Research Questions

[Simon Barden]

The wood certainly makes a difference to the sound/feel on an electric guitar, but for me it's more to do with how much of the higher frequencies the wood absorbs. Even among the same types of wood, some pieces will dissipate higher frequency resonances a lot quicker than others, which can make for a very dull sounding guitar, especially when using single coils as they have more high-frequency content to start with, so the wood's effect is more noticeable.

And you've got two important pieces of wood - the neck and the body. If they compliment each other, then you get a great guitar. If they oppose one another, then the guitar isn't going to be as good.

You really need to go to a guitar shop where they have sufficient guitars of the same type available to try. One will always sound better than the others, even though the hardware and the woods are all the same (and that's obviously the one to buy if you're there for that purpose).

You've got the same basic properties of wood working in both acoustic and electric guitars. However on acoustics, the sound relies almost entirely on the wood (plus the construction methods used), whereas on an electric, the woods take a secondary role to the pickup design.

I recently saw a post elsewhere by a maker of composite body acoustics that states that with a carbon DLC (diamond-like carbon) saddle, he can re-voice a Martin acoustic to sound like a Collings. That's quite a big change from a small piece of the guitar (though I suppose if you put a soft rubber saddle on you could make any guitar sound awful).

The problem with a lot of this sort of discussion is that there are very few actual measurables that can be compared scientifically. One man's 'tone' is another man's 'meeeh'. You could measure frequency responses, but you also need to look at them in the time domain as well. And even plotting them on a 3-D style graph, you could only really compare how quickly certain frequencies fall off. But it still won't really tell you what sounds 'nicer'.

You've also got other variables such as old vs new guitar strings, air temperature and humidity, thickness and type of finish, plus the age of the wood(s) to take into consideration. I've had an acoustic that sounded brilliant 1 day out of 20, the rest it sounded dull and uninteresting.