Guitar 'truths" that you believe are myths

jimistone

jimistone

long standing member
One that I think is a myth:
"An electric guitar sounds better with a thin nitro lacquer finish than with a thick poly finish."
It's a hotly debated topic for sure.
On my 1966 strat I made the idiotic mistake, when I was 18 years old, to remove the finish. Natural ash strats with black pickguards were all the rage. (I found out the hard way what a 3 piece alder body was)
Anyway, I had access to dupont emmoron poly clear and activater for free (was in the coast guard). I painted that strat with poly. Several coats of color and I don't know how many coats of clear...a lot.
Guitar sounded amazing as always
Fast forward 20 years.
I learned a lot about vintage fender finishes and I decided to remove the poly finish and do a proper thin nito lacquer lake placid blue over white primer. It took 2 weeks of brushing on aircraft grade paint remover daily to get all that poly off, but I got er done. Did a gorgeous nito paint job.
Guitar sounded amazing as always.
Not a dimes worth of difference in the tone.
So, I say myth on that one!
 
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How about type of wood used for solid-body electrics. I've always read that different woods resonate differently - I don't question that. I can feel my unplugged Strat resonate nicely. But I have also read that this resonance affects the guitar's amplified sound. I can accept that this is true to an extent, but doesn't make a noticeable difference to the average musician's ears - maybe only to those with extremely sensitive hearing. Do body woods' resonances effect a noticeable change in an electric solid-body guitar's sound when played through an amp or DI'd ?
 
I think it plays a lot more into the equation on acoustic guitars. The pickups and the electronics play the predominant role in electric guitar tone.
That being said, Les Paul enthusiasts swear that maple cap les pauls are brighter sounding than their all mahogany counterparts.
Also, I have taken pickups that I like out of one guitar and installed in another and they don't sound the same.
Maple bodied guitars usually are brighter than alder bodied guitars...at least that have been my hands on experience.
I tend to believe that a guitar, even an electric one, is the sum if all it's parts.
 
Various Myths of Electric Guitars

Stainless Steel threats are brighter and harder than regular Frets.
A guitars that’s played a lot is going to have a better sound than a new one.
You have to break in a guitar.
Pickups are radically different.
Nitro/Poly etc…make a difference in tone.
PAF Humbuckers are the best sounding Humbuckers
Old guitars are best.
Expensive guitars are better than inexpensive guitars.
 
Papanate said:
Various Myths of Electric Guitars

Stainless Steel threats are brighter and harder than regular Frets.
A guitars that’s played a lot is going to have a better sound than a new one.
You have to break in a guitar.
Pickups are radically different.
Nitro/Poly etc…make a difference in tone.
PAF Humbuckers are the best sounding Humbuckers
Old guitars are best.
Expensive guitars are better than inexpensive guitars.
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I don't think stainless steel frets brighten the tone. As far as stainless steel being harder than nickle or mild steel, that is pretty much a scientific fact. I don't think you benefit tonewise with stainless steel frets, but they are not going to wear as quickly as non-stainless steel frets. So, the benefit is longitivity of the frets.
 
Papanate said:
Various Myths of Electric Guitars

Old guitars are best.
Expensive guitars are better than inexpensive guitars.
Click to expand...
I remember some people saying that the old Les Pauls sounded great because the wood had aged for 50+ years since it was built. That's why Clapton's Beano tone was so great, except that a 59 LP was only 7 yrs old when he did that album.

One Youtuber did a video comparing a $400, $2000, $5000 and $60000 strats. Great, except that $60K strat was originally a stock factory built 62 Strat was $290, which if you use an inflation calculator would be somewhere around $2500 or so. If I paid $100,000 for someone's Squire strat, it would STILL be a $250 Squire strat. I would just be a lot poorer... and feeling stupid!
 
"Stainless steel" embraces a whole gamut of alloys and there are also two distinct group Magnetic and non-magnetic and hardness depends on alloy type and heat treatment. If you want super hard frets make them from tool steel and temper to 'spring' hardness!

My son sent me a link to a YT vid a year or so ago where a guy investigated what effect, if any the body of an ELECTRIC guitar had on the tone. He ended up with an "air guitar" no body at all just strings and pickups. Neither he, my son nor I could tell it from the regular slabby.

Yes, the strings must cause vibrations in the wood. Physics innit? But the question is, does the vibration feed back to the strings and get picked up? Seems not.

Dave.
 
ecc83 said:
"Stainless steel" embraces a whole gamut of alloys and there are also two distinct group Magnetic and non-magnetic and hardness depends on alloy type and heat treatment. If you want super hard frets make them from tool steel and temper to 'spring' hardness!

My son sent me a link to a YT vid a year or so ago where a guy investigated what effect, if any the body of an ELECTRIC guitar had on the tone. He ended up with an "air guitar" no body at all just strings and pickups. Neither he, my son nor I could tell it from the regular slabby.

Yes, the strings must cause vibrations in the wood. Physics innit? But the question is, does the vibration feed back to the strings and get picked up? Seems not.

Dave.
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Guitar pickups are using a magnetic field to eventually turn the string vibration to the sound we hear. How can vibrating wood be picked up by a guitar pickup? If the vibrating wood effects the vibrating string then ya it’s a factor
 
It's possible for the wood to vibrate which makes the string vibrate. Just look at any hollow or semihollow guitar. Given enough volume, the body will find resonant frequencies that will cause the whole guitar to vibrate. That's going to affect the sound. My hollowbody guitar with P90s will feed back pretty easily with only moderately loud volume.

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I think the less the body and neck are effected by external vibration, the less they contribute to the overall sound.
 
Guitar feedback is due to the relatively massive energy produced by a speaker. The energy a string might put into the body is microscopic and the energy the body returns to the string even less.

Dave.
 
PorterhouseMusic said:
Am I mistaken - that pickups can be radically different? ("radical" is a relative term - but we could just as well say "extremely" different)

I'm pretty sure that that is not a myth.
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Yes, that's 'science'. A pup has number of turns, resistance, inductance, inter-winding capacitance* and all will be modified by the losses caused by the magnet and pole piece material ("Eddy Current" and his mad mate "Hysteresis" !)

*That will be modified by the cable capacitance and the capacitance of the amp's input stage (usually lower for transistor/op amp inputs) All that results in a resonant system that will be damped to a greater or lesser degree by external resistances, one of which is the input resistance of the amp.

Dave.
 
Pickups will sound different as you vary the design. There is an excel worksheet called Guitar Freak 6 which allows you to look at the response curves of various pickups, and how things like capacitance and resistance values of the pots change the response. You can look at both resistance and inductance of the coils as well.

People go nuts over infinitesimal changes, like the alloy of the screw or if it's enamel or poly coated wire, which I find somewhat amusing. However, changing the magnet, the number of turns, whether the pickup has a cover or not, will change the character of the pickup even within a single style. Wax potting can change the pickup's susceptibility to feed back, which is caused by the wire sympathetically vibrating. When the ladies were sitting at those winding machines in the 50, spinning bobbins for 8 hours a day, and screwing things together, they weren't spending a ton of time trying to meet an exact formula. Heck, Gibson's early winding machines didn't even have turn counters. They just spun for a set time, hence there was a lot of variation.

As for "radical" changes, yeah, going from a tele to a hot humbucker is a pretty radical difference.
 
Mass/ geometry matters. And a MASSIVE point of diminishing returns. What matters. Mass, a more resonate base structure and more than anything pickups
 
I saw Dave already jumped in on the stainless steel hardness statement I was all het up about. Difference in wood density on electric SOLID body guitars mostly does not affect the AMPLIFIED sound, but definitely affects the sound 'in the room' so depending on where you put the mic it can affect the recording.

The higher the gain and resulting harmonic distortion the less pickup differences show up when recorded. At extreme gain, even the difference between humbuckers and single coils becomes negligible compared to mild overdrive sounds. The difference in pickups as far as after amplification is down to output level and resonance as between the 'pots caps and inductors' in a given setup are electrically a filter circuit that outputs a specific resonant response. Depending on the type of preamp circuit in a given pre-amplifier the resonance may or may not be affected, as Dave already mentioned.

Again, more the gain, the less this matters, at lower gains there is more audible difference. String gauge resonance is much more obvious than pickups IME. Also , Some pickups are wound so that the resonance peak is much flatter when paired with the average pot and cap set and IMHO this is what makes some guitars 'boring' to play. Humans find some frequencies more pleasing and some less, so it makes sense that the combination of specific resonances with harmonic additions from distortion, especially odd harmonics ,it is unsurprising that less overdriven tone can make guitarists choosy about the pickups, even if the actual difference is tiny and unnoticeable at high gain.

IME there are 'boring' pickups (I have an ESP and a PRS that I just can't get excited to play except with specific signal chains, whereas my 80's era Gibson SG 62 reissue almost always sounds great no matter what the signal chain
 
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Gtoboy said:
I saw Dave already jumped in on the stainless steel hardness statement I was all het up about. Difference in wood density on electric SOLID body guitars mostly does not affect the AMPLIFIED sound, but definitely affects the sound 'in the room' so depending on where you put the mic it can affect the recording.

The higher the gain and resulting harmonic distortion the less pickup differences show up when recorded. At extreme gain, even the difference between humbuckers and single coils becomes negligible compared to mild overdrive sounds. The difference in pickups as far as after amplification is down to output level and resonance as between the 'pots caps and inductors' in a given setup are electrically a filter circuit that outputs a specific resonant response. Depending on the type of preamp circuit in a given pre-amplifier the resonance may or may not be affected, as Dave already mentioned.

Again, more the gain, the less this matters, at lower gains there is more audible difference. String gauge resonance is much more obvious than pickups IME. Also , Some pickups are wound so that the resonance peak is much flatter when paired with the average pot and cap set and IMHO this is what makes some guitars 'boring' to play. Humans find some frequencies more pleasing and some less, so it makes sense that the combination of specific resonances with harmonic additions from distortion, especially odd harmonics ,it is unsurprising that less overdriven tone can make guitarists choosy about the pickups, even if the actual difference is tiny and unnoticeable at high gain.

IME there are 'boring' pickups (I have an ESP and a PRS that I just can't get excited to play except with specific signal chains, whereas my 80's era Gibson SG 62 reissue almost always sounds great no matter what the signal chain
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Err? Yes! One thing not so far mentioned is pickup/string proximity. Obviously the closer the hotter but TOO close and it is said the magnet "pulls" the string and spoils the tone (which is in any case totally subjective as we all know!)

It is interesting I think that whereas Neo, high flux magnets have ousted the older alloys in most devices. Loudspeakers*, microphones, headphones even 'Xmas cracker" LED torches! There does does not seem to be a rush to incorporate them in guitar pups? But then my knowledge of the market is very limited.

*Of course, guitarists will forever drool over "Cobalt Blues"!

Dave.
 
Thinking about it, I think that the construction of a guitar or bass 100% has an effect on what the pickups 'collect'. If the instrument had infinite mass, then excitation of the string and the subsequent 'collection' or capture of the string vibrations would be isolated from any modification the support of the bridge and nut introduces. I am looking at things like e-bows. These things clearly influence the vibration of strings with no physical contact. A quick experiment with my instruments hanging on the wall, by tapping the bodies reveals they all react to the tap differently. This excitation makes it through the body to the strings, and whatever they do in response, must be captured in the sound.

Bodies are also resonant at different frequencies, depending on construction. Things like pedal steels are heavy, solid and the mechanical noises don't seem to make it to the output. My 335 on the other hand is quite sensitive to physical noises. Some guitars also take off with loud amps, while others seem different. Standing in front of a loud cab may well influence string vibration, a la Gary Moore, but other guitars just shreak uncontrollably.

My Hofner-ish bass is incredibly light, but sounds really good. Is this because while light, it is not resonant?

It leaves me confused. Heavy should be better, but isn't automatically how it seems to work. Something clearly happens, and sound changes - but how?
 
rob aylestone said:
My Hofner-ish bass is incredibly light, but sounds really good. Is this because while light, it is not resonant?
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This particular example has always interested me. This guitar's sound has a definite "woody" tone, IMO. Is this due to the hollow-body wood construction, or does it come from Höfner's proprietary pickup construction? I'm inclined to believe if the pickup(s) were installed into a solid-body electric, they wouldn't produce that "woody' tone. So the tone is coming from the wood body, through the pickups then the amp/speaker.

Then again. . . the Gretsch G2220 Electromatic Junior Jet Bass appears to have a touch of that same "woody" sound, so it must be coming from the Basswood solid-body. . . ? Or maybe I'm just hearing things that aren't there . . ?

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