Everything else equal, changing only the guitar woods (very interesting)

[kingsleyd]

It's always nice to confirm what our ears tell us.

And being an audio engineer-ish type myself, I get the need to see the proof that what we think we're hearing is what we're hearing.

Yet we make creative decisions with our ears every day, and trust them implicitly in our work! So I finally said, screw it, I'm going with my ears on this one.

Exactly.

And the thing is, every guitar has its own individual voice. Anyone who has gone to a store and played five of the "same guitar" knows that. So, whatever the nature and extent of the sonic character that is attributable to the wood variety/ies, it's always going to come with a caveat that any particular guitar may exhibit more or less of that character.

The upshot of that is this: everything else is NEVER equal. All of the parts vary -- the metal bits, the pickups, the angles at which things are attached, all of it. Two guitars that are "all the same except for the wood" are only sort of the same. Moreover, you can't conclude anything from a comparison of just two guitars, or a small handful of guitars except for maybe "the wood probably makes a difference" but hell, anyone with experience and a decent (or even half-decent) set of ears knows that from experience.

What you could do (if you had a lot of money) is to commission a much larger experiment, with a lot of examples (like 25 or more) of guitars that are "all the same except for the wood." Say 25 of "wood A" and 25 of "wood B" then have people listen blind and try to identify them as "A" or "B." The subjects wouldn't even have to know they're listening to anything in particular except that there are two distinct groups. Run the stats and you'll know with whatever degree of confidence you want whether there's a consistently observable difference. The minor differences in all the other parts (and for that matter the wood of interest) will come out in the wash.

Of course guitar builders who make a lot of guitars do that in the course of their work. Maybe not carefully as in the experiment described above but they do play 'em and listen, and as a result they typically have some reasonably well-founded ideas about general sonic characteristics of different woods. Also of course there are a lot of pseudo-scientists on these boards who claim those kinds of statements are marketing BS. The world goes round and round, and Les and I keep buying guitars and trusting our own ears.

It's all good.

 

[László]

The world goes round and round, and Les and I keep buying guitars.

It's sort of the Planck's Constant of the guitar world, isn't it?*





*Note: I do not know squat about quantum mechanics, and couldn't explain Planck's Constant to anyone in a million tries. I just know it's a constant, that it exists, and has something to do with photons.

Then again, it's probably easier to understand than why guitars sound the way they do.

 

[CVS]

So I finally said, screw it, I'm going with my ears on this one.

The ultimate judge and jury - your ears!