00:00.00 archpodnet Hello and welcome back to the pseudo archeology podcast episode 109 and we have been talking about electric guitar tone wood and I've been waxing philosophical about my love my pure love you guys for the electric guitar and everything about it. Um, so in order to understand if tone wood is a thing or not we need to take a moment and understand how an electric guitar actually works you know and. Maybe a bit of the history about it now. An electric guitar is basically a product of the 1950 s that's what I would say. Um yes, you might have a few. 00:49.43 archpodnet Ah, prototypes and this kind of thing earlier than that. But then the early 1950 s is when you get kind of the 3 big famous electric guitars being made for the first time the solid body ones you have from fender. You have the telecaster and. Soon after that you have the strata caster and then of course for those of you who are into the Gibson world. Whatever ah, there is the less paul so those 3 if you just take those 3 into account that covers basically every single. Guitar playing musician that you like and yes there are other guitars that haven't been built since but most of them really are kind of takeoffs on these big 3 um, why this started in the 50 s was really. You have acoustic guitars before that and they're in the band and you think of the band being kind of a big band or this kind of thing and acoustic guitars are kind of quiet. You know if you put up an acoustic guitar against some trumpets or some saxophones I mean those are pretty loud. So how are you going to make and ah. Acoustic guitar louder you know now. 02:14.94 archpodnet As we talked about earlier acoustic guitars do have a difference when it comes to the woods. Especially those used for their tops a mahogany topped acoustic guitar will sound what we call Darker. Usually or more midi Um, meaning that the the high notes are a little bit more subdued. They have a little bit more of a warmer town right? Um, while in acoustic Guitar World Spruce is usually. Giving you a brighter sound the the treble parts. The higher notes are more crisp. They're more high. You know, not more high. They're more crisp they're more maybe a little more bell like you know they stand out a little better and it's just personal taste you know and of course in all this we have to Remember. It's in the fingers. You know what? I mean even for an acoustic guitar. Of course it's going to depend on how you hold the guitar how you fret it. You know how you pick and so on there's so many variables but those are those are real. That's the thing now to make this. Acoustic Guitar Louder They're going to start to put pickups on it and as I talked about before ah electromagnetic pickups are such simple Tools. You guys. It's a magnet with wire wrapped around it plugged in of course and. 03:50.49 archpodnet That wire or that the pickups rather pick up the sound of the steel strings being strumped an electric guitar needs steel strings If you put Nylon strings on it. It won't work. It needs the metal. So. Strum these and basically I don't want to get too crazy into it. But the the strings themselves are magnetized a little bit by being in this magnetic field and they wiggle and that wiggling is then changed into ah electric energy goes through the cord. It's plugged into the guitar and then goes over to the amplifier right? and the amplifier changes it back into Vibration. It makes it much louder and then you hear it right? That's how the sound production on an electric guitar works Now. What's weird is. And electric guitar looks so much like an acoustic guitar. They look so similar but that's what messes us up and what I find with this whole guitar thing. We use our eyes too much and not our ears. You know so while an electric guitar looks the same as an acoustic, the sound is completely different. It's made in a completely night and day different Manner. You play it the same you strum it you fret it. You know you put your fingers where you want the ah where you want the notes to be.. It's so Simple. You're just making a series of strings shorter or longer you know by fretting it and they get higher or lower and you play a handful of them at the same time. 05:27.70 archpodnet A look at that you have a chord right? So the the style in which both of these instruments are played is the same they look similar. They work completely differently right? That's our first and I think probably the biggest mistake that people make. And the other one is actually not realizing that guitar pickups are not microphones you know they work differently. They're an electromagnetic situation. They they don't ah, they don't ah work based on the. 06:04.94 archpodnet Sound like you can't you can't speak into an electric guitar pickup. You can't put an electric guitar pickup on a microphone stand and sing into it and expect anything to happen. It won't you know they so they work differently. So what really matters in terms of the production of sound for an electric guitar. Well lots of stuff of course first and foremost are going to be the pickups. Pickups themselves and by that I mean what type are they there's different types. There's one's called single coils which sound can sound really great. Although that's of course very subjective but they can have problems with um, ah. Noise made by other electromagnetic devices in the area they have humbuckers which are another style again. The less paul is known for humbuckers. The stratacaster is known for having single coils they produce different sounds and again of course they do. The pickups are different the magnet type. Ah, is different. You know that that can be a thing the type of metals the alloys that the magnets are made out of there's these ones called down niko twos and Outlio fives and there's ceramic ones. There's all different kinds of magnets and they're going to make a different sound. Of course they're going to pick up the strings or rather they're going to. 07:30.74 archpodnet Sort of create a magnetic field that's a bit different based on their the metals the wire you you wrap around the pickup is going to make a different sound depending on how many raps there are you know it's going to make a different field. It's going to. Ah. Change that variable and of course on on the electric guitar itself something an acoustic totally doesn't have you have a volume knob you have a tone knob so you can make it louder or softer the tone you can sort of roll on and off different aspects of the of the tone. You have things like the string gauge itself are the strings thicker or thinner. Um, you have how you're picking the guitar are you using a plastic pick are you using your fingers those will make the strings vibrate in a different fashion right? It's all it's about is string vibration. And the pickups picking up that vibration type and sending it. That's all it is um where you pick on the string are you picking mirror to the bridge. Are you picking more in the middle. Are you going Keith Richards style and picking all the way over towards the neck where you hit the string will form a different vibration which of course will sound different as we go to a lesser extent the bridge and the nut themselves are going to make. 08:56.91 archpodnet Ah, difference where the string sort of begins and ends you know where their cutoff points. What are those made out of how tight are they you know that kind of stuff and maybe even to a tinier degree the actual metal that the frets themselves are made out of in terms of does it do a better or worse job kind of. Ah, holding the string when we talk about sustain and this kind of stuff so there's all kinds of stuff there right? Those are all real things that matter in terms of the sound of your electric guitar. You can mess with these and instantaneously see the difference or hear the differenceference look at me. Hear the difference notice. One thing I didn't list would type right? I mean think about it. Can you hear the mahogany. In an electric guitar if you listen to any of your favorite music. Can you hear the ash in Eddie Van Halen's Franken Strat you know can you hear the maple can you hear the alder. Come on man right? Of course you can't it's silly now check this out I am not completely cruel to the believers of tonewood I'm gonna throw you a bone. 10:31.36 archpodnet Even though as we'll see. It's not even really about maybe it makes one thousandth of 1% of difference based on the overall like rigidity of the body or something like that because by vibrations are all that really matter. But it's vibrations in the. Electromagnetic sense right? not in It's not how your guitar feels on your body and oh my god to take a side note like so many people will talk about the resonance of the guitar body. Oh well, this guitar sounds better because I can feel it man the electromagnetic current like doesn't give a damn about that. Okay. Your feelings remember it's about data not feelings how many times have I said that so the bone I'm going to throw is something like that. Okay, maybe maybe a half of a one of an nth of a percent the rigidity of the guitar maybe because hey maybe the pickups themselves might. Vibrat a little or something like that. But in reality if you even take that bone I've thrown. Okay, maybe maybe the body being a little more rigid maybe maybe it matters a tick first there's 2 things why this isn't really a bone thing number 1 all that stuff I already listed matters more case closed stop talking right? The pickup the oh I didn't even say um on the pickups the pickup height. How close it is to the strings and it's location along the strings is it close to the bridge is somewhere in the middle I mean. 12:04.69 archpodnet an eighth of an inch off will make a huge difference. So all that stuff is huge. The volume knob the town. Do you use a pick or not you know all that stuff matters more than you're if it's alder please and if we also think more about this wouldn't the paint matter more than the wood what about tone paint I got to put my tone paint on then I can get my tone right? There's so many other things like what about a tone pick dude. This plastic isn't right I need I need heavier I need a darker plastic. For my pick then I can get my tone right? What about the amp materials if we want tone woods shouldn't the wood. The amp is made out of matter more than they would that the guitar is made out dude. My tone wood for my amp I need to get that on I just can't I can't emote. And you can see how silly this is when you really think of it with a scientific brain and how much we we listen with our eyes you know things like Mahog Mahogany is darker and good god. Because it's a dark wood. Ah, and yeah maple it's brighter be because it looks lighter ah see what I'm saying we got we got to. We got to get away from this man, we got to be honest, so what. 13:35.97 archpodnet What freaks me out is you can see the magical thinking in this right? You can see how this is gone to the nth degree but that this silliness is a choice on a professional website of pickup companies. When we return what to do about the great electric Guitar Tonewood debate.