00:00.80 archpodnet Hello and welcome to the pseudo archeology podcast episode 109 and I am still your host Dr Andrew Kingkella tonight the great electric guitar tonewood debate. Can you hear. The Mahogany. So as you can tell from the title of this I thought I'd step a little bit aside from classic pseudo archeology for today and concentrate a little bit on pseudoscience now. You could argue that everything I touch has an archeological component to it as I am an archeologist but tonight yeah no, we're a little to the side and that's fine. The reason why I'm doing this is because every so often I'll notice something in the everyday world. That follows the same pattern as pseudo archeology right? This sort of false idea being perpetuated year in and year out and nobody does anything about it. So I thought you know what I'm going to do something about this and so our question tonight is. 01:19.33 archpodnet About does what an electric guitar is made out of the wood right? does that affect its sound and realize we are talking about electric guitars. Solid body electric guitars specifically right. We're not talking about ah acoustic guitars because in the acoustic guitar world. It does affect the sound. You can obviously tell if you strum acoustic guitars made of different woods. That it matters because the sound is generated from the top of the guitar right? You can see the little hole there at the top of the guitar and the top vibrates. You know, based on the strings and based on how flexible that wood is. Basically that affects the tone so different woods obviously have a different tone for an acoustic guitar. But what about electrics now I play guitar. Ah, right next to me in my office at Moore Park College I have an electric guitar standing by for whenever I need it now. I've played guitar for good lord probably over yeah over thirty years and 02:44.16 archpodnet That sounds like I would be good at it. But I'm not dear listeners I am not very good at the electric guitar but you know what I love it. I love playing the guitar you guys I love it. I love everything about electric guitars. Specifically I love learning about him. I love fixing them I love changing out the pickups in them I just dig the electric guitar. It brings me so much joy my crappy electric guitar playing brings me as close to pure joy I think as we can get so. As the years went by I wanted to learn more about the electric guitars now background wise I started playing in my like middle to late teens I had started music by playing the trumpet in junior high you know. Actually in grammar school and by the time I hit the tenth grade or so you know the trumpet not so cool. The electric guitar pretty cool. So I switched over to that and I continued to play ah throughout college again, just sort of learning on my own I took a handful of lessons. But largely I just kind of learned and I played and I played with some friends from time to time and it was just something that I I dug you know I had an acoustic and 2 electric guitars. Um, then by ah. 04:19.29 archpodnet I would say the early two thousand s by the time I was about 30 or so life changed and I barely ever played I would play the guitar like I don't know 2 or 3 times a year you know I just kind of put it on pause kind of having a young family and that kind of stuff. And so I didn't really play for like 15 years then about god about maybe seven years ago or so my children were growing up and I was kind of like you know I should get back on the guitar playing trip and. So I started again, you know this was maybe 20152016 something like that and I realized having been out of the hobby for like 15 years I'm like man things had changed and what I first noticed was um. Inexpensive guitars had gotten much much better and I was kind of comparing them to my 3 sad old guitars and my guitars you guys were in horrible shape right? Everything was wrong with them I mean they like buzzed horribly. Stuff was out of alignment the nut and the bridge were sort of the nuts weren't cut very well. The bridge was off. The electronics were scratchy and dude I had a terrible amp like everything it was a mess so I did a couple things first I bought myself not 1. 05:55.26 archpodnet But 2 new guitars. 1 new acoustic and 1 new electric and they were inexpensive and what that means these days in guitar world is like between you know, two hundred and three hundred dollars is pretty cheap and I bought those and so I could see how good things could be. And then I also decided to fix what I had right? So I'm Goingnna look into this and I'm gonna fix my old stuff and not only am I goingnna fix it I'm gonna modify it and I'm going to improve my my guitars my my sad collection of 3 guitars. So knowing enough about guitars where I know that pickups made a difference and I'll get into how that works later. Um I decided to buy some new pickups for one of my guitars now pickups themselves are. Extremely simple things. You guys like the technology in electric guitars is really it was old technology in the 1950 s basically and they really haven't changed it since so guitar pickups are magnets with wire wrapped around them. That's. Really it and then you're going to electrify those and when you strum your metal strings. It's going to create a current that is then ultimately picked up so it's important to realize that guitar pickups are not microphones. 07:31.21 archpodnet Okay, they don't pick up like sound like that. It's about um, a metal vibration. Ah with a magnet you know and then sort of that energy being translated into electricity and then back out to ah vibrations through the amp. 07:50.28 archpodnet Now when I was looking to buy these new pickups now those of us who know guitars a stratacaster has 3 pickups a les paul or a Telecaster have 2 pickups and Eddie Van Halen is known for using 1 pickup in his early guitars. Because he's awesome in buying these pickups I went to the 2 main pickup sellers which are companies called Seymour Duncan and Demarsio and looking on their website I realized they had a drop down menu of like ah. Choose your own pickup kind of thing right? Both of these sites where you drop down and you choose what you want what kind of sound you want you want to be darker. Do you want to be more bright you know and so on totally makes sense and of course the type of magnet that the pickup is made out of will make a difference makes sense. Now I looked at these dropdown menus and I'm going through them I'm like okay 6 strings all right I want to brighter pick up whatever but then it gets. There's a dropdown menu that says would tone would and they want to know what the. Body of my solid electric guitar is made out of and there's this dropdown menu for like mahogany and maple and ash and so on in the guitar building world common woods are ah Mahogany which is seen as having a dark tone maple. 09:22.70 archpodnet Which is seen as having a bright tone and then a bunch of stuff in the middle like Alder or Ash and even pine and poplar those are some of the more common ones now. Not only did they have a dropdown menu for the guitar body. They had a drop down menu for the guitar neck. What's your your fret board. The the part where the frets are the part where you put your fingers was your fretboard made out of rosewood or made out of maple and you would choose these selections. And then the website would give you pickup choices based on all these and the variables included the wood now I was kind of new to guitar at the time meaning I kind of was reupping my knowledge of it. And it bet a long time so I went with it. You know and I clicked the right stuff. Oh this guitar is mahogany. Oh it has a ah rosewood fretboard right? and I ultimately bought a pickup based on these choices. But as I did more research and as I thought about it. And you guys I did put the pick up in and it worked perfectly. Fine I was like way does that does that matter at all thinking about the physics of the thing and how an electric guitar works I'm like wait. It. 10:54.77 archpodnet Pretty sure this is all Pseudoscience I'm pretty sure this is just magical thinking and miscellaneous beliefs that people have had for a long time just because they have beliefs I think it might just be because. They are comparing acoustic guitars and electric guitars and while everyone gets how acoustic guitars work. Most people actually don't really get how electric guitars work so they're sort of taking the ideology of the acoustic guitar and putting onto an electric guitar where it really. Doesn't compare at all and the more I thought about this I'm like but I want to learn more about this and I wonder if there have been experiments done to look into this does the the quote unquote resonance of the wood. That's used to make the body of a solid electric guitar does that make a difference when we return how an electric guitar actually works.