Engineer comments

[Glass Snuff]

alecee, I work in a store, and I think you'd be amazed at how many people choose guitars by words, rather than notes. The words "Fender" or "Gibson", written on a headstock, are considered very important.

However, in terms of context, TwinReverb said nothing about evaluating a guitar's tone. He's interested in understanding the physics of it. This, I think, is a worthy quest.


joelap, I hope you're running the MOSFETs at tube voltages, an not vice versa.

[Fender_Punk]

-Sustain is overrated
-Kids play 9 strings
-Good resonant wood make your pickups "hotter"

Well put. This means those lightning fast overrated virtuosos are babies as many of use 9, a lot of them use 7s.

to me the biggest impacts on overall tone are:
- Body & Neck woods
- Pickups
- Amps (or if your looking at just the guitar, then strings & hardware come next)

[Danglin' Fury]

I have VERY thick and meaty wood and I use re-bar for strings!

[Robert Delahunt]

-Sustain is overrated
-Kids play 9 strings
-Good resonant wood make your pickups "hotter"

I know you're messing around, but my opinion: I love sustain and cannot get enough. However, while I love 9s on my Strat (I get tons of compliments on how it sounds), so far I wasn't liking them on my Showmaster (but that could be the guitar being bright, so the jury's still out). Satriani and other virtuoso guitarists that play on 9s or even smaller are hardly children .

As for wood, resonant would mean that either the body resists dampening the string vibration, like in the case of maple and heavier woods, or that the internal resonant frequencies of the wood combine well with the range of the instrument to vibrate in sympathy with it (hence not dampening as much as a sucky piece of wood). I love how swamp ash has nice overtones in the bass region: sometimes I'll hold some of the low E power chords just to watch the strings stop vibrating in primary while vibrating in harmonics . To each his/her own, but give me a nice resonant piece of swamp ash any old day