B3Guy said:
1. Is it good or bad for a guitar body to vibrate when played (considering my desire for a singing guitar)? does this help or hurt sustain, etc?
The body has no choice but to vibrate when the strings are struck, since they're attached to each other. Has to do with those pesky laws of physics. Inertia and F=MA and all that. How much it vibrates depends on how dense and stiff the wood is, how tight the neck-to-body joint is, how firmly attached the strings are (tuners/nut/bridge) and the string-to-body weight ratio, among other things. How's that for a pile of widely variable variables?
I know that's not what you're asking, though <grin>
Generally speaking, a guitar whose body is vibrating a lot is absorbing a lot of energy from the strings, so you're going to lose sustain. If string vibration gets absorbed, there's less for the pickups to hear, which is death on an electric, while being highly desirable on an acoustic. Of course, the inverse is also true. That's why your heavier electrics such as Les Pauls and Telecasters sing so well. There's a lot of mass in the body, so inertia dictates that it's going to tend to stand still without some serious energy input. Standing still means less absorption, so the strings vibrate longer. Of course, there's a limit - you don't want to make a guitar out of granite or cast iron. It would be unmanageable.
Not gun doit. Wouldn't be prudent.
On the other end of the scale, something too light or with too many joints is going to absorb too much vibration and sound dead, even though the body will be vibrating like a couple hot & bothered teenagers after the Homecoming Dance. Here again, good for acoustics, death for electrics. That's why you'll see spruce and cedar used to build acoustics, but never electrics.
As far as tone goes, given any suitable wood species, the density, stiffness and grain orientation translates into woods that will absorb some frequencies more than others. That's where you find preferences for Mahogany vs. Alder or Swamp Ash vs. Poplar or Korina vs. Maple, and so on. The difference aren't outstanding, but they are audible and to some degree, measurable. But, what's the scale? Sometimes, saying one wood is brighter than another is sorta like saying jumping off the 34th floor of a building is more damaging to your skull than jumping off the 28th floor. From a practical point of view, there's no difference, regardless of what physicists might say.
So, the bad news is that no matter how much you know about a particular species you can't predict with much accuracy what it's going to do. For instance, Swamp Ash is a popular choice for solid body guitars, but how it responds depends a great deal on the age of the tree, what part of the tree you've used, how it's been cut, etc. That's why you've heard all the stories about "The One That Got Away". Between the variability of the wood and what used to be the variability of pickups, you could play 10 seemingly identical guitars and get 10 different sounds. One of them might be magic to your ears. Or none of them. Who knows? Nowadays, pickups are pretty predictable, but trees still do pretty much whatever the hell they want when they're growing.
Fortunately, using the wood species most builders do, the body/neck plays a lot less of a role in the sound of an electric guitar than the pickups do, so you can play retrofit games quite a bit to get where you need to go. It's like most problems - you just have to throw money at it.
B3Guy said:
2. Single coil Pickups: Hot or not? Will hot pickups or normal pickups be better for what I'm wanting? I want to make sure that the neck and middle pickups really sing. What about the bridge pickup? most starts I play have a lot of bite in the bridge, which is fine (as long as the other pickups can give me the juice). Would it be better to take the "bite" sound and run with it in the bridge, and what pickup type will be good for this?
Here again, we can only speak in generalities. Usually, the hotter the pickup, the worse the frequency response, and it's the high end that suffers. Or, it may be that the low end is augmented. I've never put it on a scope to see, because it doesn't really matter. The end result is the same.
But, a hot pickup will usually beat on your amp's preamp stage, which can sometimes translate into some pleasant distortion. There is some risk of character loss, though.
Lower output pickups usually have a more balanced and musical character, but if you wanna wank and crank Ted Nugent style, it ain't happening without some electronic help.
Pole design, magnet material, number of winds and gauge of wire, among other things are some of the variables involved there. Again, generally speaking, ceramic magnets tend to make for edgier sounding pickups, while alnicos are a little more refined. Some manufacturers are even using Neodymium now, although I'm not sure if it has a particular character associated with it. They just have incredibly strong fields for their size, so you can build some unusual configurations. Bill Lawrence and GFS both make Neodymium-based pickups, for instance.
So, you pays yer munny and you makes yer choice. It's mostly luck and voodoo.
