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The data is in: the Wood Doesn't Matter

Street Avenger said:
NQbass7 said:
I personally am of the opinion that 90% of subjective opinions on things like sound or taste are bull.

You put the same wine in two bottles, one with a higher price tag, and people will tell you that the more expensive one tastes better, even though it's identical. (They'll even go into detail about what specifically was different and better.)

I would be surprised if there isn't an identical effect with sound - take the same tones but tell people one came from a koa bodied guitar and the other came from an alder bodied guitar, and I'd bet people will tell you they sound different, and the koa one sounds better. And then they'll tell you about how they don't sound the same, because they personally heard the difference.

With any type of subjective experience like that, your brain is as much or more a factor than anything else. So until you can show me specific blind taste tests or listening tests that tell me that people will consistently rate one thing higher than the other, I'm going to err on the side of believing that there isn't a difference.
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Really?? There's no difference in tone between guitars with bodies made of alder, mahogany, and hard ash with the same pickups, hardware, & strings?

All just "subjective"?

Give me a break.
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Do you have specifics that indicate otherwise? I'm more than willing to change my mind if you can demonstrate it.
 
Paul-less said:
Pick attack, pressure of the fretting hand. Hell, the amount of vibrato you use. That is what makes people sound like themselves on different instruments, and unique when multiple people use the same instrument.
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+1

Every guitar I've ever played has sounded like me. 
 
NQbass7 said:
Street Avenger said:
NQbass7 said:
I personally am of the opinion that 90% of subjective opinions on things like sound or taste are bull.

You put the same wine in two bottles, one with a higher price tag, and people will tell you that the more expensive one tastes better, even though it's identical. (They'll even go into detail about what specifically was different and better.)

I would be surprised if there isn't an identical effect with sound - take the same tones but tell people one came from a koa bodied guitar and the other came from an alder bodied guitar, and I'd bet people will tell you they sound different, and the koa one sounds better. And then they'll tell you about how they don't sound the same, because they personally heard the difference.

With any type of subjective experience like that, your brain is as much or more a factor than anything else. So until you can show me specific blind taste tests or listening tests that tell me that people will consistently rate one thing higher than the other, I'm going to err on the side of believing that there isn't a difference.
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Really?? There's no difference in tone between guitars with bodies made of alder, mahogany, and hard ash with the same pickups, hardware, & strings?

All just "subjective"?

Give me a break.
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Do you have specifics that indicate otherwise? I'm more than willing to change my mind if you can demonstrate it.
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The only "specifics" I have would be my personal experience, which I cannot demonstrate on the Internet.

I had a Strat with a heavy, hard-ash body what sounded much brighter (treble) than my alder Strat with the SAME pickups & type of hardware. I played a friend's heavy, '79 hard-ash Strat, and it too sounded much brighter. I had a ESP "M" series with a Floyd and a body made of agathis, and it sounded extremely dull/dark/muddy compared to my ESP M-II made of alder with a Floyd and the SAME exact pickup, same neck & fretboard woods.

Same amp, same amp settings.

It is pretty much a known fact that a Les Paul with a solid maple top has more mid-range attack than one with a solid mahogany body and no maple top.

Unless your hearing is damaged, it doesn't lie. It's ridiculous when people claim with supposed "scientific" data that your ears aren't really hearing a difference.
 
Cagey said:
I wouldn't go so far as to say there isn't a difference, but I think it's generally minor, perhaps in some cases to the point of insignificance. Amplified, that is. Acoustically, the differences can be dramatic. I have plenty of examples of that in my collection, as I'm sure we all do.

Here's how I look at it.

The pickups can only sense the string vibrations, not the body, so the low impact of the neck/body composition makes sense. But, it's also true that the neck/body combination absorbs some of the energy of the strings, and more or less so at different frequencies. That changes how the strings vibrate and for how long, and since the pickups sense the strings, that influence has to be audible once amplified.

For example, a hard, dense wood is going to absorb little energy from the string(s), so you would have longer sustain periods. If the wood is shaped or has a grain structure that allows it to absorb certain frequencies more so than others, you'd also have variations in tonal character as some harmonics decay while others continue. So, it would seem to be difficult to say that composition (wood) doesn't influence the character of the sound in an electric guitar, since it influences the vibration of the strings and the pickups sense the strings.

I still think the influence isn't enough to get worked up over. I don't think it can be disregarded, but I think the solidity of the bridge and the behavior of the pickups and amplification chain are the major tone shapers for electric guitars.
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'Sounds like you're basically saying that if an alder or mahogany body absorbs more high frequencies than hard-ash, then that is the resulting difference that will be heard. And that result was "affected" by the wood type.

I don't agree that it's "minor" though. I believe it is very noticeable on many guitars.
 
I'm glad I'm not blessed(cursed?) with detailed hearing.  All my guitars sound the same to me.  ???
 
Street Avenger said:
Unless your hearing is damaged, it doesn't lie. It's ridiculous when people claim with supposed "scientific" data that your ears aren't really hearing a difference.
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No but your brain often does lie and it's a very, very well established FACT.

And there are approximately 800 quadrillion documented examples of people who swore up and down that they could hear "obvious, night and day differences" between things - that is until they were forced to try and identify things without knowing what was what first, in which case they couldn't identify the "obvious, night and day differences" with any better results than just guessing would give.

So the problem isn't that one automatically isn't hearing a difference unless they can prove it scientifically, it's that no one has any way of knowing if they are actually hearing a difference or if they are just imagining that they are.
 
drewfx said:
Street Avenger said:
Unless your hearing is damaged, it doesn't lie. It's ridiculous when people claim with supposed "scientific" data that your ears aren't really hearing a difference.
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No but your brain often does lie and it's a very, very well established FACT.

And there are approximately 800 quadrillion documented examples of people who swore up and down that they could hear "obvious, night and day differences" between things - that is until they were forced to try and identify things without knowing what was what first, in which case they couldn't identify the "obvious, night and day differences" with any better results than just guessing would give.

So the problem isn't that one automatically isn't hearing a difference unless they can prove it scientifically, it's that no one has any way of knowing if they are actually hearing a difference or if they are just imagining that they are.
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I see, so my brain isn't smart enough (or reliable enough) to decipher if my ears are hearing various degrees of low, mid-range, and high frequencies.

Heck, why even put tone controls (Equalizers) on audio equipment? No one's brain is smart enough to know what they're hearing anyway. 
  ???

Of course the opposite extreme is people who claim that nitrocellulose paint sounds better than polyurethane or polyester. I guarantee that in a blind listening test, they couldn't tell you which was what.
 
There is a whole field of sensory science that is largely responsible for the way food is sold today.  It is quite funny to see some of the examples of how your brain can make you believe things.  Here is a picture of circles.

225px-Fraser_spiral.svg.png


I am willing to bet your brain tells you otherwise.  The same can happen with your other senses as well, hearing included.  To properly test these sorts of things, controls are necessary.  The difficult part is designing controls that are not biased.  Using humans, it is very hard to control.  Also, humans tire easily and this skews result dramatically.  Even when taking the human element out of it, it is very difficult to make a test that is not biased.

This says nothing about guitars and how the woods effect them, just that the testing is full of dangers (to accuracy and precision).

And seriously, we all know that tone resides in the strap buttons, I don't see why we have to rehash this argument again.
Patrick

 
Street Avenger said:
I see, so my brain isn't smart enough (or reliable enough) to decipher if my ears are hearing various degrees of low, mid-range, and high frequencies.

Heck, why even put tone controls (Equalizers) on audio equipment? No one's brain is smart enough to know what they're hearing anyway. 
  ???

Of course the opposite extreme is people who claim that nitrocellulose paint sounds better than polyurethane or polyester. I guarantee that in a blind listening test, they couldn't tell you which was what.
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It's not frequencies so much as it's timbre, which is much more complex. And it has nothing to do with smarts - the brain does all sorts of interpretation on its own that you're completely unaware of. It will ignore and/or modify data from all your senses in order to make sense of it. That's why eyewitnesses are so often useless in criminal trials. 10 or 12 people can see the exact same event and have 6 or 7 different versions of it.

For example, here's a real life commercial application of the phenomena: the optical industry sells contact lenses packaged for those who need bifocals called "monovision".  What they do is figure out what correction you need for near and distant vision. Then they give you one contact of each diopter, and you put one in each eye. Now you can see close up with one eye and far away with the other, but you don't know that's happening. Your brain stitches things together internally into a correct image. You just see everything in focus regardless of distance. I've had them before, and it's wierd. Doesn't seem like it would work, but it does.

Same thing happens with another form of contact where they alternate the two diopters in concentric rings, and both contacts can be the same. Your brain just automatically sorts out the focused image with no effort on your part at all.

Traumatic injuries often don't hurt at all. Your brain can shut off the pain while you're in shock. It'll also often conveniently discard the memory of it.

Taste is obviously interpreted differently. One man's pork tenderloin is another's roadkill.

Hearing is no different. Your brain can selectively pay attention to some things and not others. Sometimes you don't selectively ignore the sound altogether, but subconsciously only pay attention to certain characteristics of it.

So, don't be offended if you are or aren't hearing something that others do or don't. Unless you have objective instrumentation on it, you can't know. Humans are terrible about objectivity, because we're emotional creatures.
 
Patrick pretty much said it.

Street Avenger said:
Unless your hearing is damaged, it doesn't lie. It's ridiculous when people claim with supposed "scientific" data that your ears aren't really hearing a difference.
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And unless your tongue is damaged, it doesn't lie either, say the wine-testers.

I'm not denying that your ears are hearing a difference. I'm questioning whether the difference your ears are hearing comes from the wood, or from your brain knowing about the wood.
 
Why doesn't a tele deluxe sound like a les paul if the wood doesn't matter?

I don't know about all of you, buy I play my through an almost clean signal. Hardly any overdrive. I can hear what guitar is being played through my rig blindly.

If you're feeding your guitar through a Diezel amp with every knob at 10, I'm positive you would have trouble hearing the difference between a danelectro and a Schecter. But that's a whole different extreme.


To get back on topic though, this "scientific research" was conducted poorly, and his actions don't even warrant looking into this further. Until somebody can give statistics regarding the entire spectrum of variables that make up sound, then I will continue to say that mahogany is warm and alder is bright. I may agree as to say "the difference between mahogany and limba is inconsequential," but to argue that maple and mahogany sound the same is simply balderdash.
 
I've built the same instrument with the same pickups , strings etc , using different woods and the differences are subtle . 

The interactions of all components have subtle influences , and every once in a while, you get just the right combination of those and a special instrument is born.
 
The nice thing is that most of the time, the differences between woods are small enough that you can change your guitar to sound how you want it to with EQ and pickup changes.
 
The way I think of the brain interfering with what's really there is this: Our brain is trying to do us a favor by subconsciously inserting the stuff that it determines "should be there" even if it's not, thus making our subjective world more coherent.

IOW, it's not a bug it's a feature. And most of the time it actually is, but in other cases it's a royal pain. Particularly when misconceptions, popular mythology and marketing are involved.

And in cases like this discussion, it tends to make us either admit we're sort of just speculating, or else go through a whole lot of trouble to actually try to prove things.

But as far as I know, informed speculation isn't a crime, so...
 
"it isn't a bug it's a feature"

I agree. And I also agree about it being a pain when marketing is involved - hence people buying tone capacitors for $75 a pair or worse, when nobody has yet been able to tell the difference in a blind test.
 
From an asthetic point of view, the wood choices DO matter. Also there are woods domestic and exotic that are not used for instrument making.  WHY? The reasons for choosing woods are tone, strength, grain shape and stability. Balsa wood, for example, would not be used because it lack the strength and stability of other common hardwoods.

Finally sound is subjective even if recorded "scientiffically" as the devices used to cature the sound have their own unique "fingerprint" sound. There is obviously going to be a diference between what a first act single-coil pu will capture compared to a telefunken u-47.
 
Paul-less said:
Why doesn't a tele deluxe sound like a les paul if the wood doesn't matter?
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I don't know much about either guitar, but they have different bridges and scales for starters, don't they?

Paul-less said:
To get back on topic though, this "scientific research" was conducted poorly, and his actions don't even warrant looking into this further.
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I agree that, at least from what he's presented so far, he doesn't have much of a case. I disagree on what you're taking as the default assumption though. Based on everything I've seen about how the brain can be wrong when evaluating subjective stimuli, I can't justify assuming there's a difference. Unless the difference can be reliably noted in a blind listening test, I'm going to assume that the difference is so inconsequential that I shouldn't care about it.

Eric Banjitar said:
From an asthetic point of view, the wood choices DO matter.
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This I can agree with 100%. I might look at some of the tone info a little bit if I'm between two woods that I like, but basically when I'm building a guitar from Warmoth, I'm picking wood based on looks, feel, and weight.
 
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