Wood Tone Theory?

[Stratman44]

Pandors Box has been openned!
I've played a mid 80s Japanese Strat for 20 years. Im not sure it is ebony or indian rose wood fretboard.  Not sure what bodywood it is.  Serial # is h023667. My son wanted to make a strat so we read about building and then made a strat but used my strats electronics.  Some people do not subscribe to the idea that the woods make much of a difference.  After this build, we DO believe wood makes a huge difference. The build was with a swamp ash body, maple neck with indian rosewood finger board, vintage tuners and vintage 6 hole tremelo bridge.  I expected the tone to be similar given that the electronics are identical.  My old strat was typical strat tone.  The bridge pup produced a thin almost ice-pick tone (I used it seldom). I used the neck and middle pups together for an out of phase tone.  Seperately they had bell like chime.  The middle pup would ring into overtones easily especially with harmonics.  The new guitar has a very different voice!  It is very warm and growly.  I like the sound but I miss that pure bell like tone. 
Questions:
1) Can a change in electronics bring back the bell tones or must that quality be present acoustically before pups can bring it out? What might accomplish this?
2) What variable could be changed to bring this build back toward the bell tone: the neck, the tuners, the body?

 

[Strat Avenger]

The wood definitely makes a difference in tone, the neck perhaps more than the body, but both do. The bridge also has a large affect.

What neck do you have on the Warmoth?

By the way, the in-between pickup positions are not "out-of-phase". They are very much in-phase.  Out-of-phase tone is very honky and nasty (nasal), and sounds terrible. It's completely different from the pleasant "quack" that the #2 and #4 positions produce with single-coil pickups.

 

[line6man]

By the way, the in-between pickup positions are not "out-of-phase". They are very much in-phase.  Out-of-phase tone is very honky and nasty (nasal), and sounds terrible. It's completely different from the pleasant "quack" that the #2 and #4 positions produce with single-coil pickups.

They are indeed out of phase.

The pickups are in different locations, which means that the vibration of the strings induces a current to flow in one pickup at a slightly different time relative to the other pickup, which cause various constructive and destructive interferences between the waveforms when combined.

When you flip the leads around on one pickup, that's also out of phase, but the degree of separation is much greater. At 180 degrees, any identical waveforms will fully cancel out. Since much of the signal from two different pickups is approximately the same, this means that there is often a lot of destructive interference going on when you shift by 180 degrees, which leaves you with nothing but thin, nasal tone. The usual position 2 and 4 Strat thing does not cancel out too much of the waveforms, because most of the signals are still relatively in phase.

 

[Stratman44]

Neck: Warmoth Pro maple with indian rosewood fingerboard
"out of phase" - the description is relate to what I hear with the humbuckers on my Gibson ES-347when i use the "out of phase" switch- more warmth, less high frequency, kind of growly.

But back to the original questions- what suggests can you make to bring out more bell like chime?

 

[stubhead]

Hmmm... bell-like chime on the neck and middle, growly on the bridge - Pandora's Box indeed! I am guessing, but I'd guess that the old body weighed more? It was probably some kind of analog to American ash, but for obvious reasons a lot of the Japanese guitars were made out of wood that's not been shipped all the way from America. Swamp ash is fairly unique in that it's both hard (the darker parts) and soft (the in-between parts). It's almost like a hard honeycomb structure. Ideally, that chime should still be there, coming out of the wood - but the electronics/pickups aren't selecting the same frequencies, in the same proportions. You could get some ways forward in knowledge about those particular pickups by trying a few different wiring tricks. The first might be to just (temporarily) hot-wire the neck pickup to the output, and see if your "chime" comes back. The whole system is interactive, which makes things confusing (not to marketers!), so by working with what's already there you can at least avoid buying thousands of dollars worth of pickups searching for one particular thing. If the hotwired neck pickup gives you back enough highs to contain the chime the next step would be to work with the tone control's capacitor's value  - if it's a .047 say, you might want to try a 0.022 and see if the highs squeak past it.

Another thing to do would be to raise the pot's values up to 500K, though it may be difficult to find out what's in there right now. And if it's wired like the original Strats, there's no tone control for the bridge PU. The single most common Strat mod is to run the bridge pickup to a tone pot on the second knob, the middle and neck pickup to a tone pot on the third knob and run both back up to a master volume on the closest knob. That lets you adjust the bridge tone circuit to eliminate the icepick, but the neck and middle PUs can have more highs from a lower value on the capacitor. Hello, Pandora, you're looking well....

 

[Stratman44]

Good suggestions! Thanks.
Just to clarify, the current setup yields a thin sounding bridge pup BUT NOT icepicky.  The middle is growly without enough bell chime.  The neck is even more growly.  The sound is nice but without enough bell chime.
Im wondering what changes the Japanese make to the electronics to compensate for the body wood differences.  May thats the main issue.  I should return the electronics to the japstrat and get some very vintage strat pups for the ash strat.

 

[drewfx]

I would play with the PU heights before I did anything else. Sometimes that can have a big effect on the tone.

 

[Strat Avenger]

I agree on pickup heights.
Also, I'd stick a Dimarzio Area-67 in the neck position.
I suspect that the heavier Warmoth Pro truss rod is the culprit in the tonal difference from the Japanese Strat.

 

[Strat Avenger]

By the way, the in-between pickup positions are not "out-of-phase". They are very much in-phase.  Out-of-phase tone is very honky and nasty (nasal), and sounds terrible. It's completely different from the pleasant "quack" that the #2 and #4 positions produce with single-coil pickups.

They are indeed out of phase.

The pickups are in different locations, which means that the vibration of the strings induces a current to flow in one pickup at a slightly different time relative to the other pickup, which cause various constructive and destructive interferences between the waveforms when combined.

When you flip the leads around on one pickup, that's also out of phase, but the degree of separation is much greater. At 180 degrees, any identical waveforms will fully cancel out. Since much of the signal from two different pickups is approximately the same, this means that there is often a lot of destructive interference going on when you shift by 180 degrees, which leaves you with nothing but thin, nasal tone. The usual position 2 and 4 Strat thing does not cancel out too much of the waveforms, because most of the signals are still relatively in phase.

You're obviously talking about "phase cancellation", which also happens when placing two microphones on the same speaker, or even separate speakers on the same cabinet. You are "technically" correct, however my point was that the pickups are wired in-phase with each other, which is completely different from the effect that wiring them out-of-phase would produce.
Didn't mean to thread-jack. I just like to refer to it as "quack", rather than 'out-of-phase', since the pickups are wired in-phase with each other.

 

[line6man]

By the way, the in-between pickup positions are not "out-of-phase". They are very much in-phase.  Out-of-phase tone is very honky and nasty (nasal), and sounds terrible. It's completely different from the pleasant "quack" that the #2 and #4 positions produce with single-coil pickups.

They are indeed out of phase.

The pickups are in different locations, which means that the vibration of the strings induces a current to flow in one pickup at a slightly different time relative to the other pickup, which cause various constructive and destructive interferences between the waveforms when combined.

When you flip the leads around on one pickup, that's also out of phase, but the degree of separation is much greater. At 180 degrees, any identical waveforms will fully cancel out. Since much of the signal from two different pickups is approximately the same, this means that there is often a lot of destructive interference going on when you shift by 180 degrees, which leaves you with nothing but thin, nasal tone. The usual position 2 and 4 Strat thing does not cancel out too much of the waveforms, because most of the signals are still relatively in phase.

You're obviously talking about "phase cancellation", which also happens when placing two microphones on the same speaker, or even separate speakers on the same cabinet. You are "technically" correct, however my point was that the pickups are wired in-phase with each other, which is completely different from the effect that wiring them out-of-phase would produce.
Didn't mean to thread-jack. I just like to refer to it as "quack", rather than 'out-of-phase', since the pickups are wired in-phase with each other.

If we're getting technical, the pickups actually are wired out of phase with each other. If you have a RWRP set, as most players do, the coils are reverse wound, relative to each other, so any magnetic field noise induced in the coils can cancel out, since there is a 180 degree phase difference that causes destructive interference between the waveforms when added together.

The signal remains largely in phase, however, because the magnet polarities are opposite, but that's irrelevant to the wiring.

 

[Strat Avenger]

Your typical classic Strat pickups are not RWRP, and are therefore wired in-phase with each other. Also, when using a RWRP middle pickup, the leads are reversed so as to be "wired" in-phase with the other two pickups.
If they weren't, you'd have that "honky" nasal tone mentioned previously.
When you wire a humbucker (rails or full-size) with standard single-coil pickups (or stacks), you must reverse the hot and ground or the #2 position will sound nasal and horrible.

 

[Super Turbo Deluxe Custom]

To Stratman44, this is a bit of frustration that we all run into.  It could very well be the tonal differences of woods and neck construction differences.  Consider this too, all things being equal, those pickups may sound different in an otherwise identical mid 80s Japanese Strat.  Guitars are constantly reminding me they're made of wood.  Hardware and pickups are generally the most consistently reproduced items on an electric guitar because they are made by exacting standards and tolerances.  The variations in wood aren't random at all but typically fall in parameters that can best be designated within a range and +/-.  It's why no 2 guitars sound the same (just close enough), why touring bands have studio gear, and why Clapton and many others had to take several Strats to make a good one.  Maybe the older Strat just has the mojo.

 

[line6man]

Your typical classic Strat pickups are not RWRP, and are therefore wired in-phase with each other. Also, when using a RWRP middle pickup, the leads are reversed so as to be "wired" in-phase with the other two pickups.
If they weren't, you'd have that "honky" nasal tone mentioned previously.
When you wire a humbucker (rails or full-size) with standard single-coil pickups (or stacks), you must reverse the hot and ground or the #2 position will sound nasal and horrible.

Yes, if your pickups are not RWRP, then your magnetic field noise and signal are both largely in phase. Do people still use non-RWRP Strat sets?

It doesn't matter what colors you want to use for your leads, the physics are the same. Of course, it's arguing semantics at this point.

 

[Tonar8352]

I always mate a 1-piece maple neck with a Swamp Ash body after I had this experience.  I had a strat that had a maple neck with ziricote board that was almost muddy; when I switch it to a 1 piece maple neck it became a spectacular guitar.  Switch the neck to a one-piece maple neck with a bone nut and that guitar will come to life like you would not believe.

 

[stubhead]

Does Warmoth typically mate a maple fingerboard to the same maple back, when ordering a "modern" type construction? I haven't gone all-maple in decades, mebbe it's time again. An AWFUL LOT of famous (and good-sounding) people insist on this combination...