Does Tone Wood Matter on Electric Instruments?

I wonder if you use suede if you get built in fuzz?

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:rofl::joy::rofl:

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Itā€™s all depends on what type of wires cover you use as well. Cloth cover while very chic but it does take away the resonance, just saying. :slight_smile:

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It looks like a giant moccasin with pickups.

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Youā€™re partially correct but for the wrong reasons. Tone wood on acoustic instruments matter because the wood is acting as the speaker. Its resonant qualities are going to affect its ability to replicate any given frequency. Woods on an electric guitar are going to produce some overtones and feedback, but the way a pickup is designed, itā€™s going to be almost imperceptible in the output. A sound is just a frequency, and the string, the way it is moved, the pickup, the amp (electrical colorization and speaker accuracy) are 99% of the workload in the process. The overwhelming majority of people canā€™t even perceive the difference in 1/32 semitones, and your ears are the most subjective tool of all. The effect of tone woods on electric instruments is so minuscule that it canā€™t even be accurately measured, recorded, or replicated, though Iā€™m sure if you sat down with a spectrograph for a few hours you would find something. That should tell you how important it is

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I totally agree with this guy. just listen ā€¦ I myself experienced exactly the same stuff. also itā€™s not only about pure tone, itā€™s about the vibration, the feel of the instrument, which is very important because it can make you play differently and thus donā€™t sound the same at all from one instrument to another.

itā€™s easy to experience, really. just try a lot of instruments and you will agree. just an advice. do/believe what you want.

not saying that a plywood bass canā€™t sound good (I have one and Iā€™m pretty happy with it), just saying that there is no sense saying that the woods have no impact on an instrument that is made ouf of wood.

also my two main instruments, guitar and bass, happen to both have an ash body. heavy (and not very comfortable) but very lively and I love those bodies for this reason. an ash body, in my opinion, is the ideal mix of violent attack and warm resonnance.

again, do/believe what you want.

need more proof ?

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Man, @terb, these videos are really good.

Dang it, I think Iā€™m starting to come around to the tone wood side. His statement about the wood only affecting the sound by 5% comes down to how much that 5% matters to you and I have to admit that the last little bit, whether itā€™s 5% or 1%, does matter to me. Those subtleties, that someone else may not even hear the way I do, makes a difference to how much I enjoy the sounds I make.

Also, it was nice to finally hear someone talk about the physics.

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Perhaps but out in the wilds of bass stores, your not going to really ever have a variety of basses that are all exactly the same components except the ā€œtonewoodā€. So how will you know itā€™s the thing doing it for you?

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This is really what it comes down to. Thereā€™s no question if there are differences or not - there are. What matters is if the relatively minor differences actually matter to you.

To me, they absolutely do not, compared to other factors, but YMMV. Given what I know now and can do with EQ and other tone shaping, minor differences in the original guitar tone matter very little to me.

Pickup choice, string choice - now these can make larger differences.

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Yep, because this is a thing :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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Similarly why I donā€™t care if I shoot a Nikon, canon or Sony camera because I can get the look I want on any of them because the raw processor makes more of a difference.

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Yes and because:

  • Heavy big chunks of wood are not very resonant

  • pickups are inductive transducers and not microphones

Wood makes so little a difference that for the way most people play, pretty much every other factor in the sound chain will negate it. I have several basses with several kinds of fingerboard wood, several kinds of body wood, several types of strings, several kinds of pups and within a very wide middle ground, I can get pretty much any sound from any bass.

No sound engineer is ever going to care what body wood your bass is. Bring a pbass, donā€™t try anything fancy, heā€™ll do the rest. If you want to play a bass that has a certain sound and you feel like it has to be a certain wood then do whatever but pretty much everything else matters more.

Now go practice your ghost notes.

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I was going to build a bass this year, I think Iā€™m going to make the body from corks because I love irony :slightly_smiling_face:

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Set up your last will and testament first, so that when the screws for the bridge pull out and it smacks you in the head, your affairs are in order :joy:

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John Enthwhistle tried to play the solo on My Generation on a Danelectro, but kept snapping the strings. He couldnā€™t buy just the strings, so he bought all the Danelectros in the area, and eventually had to settle on a Jazz, which is what made the album.

Which proves both points. You canā€™t always get the sound from a different bass, but anyone going to argue the bass solo in My Generation is just about perfect?

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Theyā€™ll be in epoxy resin, Iā€™ll either put threaded metal inserts in or more likely a wood core for the center block.

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I donā€™t understand why would you care about such thing? Unless your intention is to play your bass unplugged and all by yourself. Biggest difference in tone is in your cab (speakers) and mics you use to record it with.

When you plug in your bass that 5% becomes completely irrelevant and it becomes even more irrelevant once your recording ends up in actual song after being EQā€™d, compressed and saturated multiple times. Your listeners wonā€™t care, your mixing engineer wonā€™t care so I donā€™t understand why would you care?

After mixing a lot of songs I can tell you that most important thing is that your bass stays in tune, itā€™s properly intonated and that you can actually lay down great performance (well recorded one as well). Last thing I care about is which wood is it made of.

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For most people, the biggest difference is in their hands. You can give the same bass to 2 people and it will sound completely different.

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Yeah. This became apparent to me really fast. I mean - the sound difference will quite possibly make it through to the final recording. And it absolutely exists. But will it matter in the end? IMO, no, not compared to everything else that happens to the tone in the mixing and mastering process.

Live it might make a bigger difference, but live acoustics are super shitty anyway, for most places. Tonewood is the least of your problems there.

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I saw his video about where does sustain come from posted a bit above, but didnā€™t know if this one ever got posted.
If it did, I apologize for the repeat.

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It is literally in the first post :rofl: (albeit hidden behind URL hyperlink)