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Fran wrote:Most probably Basswood.

they are indeed.

Maybe that'll keep the weight down on some of them...

markarkark wrote:

Fran wrote:Most probably Basswood.

they are indeed.

Nothing wrong with basswood .. What tends to fuck up the tone of basswood is a thick or bad finish . Basswood just tends to be soft . And it holds up much much better than pine ..

Some don't realize if a guitar is made of an awesome tonal wood but then has a thick finish it's pretty pointless. Might as well make the guitar of plastic if that's the case .

http://www.jemsite.com/jem/wood.htm

None of you could tell a solid bodied electric guitar made out of 350 year old water logged fleetwood from one made out of plastic in a blind test. Not unless you're a savant with Synethesia and can attest that plastic guitars sound like catfood. It's a fact. Get over it.

Rox wrote:http://www.jemsite.com/jem/wood.htm

thrilling read.

laterallateral wrote:None of you could tell a solid bodied electric guitar made out of 350 year old water logged fleetwood from one made out of plastic in a blind test. Not unless you're a savant with Synethesia and can attest that plastic guitars sound like catfood. It's a fact. Get over it.

Oh yeah you can .. I have basswood , mahogany , alder and swamp ash guitars . You can hear and feel a difference . And 2 of them have the same pickups but different wood .. Difference .

I got to play both a Jag and Jazz in both basswood and alder and you can hear it and feel it . There are tonal differences between the Fender and the Squier . Not that it's bad .

Rox wrote:

laterallateral wrote:None of you could tell a solid bodied electric guitar made out of 350 year old water logged fleetwood from one made out of plastic in a blind test. Not unless you're a savant with Synethesia and can attest that plastic guitars sound like catfood. It's a fact. Get over it.

Oh yeah you can .. I have basswood , mahogany , alder and swamp ash guitars . You can hear and feel a difference . And 2 of them have the same pickups but different wood .. Difference .

Would you hear it without knowing though? If i sent you a recording of a Lucite guitar, MDF guitar, Basswood, Mahogany and Pine do you think you could pick them out?

In some cases ... Yep.. In clean settings. You might think it's bullocks but it honestly isn't really hard .. Ok . Who's gonna pull my punk card ?

If you can't tell the difference unplugged, there isn't one.

I don't think body wood has a sound of it's own, but it has a bearing on the overall sound/feel of any given guitar due to it's resonant properties/weight respectively... nonetheless, nothing in the body wood of a Fender affects "tone" the way most guitarists use that word, and even if you have two of the same model from the same run they're bound to have natural differences from each other, even totally stock and with the same woods.
The neck has a much larger effect on this. Swapping my '70s RI neck around on old alder Squier/paulownia GFS/thin-bodied affinity Squier bodies confirmed this for me... it was the same Strat every time, real low and boomy with loads of sustain, body and neck ring harmoniously against your body as you let a chord hang, nothing like my other Strat. The bodies even each had different trems, and on the last trem I tried with both zinc and full steel blocks.

You don't need to plug in to gauge this sort of stuff, in fact it helps not to. When I handed the first incarnation of that Strat to my brother without saying a word about it apart from "new one" he strummed one open E chord unplugged and looked at me with a wide-eyed "whoa." Then he immediately started asking what the HELL kind of Strat it was and what it cost. That guitar had an undeniably bassy character for a Strat, and it's also LOUD unplugged... and that's something that's followed the neck around to different bodies/strat trems.

Fran wrote:If i sent you a recording of a Lucite guitar, MDF guitar, Basswood, Mahogany and Pine do you think you could pick them out?

One to file under "Things that sound sinister and threatening when Fran says them".

Can't say I ever really notice, but my favourite guitar is basswood. To me the characteristic of the wood that means the most to me is it weight, and thus it's density. Heavy guitars suck, and the deadest sounding guitar I ever had was a Mexican 50s strat that could have anchored the Queen Mary

paul_ wrote:If you can't tell the difference unplugged, there isn't one.

I don't think body wood has a sound of it's own, but it has a bearing on the overall sound/feel of any given guitar due to it's resonant properties/weight respectively... nonetheless, nothing in the body wood of a Fender affects "tone" the way most guitarists use that word, and even if you have two of the same model from the same run they're bound to have natural differences from each other, even totally stock and with the same woods.
The neck has a much larger effect on this.

absolutely. you actually push the string against a fret that is sitting directly in that piece of wood. the body wood of a guitar is many more times removed from the vibration of the string. I really have yet to see any real scientific reasoning behind why the body wood of a solid bodied guitar would have any effect on what the pickups are sending down the line. and body finish (lol!!) even less so. the entire idea of the body wood effecting tone comes from guitarists traditional attitudes towards acoustic guitars and it seems the ideas sort of carried over into electric guitars because people were used to thinking about it that way. an acoustic guitar's soundboard is indeed resonating, that's the whole point of it. but tell me, how would a solid 1 1/2" thick piece of wood be resonating?

it may well be that one guitar sounds different than the other, but I'm going to wager that it's probably one of many other factors other than the body wood.

I'm sure that the body wood does make a difference, if only to the sustain and possibly tuning stability. Are other differences noticeable in most situations outside of a scientifically rigorous A/B test? Probably not. At least, not in comparison to other, more dramatic, factors such as strings and circuitry. I'd be the first to admit though that I'm too cloth-eared to discern the body wood type, unless it makes a significant difference to the weight or body/neck balance. Comfort is more important to me, and aesthetics are second to that (I like my sunbursts).

Concretebadger wrote:I'm sure that the body wood does make a difference, if only to the sustain and possibly tuning stability.

WHA?

Saw this over on harmony central:



So pretty

If a basswood guitar and an alder guitar with the same pickups and specs sound and feel different, of course the fuck they do.

Two alder guitars with the same pickups and specs sound and feel different, too.

I'm still not impressed.

So they are now making them at a "I'll have a coffee and that green guitar please" price. Still, only additional guitar I'd really want someday is a vintage or maybe Avri/TS Jag ... having a job made me a snob, maybe. But maybe it's better for me to want something I can't just buy without planning and sacrificing something else. Life would be boring if everything was available as easy as a Squier Jaguar.

GAK has them in stock now.

stewart wrote:

Concretebadger wrote:I'm sure that the body wood does make a difference, if only to the sustain and possibly tuning stability.

WHA?

I was thinking about those crappy things made of plywood or worse that are sold in mail order catalogues. An extreme example maybe, but still...lousy quality wood is bound to cause problems like warping, structural weak spots and so on. Again, unlikely but yeah.

Surf Green Jaguar or Sonic Blue Jazzmaster.
THIS DECISION IS TOO HARD.