Rocky said:
I have a Reallygoodearascope built into my cranium and it tells me that different woods sound different.
He he, definitely the best answer in this thread!
I think the final judgement of a guitar tone must be our brain's one, so how we feel it, and every person is different from another one out there.
BUT I believe that IT IS A MATTER OF FACT THAT WOOD AFFECTS ELECTRIC GUITAR TONE. The body and neck wood help to sustain strings vibration, enhancing some frequencies over others, depending on the physical nature and structure of the wood. However the effect of wood can be heard and felt differently from person to person (due to our human nature, we're not all identical scientific instruments). I think pickups play a greater part than wood in achieving the overall guitar tone, but wood helps too. In a certain way it's even wrong to say what counts more, because pickups and wood do not work in the same way in contributing to the sound... they rely on different physical origins. I'm just saying that if I had to choose what to do to obtain a specific guitar tone I personally would first think about the suited pickup and then about the wood. And I think a feature as important as the wood type (and often probably even more) is the construction quality of the guitar (solid and well designed bridge, nut, neck...) which allows the vibrations to be transmitted to the wood in a perfect way.
Then, if physicians follow me (I hope they will say I'm wrong if I am), the differences of the attenuation/enhancement/sustain effect that different woods have on the acoustic waves produced by guitar strings are ideally more evident [the differences] when frequencies are higher. This because of the fact that for longer wavelenght (so lower frequencies) the Continuum Debye model is more appropriately applicated, and it happens as if the acoustic waves were "seeing" a continuum material through which they're were propagating (approximately not taking care of the atomic/molecular microscopical nature of the crystalline/amorphous reticuluum of the material itself), just like a gelatine.
Waves propagating through the wood with a higher frequency (shorter wavelength) obviously would "discern" in a better way that atomic/molecular microscopical configuration, because they can involve microscopical and not macroscopical motions into the material. As a result, higer frequency acoustic waves would be more affected by the microscopical nature of the material, and obviously wood, steel, glass and plastic do not share the same structural nature. That said, we could argue that we would better hear the tone difference playing higher notes, so higher frequencies, while we would not hear those differences in low frequency notes so well.
Hey, you few who have followed me!
After all this explanation I must say... all I said doesn't count for tonal differences to me. Just because I think there are not so high frequencies involved in playing guitar (even considering the highest harmonics), and there should not be anything related to atomic/molecular structure, displacement order/disorder.
BUT, what counts to me it's the different density (gr/cm^3) of the different materials used to be part of a guitar body/neck. And a different behaviour for acoustic waves is surely connected to the density of the wood (or the plastic), how they are, one more time, sustained, enhanced or attenuated. Then, there is a continuous change of density inside a wood, just think about wood's veins... so we could say that higher frequency waves should ideally not be as affected by density variations as the low frequency waves instead are (the contrary of what happened before!), because the higher the frequencies, the higher the possibility that the wave can be sustained into a single vein, while the lower the frequency the higher the possibility that the wave can extend to regions of different density.
I apologize for the long post and i it feels too pompous, but I'm here also to make experience of english language, so sorry!
I would like to end this post in the way it has begun. I think I gave physical true reasons for which wood is important to obtain a specific guitar tone, but the main important thing is reassumed by rocky's post:
Rocky said:
I have a Reallygoodearascope built into my cranium and it tells me that different woods sound different.
