Cagey
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Street Avenger said: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.