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If you want to know more about guitar woods and hardware, and how they affect the sound of a solidbody guitar, this page may sate yor curiosity.

I have been experimenting, repairing, and building guitars and basses since 1970 when I was in 7th grade. Everything I know comes from hands-on work; for better or for worse, I never had any formal luthiery schooling. Here, I am going to give you my most honest opinions, both positive and negative, about what is important to electric guitar tone. In order to qualify these, I want to first make some points about my own strengths and weaknesses... First of all, I do not have magic ears. My ears are average. I can't hear the difference between different brands of batteries in pedals, or different kinds of cables. So there will be a few things that I label as "slight" or "overrated" in guitar construction, although there may be a few people who can hear differences more acutely. On the other hand, I have always had an innate feel for materials and structures, and for efficient and effective crafting techniques. And like Leo Fender, Ned Steinberger, and Ken Parker, I think I have successfully applied these to guitarmaking. Although I freely admit that the three fellows cited above have each taken the craft farther, in the times they worked in, than I have so far.
Anyway, on to the substance...Remember, I hold none of this out as hard fact; rather, they are my professional opinions, borne of experience.
The TONE of an electric guitar is a complex and subjective thing, but it can be broken down into 2 components. These are the ENVELOPE, which includes the attack, sustain, and decay of a note or chord, and the HARMONIC character, which is somewhere between fundamental and complex. If you have any synthesizer programming experience these terms will sound familiar. I do, so these are the words I like to use. The actual sound all begins in a vibrating steel string. The way the string is attached to the guitar and how tightly it is stretched are the first factors in tone. The more directly the string is coupled to the guitar, the more feedback it gets from the materials the guitar is made of. This is RESONANCE. My concept of tone is this: As a note attacks, sustains and decays, the harmonic character changes along the way. Resonance determines what progress the harmonic changes make within the note's envelope. I like to think of sustain as the part of the envelope when the overall note sounds close to the same loudness, and the harmonic character is changing because of resonance. Decay begins when the loudness begins to peter out. You can hear this if you pluck the same note on a Les Paul, and then on a Strat, with no amplification. It is not surprising that these 2 guitars traditionally represent opposite extremes of the electric guitar tone spectrum, because almost every design feature is different. I think it will be useful to compare these very familiar guitars to each other, as well as to a JET Earlewood, and point out the effect of each feature on the tone. Of course the end result is more from the interaction of all these features, than the sum of the features themselves. Also, the following discussion concerns itself only with tone, and additional comparative advantages to strength and playability are not considered.
STRINGS. Heavier guage strings are stretched tighter, and they have a longer sustain and decay time. Lighter strings have a shorter sustain and decay, and so by contrast, sharper perceived attack. Most string brands are the same to me. Brand differences lie in quality control (e.g. is a .016 really in the .0152-.0168 range? Are plain strings accurately circular in cross section?) and actual string structure. There are steel and nickel windings, hex cores and high-tech coatings. All I know is, steel wound strings sound brighter. That means they have a relatively sharper attack and shorter decay, same sustain, and a higher harmonic pattern than nickel.
BRIDGE. The bridge, nut, tuners and tailpiece all determine string coupling. Above, I mentioned "how directly coupled a string is to a guitar"... An acoustic engineer could break this out in a lot more detail, but let me just say that, this is more than simply a matter of how large the contact area is, or what metal alloys are in the parts. Generally more mass and body contact = more coupling. This was the idea behind brass bridge plates and nuts in the 70's. However, there is more to it than that. The bridging and anchoring points of the strings all interact together to transmit vibrations between the guitar and the string, giving feedback. As this feedback happens, certain frequencies are reinforced and others are cancelled. How efficiently this transmission and feedback happens is coupling. Coupling can also be more pronounced in different parts of an instrument's harmonic response. A steel tremolo bridge, for example, seems to be good at transmitting higher harmonics, and not so good at transmitting lower ones. A brass hardtail or steel tune-o-matic better transmits lower harmonics and fundamentals. Stringing through the body may give longer sustain, and a more acute angle over the bridge gives sharper attack.
WOODS. The wood in a guitar receives the vibration from the string by means of coupling, vibrates in response, and transmits the vibration back to the strings. The pattern of vibration of the wood in the instrument is the resonance, and how it feeds back and forth to the strings determines how the harmonic pattern changes during the envelope. Generally, Thicker slabs of wood and denser wood both resonate at higher frequencies, because they have more mass. You can hear this by tapping heavier, lighter, thinner, and thicker boards and comparing the tones. Length is also a factor (look at a xylophone) but most guitars are very close to the same length. (The difference in scale length is physically very slight regarding resonance, and at any rate is greatly overshadowed by the effects of the difference in string tension.) The note that you hear when you tap a board is the resonant frequency of the board, in other words, the fundamental. An electric guitar likewise has a resonant frequency peak that is the resultant of the entire construction of the instrument. The overall mass of a guitar also has another major effect, and that is on the attack and sustain portions of the envelope. They both are increased. So, in designing an electric guitar, there is a balance between optimizing the attack/sustain, and keeping the resonant peak from getting high enough to impart a detectable shrillness in the sound.
The guitar is made up of 4 main parts that are different densities. These are the neck, fingerboard, body, and top. I believe this order represents their relative importance also. So, while some parts may be of high density, other parts are lower density. The way they add up and interact will determine the resonance of the guitar. Remember that resonance affects the envelope (responsiveness) of the guitar as well as the harmonic character.
Here is how I rate guitar woods in density, from high to low:
1. Ebony, wenge, cocobolo
2. Rosewoods, purpleheart, bocote, paduak
3. Hard Maple (can be flamed, birdseye)
4. Soft (quilted) maple, ash
5. Alder, mahogany
6. Korina, mahogany (mahogany is variable)
7. Swamp ash, cedar, redwood
8. Basswood
This is a good place to point out also, that some metal parts like truss rods and neck joint screws that are integral to the guitar, also add to the density equation. And metal is much denser than the densest wood.
NECK JOINT. A screwed in neck (widely referred to as 'bolt on') creates a break in the middle of the guitar that must affect the way it vibrates. If the place where the neck and body meet are coated with thick finish and are not smooth to each other, there will be hardly any transmission across the joint. In addition there are two shorter pieces making up the guitar, each of which has a high resonant peak. At the other end of the construction spectrum is the neck-through or set-through construction, where the wood is continuous from one end of the strings to the other. This also lowers the resonant peak of the instrument, and at the same time gives a different resonant pattern. Whether this pattern sounds better or not is a matter of opinion, but it likely increases coupling overall. In between these two extremes are the set neck and the precisely crafted bolt-on, which is a more coupling-sensitive mating of different woods.
CHAMBERING. By chambering a solid body, the overall mass of the guitar is made less, lowering the resonant peak. Also there are minor resonant effects from actual vibrating air inside the chambers.
PICKUPS. Obviously in an electric guitar, pickups sense the vibrations of the strings and all the ways they are shaped by the above factors. And at this point pickups add their own effect in terms of filtration. That is, they can preserve, add, or subtract harmonic characteristics of their own. The most striking division in pickups is the single coil versus humbucking (side-by-side coils) types. In the latter, the side-by-side coil design rejects not only incoming sources of electromagnetic hum, but also the string harmonics that are multiples of the distance between the coils. In other words, if the string is going down over one coil and going up over the other, the signal is cancelled. If the string is going up and down over both coils at the same time, that harmonic is reinforced. So it follows that this will give a harmonic structure that has a stronger fundamental, and doubles the strength of lower harmonics while cutting higher harmonics in half. The result is the familiar muscular warmth of humbuckers, as opposed to the legendary clear, crisp response of single coils . In addition, the type of magnets used, the number of windings, and the shape of the coil (because of its position within the magnetic flux) all contribute to the overall harmonic response of various kinds of pickups. Now, here is an important note: Although magnetic pickups gain most of their signal from the vibrating steel string above them, there is a small microphone component. In early electric guitars, the microphonic part of the signal caused feedback in the coils which then vibrated themselves. That was the source of undesirable howling feedback. The idea then was to try to totally isolate the pickup from the guitar body and eliminate the microphonic parts of the signal. They did this by suspending the pickup over the guitar body with springs or mounting rods. But now, we have eliminated undesirable feedback through wax potting which stops the coils from vibrating altogether. Along with this came the recent rediscovery that if the pickups are mounted directly into the body with screws, the guitar sounds better! What's going on with direct mounted pickups? Here's what's going on. Direct mounted pickups are coupled to the guitar, which is coupled to the strings, which enhances resonance from the materials in the guitar. The microphonic part of the pickup signal thus enhances and amplifies the guitar's overall resonance! Now it should be clear why direct mounted pickups make suspended pickups sound sterile in comparison.
At this point, you can think about the construction features of our typical Les Paul and Strat, and identify the major contributors to their characteristic sounds. And now, think about the offshoots of these. The Les Paul copies with bolt-on maple necks that gave them sharper attack. The 'super strats' of the 80's that had Floyd Rose bridges making them more shrill on one hand, and basswood bodies that warmed up the sound on the other. PRS took a classic Les Paul design and made it more strat-like, by adding a tremolo bridge and making the body thinner.
Clearly there has been an ongoing search for the perfect hybrid electric guitar.
I would like to think I have made a significant contribution by designing a guitar that combines the best designs for playability, appearance, and tone. (Please look at the 'UP CLOSE' page on the website for the specific design features of the Earlewood model guitar.) I have been pursuing this "holy grail" of electric guitar building with much forethought, but no compromises or shortcuts.
Jeffrey Earle T.