a guitar that resonates well, and doesn't sound like a dead, lifeless plank. It's important that the neck and the body resonate together, with minimal damping, and that the resonating properties of the two don't cancel each other out.

I'm not sure you want that. Or, if you do, then what you want is an acoustic, not an electric.

If a body is resonating, that means it's drawing energy from the strings. If that's the case, you're going to adversely affect the tone and sustain of the thing. There's only so much energy available, so where do you want it to go? There's no free lunch. You can have the body absorb it, or you can let the strings ring and have the pickups send that data along.

That's why Les Pauls sound the way they do. There's a great deal of mass in the things, and so a great deal of inertia. Plus, the neck is not only shorter, a lot of it is buried in the body, so it has a harder time flexing. In the end, the neck/body absorbs very little energy from the strings, so the guitar overall has a great deal of sustain. The body is, for all intents and purposes, acoustically dead. Play one unplugged once, and you'll barely be able to hear it. But, plug it in and hit a power chord and it says "Bdbdbdraaaaang!" and holds that chord for years. It's a form of natural compression, in that the decay is slow enough that it's not immediately noticeable. Throw some pickups on there that hit the amp's preamp section a little harder, and even when the string vibration does begin to decay a bit, you're still over the top on the input. So, more compression. Pauls are cool that way. They're like virtual compressing overdrive boxes that'll cover up a multitude of sins on the player's part. The much-vaunted "talent pedal", if you will.

Traditional-style Teles do a similar thing for the same reasons, but they use single coil pickups so they don't dump so much high end. But, you can really hear that they're not absorbing much - the things are twangy as hell because the frequency response and dynamic range is so much wider. I think that's why they're gaining in popularity. With some simple modifications, you can get rid of the ridiculous twang but still have a guitar that's designed to be playable in the upper registers. Unlike the Pauls, which have a neck access similar to a dreadnought acoustic.

 

[stubhead]

It's my experience that heavy, sustaining guitars work better in high-gain situations, where they're not adding odd little peaks and valleys to the frequency output. And lighter, woodier guitars have more "natural" tone - i.e., they're absorbing frequencies, mostly highs. So they're better for lower gain situations. And anyone who's played a guitar with a floating, non-locking whammy unplugged can hear and feel the springs vibrating. I'd formulate it this way:
Solid, heavy Les Paul build = more highs
boltneck with light woods = less highs
and the most popular pickup designs compensate for that.
Humbucking = less highs
single-coil = more highs

Great tone is in the middle - it's not all highs, it's not all bass SO:

heavy body (lots of highs) + humbucking (less highs) = good tone
absorbent body (less highs) + singlecoil (lots of highs) = good tone.

It's not a perfect formula by any means. Swamp ash actually has a rigid structure, it's kind of a light honeycomb made out of a hard wood. And the traditional choice of mahogany for set-necks dials back the highs inherent in in a good set-neck. And Gibsons are not by any means always constructed with a perfect neck/body interface. How tight is the neck pocket before the robot slobbers on the glue - you'll never know ("heh, heh, just BUY it kid, look at how much nookie Jimmy Page got with one").

Chambering, maple caps, titanium this 'n' that, the scale length is another factor - 25.5" adds some snap, 25.625" subtracts a bit, but it basically works towards compensating and subtraction to get good tone.

There have quite a few successful 25.5" boltnecks with humbuckers, but the bridge PU works for me and a neck humbucker usually doesn't (though the shoegazing sludgerockers like that "woman tone" into a Triple Rectifier). However, one formula you rarely, rarely see is a Les Paul made out of all maple with three singlecoils. I'm sure any smartass can go on the web and find fifty (get'm, boys), but these were not the guitars used to record the music which has come to defined "great tone." They're just mistakes.... :sad1:

I get kind of amazed at what people claim to be able to hear sometimes. If you look at the frequency curves of every single 10", 12" and 15" speaker ever put in a guitar amp, it starts off at zero low, rises at 50Hz, curves up towards somewhere around 2000Hz to 2500Hz - then falls off a cliff. You can't hear things from a guitar amplifier's speaker that it can't reproduce. And a lot of people think that "mid-range" is the guitar notes in the middle of the neck and "highs" are above the 17th fret... but the highest E on a 24-fret guitar is only 1318Hz, the fundamental hasn't even tipped over to "highs!"

What the extreme highs coming out of a guitar will do is change the amplifier's response to them, reshaping the tube overdrive and compression and all - even though you can't hear them. It's gets very complicated very fast - low-pass and high-pass characteristics, it's sufficient to say that if you took our new solid-maple, set-neck 25.5" scale guitar with the Strat pickups and plugged it into a clean, flat power amplifier - and plugged that into a PA speaker with horns and tweeters that would amplify the highs - you'd be really, really sorry.

Most all of the rock stars with serious hearing damage who've spoken about it blame two things - standing too close to cymbals, and home studios. NOT standing next to guitar amps. All cool rock star studios have a full set of drums, and if you sit down at the drums, put on headphones (which will reproduce the high frequencies, even though you might not hear them they're still frying your noggin) and turn the music in your headphones up loud enough to match the volume of the drums,

BZZZZT!

(what? huh?)​

Especially if you're drunk, as one of the first things alcohol does is loosen up the muscles holding all those little ear-bones and membranes in place - which is why loud, great music + drunk listeners = awe, weepies, ecstasy, sex; and why all old drunk rockers are deaf as a a doorknob.

 

[Strat Avenger]

I agree with what you're saying about "sustain".  I think one wants a guitar that resonates well, and doesn't sound like a dead, lifeless plank. It's important that the neck and the body resonate together, with minimal damping, and that the resonating properties of the two don't cancel each other out.

I'm not sure you want that. Or, if you do, then what you want is an acoustic, not an electric.

If a body is resonating, that means it's drawing energy from the strings. If that's the case, you're going to adversely affect the tone and sustain of the thing. There's only so much energy available, so where do you want it to go? There's no free lunch. You can have the body absorb it, or you can let the strings ring and have the pickups send that data along.

That's why Les Pauls sound the way they do. There's a great deal of mass in the things, and so a great deal of inertia. Plus, the neck is not only shorter, a lot of it is buried in the body, so it has a harder time flexing. In the end, the neck/body absorbs very little energy from the strings, so the guitar overall has a great deal of sustain. The body is, for all intents and purposes, acoustically dead. Play one unplugged once, and you'll barely be able to hear it. But, plug it in and hit a power chord and it says "Bdbdbdraaaaang!" and holds that chord for years. It's a form of natural compression, in that the decay is slow enough that it's not immediately noticeable. Throw some pickups on there that hit the amp's preamp section a little harder, and even when the string vibration does begin to decay a bit, you're still over the top on the input. So, more compression. Pauls are cool that way. They're like virtual compressing overdrive boxes that'll cover up a multitude of sins on the player's part. The much-vaunted "talent pedal", if you will.

Traditional-style Teles do a similar thing for the same reasons, but they use single coil pickups so they don't dump so much high end. But, you can really hear that they're not absorbing much - the things are twangy as hell because the frequency response and dynamic range is so much wider. I think that's why they're gaining in popularity. With some simple modifications, you can get rid of the ridiculous twang but still have a guitar that's designed to be playable in the upper registers. Unlike the Pauls, which have a neck access similar to a dreadnought acoustic.

That completely makes sense, yet electric guitars have "some" acoustic properties. If they didn't, then maple, mahogany, alder basswood, ash, etc., would all sound the same in an electric guitar with the same pickups.  I agree though, that we don't want the body absorbing the string vibration, but rather the string vibration being transferred to the pickups. My previous comment was not worded in the best way.

 

[drewfx]

That completely makes sense, yet electric guitars have "some" acoustic properties. If they didn't, then maple, mahogany, alder basswood, ash, etc., would all sound the same in an electric guitar with the same pickups.

Some would argue they don't sound as different as you might think.

Personally, I'm convinced we have a tendency to extrapolate what we hear when we play an instrument unplugged to what it sounds like plugged in. Since our brains have a proven (and annoying) ability to make us think we are hearing stuff that's not really there, if we think we're supposed to hear it, it's hard to know what's real and what is an illusion.

Here's an interesting research paper I found that, though not particularly comprehensive, at least attempts to do some controlled testing of the impact of different body woods in an electric guitar:

http://www.stormriders.com/guitar/telecaster/guitar_wood.pdf

Note from the pictures (starting on page 4) that, when unplugged and mic'd, the different woods consistently make a really drastic difference compared to plugged in (unfortunately I don't think there's enough data presented to really draw any conclusions other than this and the fact that the differences seem to get greater for the higher strings).

Anyway, I know I have some instruments that sound quite warm acoustically but rather bright electrically and vise versa, so I'm not sure how much of a difference it really makes at this point.

 

[Strat Avenger]

Well, I hear a definite difference. Hard ash has much more top-end than alder or mahogany.
Notice how a Floyd Rose bridge produces less bass than a fixed bridge? Those are acoustic properties. It's not "all" in the pickup, although the pickup is the vast majority of it.