As a Jeff Beck fan, if I ever go back to a Strat, it would be an Olympic White, White pick guard and RW fingerboard. I prefer RW anyway, and JB likes chunky necks, so right up my alley. I am also a warmer-beats-brighter tone-wise so lean towards RW anyway.
And anything I do that encourages you to have fun and experiment - yay. A neck swap is 100% reversible and a great way to learn your way around a guitar. Go for it.
You will hear a difference, but it’ll be a subtle difference. Don’t expect night/day.
The main way that the neck effects the timbre of the guitar is that it vibrates along with the strings. Holding the string onto a fretboard between the frets makes no difference, what affects the sound is the rest of the neck/fretboard vibrating away a millimetre or so away from the string.
That, plus the nature of the bridge (the other end of the string) is what creates the “acoustic” sound of an electric guitar. Neck and bridge affecting the strings plus the pickup(s) is the sound of an electric guitar. Oh, and the strings themselves definitely make a difference, I’ve swapped around between brands, and for my money different brands can make as big a difference as different pickups.
Any other factors will have little or no effect on timbre.
I don’t know that I agree with all of the absolute-ness of the statments, but I hear you. I think you are dismissing “Holding the string onto a fretboard between the frets” too easily; a lot of technique goes on behind that fret, and the way you manage your finger pressure influences sustain, vibrato, intonation, etc. Since the fingerboard is the thing you are contacting, it would be part of that equation.
We both agree that fingerboard material influences tone - so you are saying that this is due to how the different f-board materials vibrate as part of the neck and whole guitar system? I totally agree that neck mass and overall vibration matters - I favor chunky necks and in my experience that added neck mass effects tone, along with a solid, big body joint. But the brightness I hear from ebony (and agreed, it is not life-changing; it is a small impact on the overall tone) happens regardless of the size of the neck behind it…
Now, what about the difference between through-body and bridge stringing? Because through-body guitars seem to sustain a bit more. I’ve strung Trouble both ways, and going through the body adds a lot more sustain, and a bit more, eh, depth to it. (remember, telecaster bridge)
PS: How do you guys feel about barnwood for a guitar? Specifically, 50+ year old sweetgum?
Through-body vs. string bridging is something you have to live with.
For those that don’t know, use the Telecaster to illustrate: Telecasters, as a rule, have the strings pass over the bridge saddles then through the body - so when you string up the guitar, you start feeding the string through a hole in the back of the body, up through the bridge, over the saddle and then to the tuner.
The one exception were Top-Loaders from, I think 1959 or so - those Teles simple had holes at the end of the bridge plate that the bridge was affixed to - so you threaded the string through the hole, over the saddle, etc. (see herefor a link to a TDPRI (Tele) Message board; post #7 shows both.)
So standard vs. Top-Loader is a good test case for this. The general consensus is that the standard Teles have a sharper, ballsier tone, and the Top Loaders have a little less edge to the tone - and the Top Loaders have a more “slinky” feel - the strings don’t feel under as much tension vs. the through-bodies. Now, Jimmy Page’s Led Zep 1 Tele was a Top Loader, so please don’t hear that I am saying one is better, only that they yield a somewhat different tone and feel.
Regarding the whole Tone thing, and the cork-sniffing geekiness prevalent on the web:
The only thing that 99.99% of guitars players need to care about with regard to their tone is whether it pleases them enough to encourage/inspire them to play. In other words, to use cork-sniffing language, for most meals, a solid, drinkable Table Red or White is more than sufficient.
The ONLY thing that matters is what you bring to the guitar. That is why players “sound like themselves” on any playable guitar they pick up.
Some guitars help you hear and play things differently because of their playability and tone. Sometimes it is because they are *great *guitars and sometimes simply because they are *different *and open a different door to your ears and/or hands.
However, once you have that door open - i.e., you hear something differently and it impacts your playing, or learn a new technique - you end up “bringing that with you” to other guitars. I have some excellent guitars that make me sound decent when I attempt jazz chords; as I get more comfortable on them, I find I can play the same chords on other guitars - guitars that I wouldn’t have played jazz on before - and make them sound decent.
From my POV, then, if you have an active guitar life, then if you are a newish player - first 10 years or so - you are well-served trying a bunch of guitars; pure and simple. Focus on getting different experiences, without investing a lot, so you can start to get a feel for what tones and guitar designs work for you. Don’t immediately focus on cork-sniffing holy-grail tone characteristics. A newish acoustic player does NOT need Brazilian Rosewood for their guitar, and a newish electric player doesn’t need scatterwound, deGaussed, formvar 42 authentic PAF pickups. Make sure you have 1 - 2 interesting guitars in your stable, and take the time to enjoy yourself at guitar stores, trying different guitars for 15-minute snapshots.
Within that context, if you want to experiment with factors that vary tone, do so in a way you can reverse. Swapping pickups or necks are excellent examples - lower cost and totally reversible.
Nothing beats experience. Find ways to gain that experience that fit your budget and manage your risk (i.e., doesn’t commit you to modifying a guitar irreversibly or having to get rid of a guitar you don’t think you are ready to move).
Just some thoughts.
My new/old Les Paul is being put through its trials tonight.
Here’s the story (which I may have told before) … years ago, my cousin gave me his Les Paul. He told me it was a gift from a girlfriend with a rich daddy, and when they broke up, she wanted it back. So, instead of giving that satisfaction he gave her some line about how it had been stolen and he gave it to me. Truth be told, it seems one of the reasons for his largesse toward me was because the thing was fucked up.
So anyway … it is a Studio model (although my cousin gave me some line about it being a Custom, but with a Studio plaque, but that doesn’t quite hold up to scrutiny). When my cousin first got it, it was this awesomw pearl white gloss type finish. He promptly went to town on it and slapped electrical tape and spray paint all over it, in an effort to Van Halen-ize it. So when I got it, I handed it over to my dad for a re-finishing (he likes doing stuff like that). The plan was to give it a deep cherry red finish; the result ended up being basically a bubble-gum pink finish, but whatever.
Now when I got it back from him, I wasn’t really jamming with anyone, so I just knocked around with it around the house. Then when I hooked up with the guys I’m playing with now, I took up to the studio, plugged it in and it sounded great … except that it wouldn’t stay in tune. So I basically threw the thing in the closet.
A couple of weeks ago I decided to see if it was fixable, so I brought it in to my local shop for a set up. As it turns out the neck was severly bowed. I don’t know if that was because of my dad’s wrestling with it, or if that’s how I got it.
Long story short (I know, too late), the guy at the desk wrenched on the tension bar but it didn’t quite do the trick, so they put it through a “heat press,” which I’m led to believe loosens the fret-board so that the wood of the neck can be wrenched on even harder. $135 later and, apparently, I have a fully operational and stay-in-tuney Les Paul in my arsenal.
Tonight is band practice, at which time I shall plug it into my shitty little Marshall 50-watt and I’ll see what I can melt with it.
About guitar collecting…
I never wanted to be one of those guys with the fifty near identical Les Pauls all lined up along the wall. It’s pointless doing that. There’s no possible reason for it except pure self-indulgence.
So when I started to buy more than just the three guitars I began with, I decided that every new one I bought should be different from anything I already owned. And I’ve stuck to that. It was a good way to keep it real, and I knew when I was done. Eventually, none of my original three guitars were still playable, and that was a good excuse to replace them (and to make better decisions now I’m older, wiser, and more cashed up), but I’m not looking at new guitars all the time now.
I don’t suffer GAS anymore, because my collection is more or less complete. I’ve got a strat and a tele. I’ve got a hollow-body and a semi-acoustic. I’ve got a 12 string Rickenbacker (lucked into that one). I’ve got a nylon string acoustic, a steel string, and a resonator. I don’t own any Gibsons (because the prices in Australia don’t represent good value for money), but I’ve got the Epiphone Dot Studio and a Maton Mastersound (which covers the same sort of territory a Les Paul would). I’ve even got a lap-steel.
I like to look at it as an entire collection. I know now that I can look into any situation and choose the best tool for the job. And I’m only interested in new guitars if they can fill some sort of gap in my collection. I have a lot of guitars, but the “one of everything” rule means I’m not just hoarding. I’ve allowed myself to be satiated.
That’s a good thing, because I’m not sitting around thinking “Hey, I wish I had a Tele,” (because, hey, I’ve got one). Instead, I can think a bit more about what I do with my spending money, and use it much more effectively.
Jack Batty - cool; look forward to the report. And yes, if a guitar is left in the wrong situation for too long - full tension strings with a lot of weather variation and no maintenance - then the neck can get bowed past what the rod can adjust. That repair either takes in a great way or doesn’t - you should know after playing it for a while over the next week or so.
**Kim **- I totally agree; my goal has been to arrive at the best toolset for me. I collect stuff - grew up with antique-dealer parents, collected first-edition books myself - and I have no interest in “collecting” guitars. I want as few as possible that cover the most ground for me. I have brought my “collecting mindset” to the situation a bit - I love a good haggle: get a guitar, learn from it, use it as trade fodder for the next acquisition; repeat. Also, I think my mindset has kept me focused on resale value - I try to go after guitars that are good tools first, but also retain their value.
But beyond that, playability and inspiration is all that matters. I have four acoustics which vary in good ways and sit along a spectrum of playability and uses; and a couple of electrics that I built. It’s all good.
Jack Batty
I totally enjoyed reading about your Les. You ought to give it a title, such as “Resurrection: The Death and Life of a Les Paul”. Or something. 
Q
Ordered online. Will report back, once I have time to solder them in.
I don’t think the wood behind the fret, where it may or may not be in contact with your finger, matters. I think it’s the wood that the fret in question is embedded in that matters. But, either way, we’re only disagreeing over small details, we both agree that fretboard wood matters.
(I’ve mostly been playing my Ashbory bass lately, where the strings are rubbery silicone, the fingerboard is plastic over wood, and there are no frets at all. And it sounds great. Interestingly, there are a couple of different types of string available apart from the stock strings, and I’m now on my third different set of strings: they all sound notably different.)
Anyway, if I think about the best sounding electric guitars I’ve played, one was my late 70s Yamaha SG1500 which had a sort of medium chunky neck-through “hippie sandwich” construction (layers of wood, in this case maple and mahogany). That guitar sang. Once I got a good fret-dressing done to it, it played really well, too. However, it weighed a lot, and after a few gigs using it where my neck and shoulder were very painful the next day, I retired it and eventually sold it off. It was a bit hard to sell it, because it really did sound great, but it was unusable except when sitting, and I don’t keep guitars I can’t use.
I’m reminded of another guitar: a friend of mine bought a bunch of mixed used guitar parts for practically nothing, and asked me to assemble a guitar out of them. The neck was a skinny Charvel superstrat pointy headstock thing, and the body was a Kramer superstrat, made of Basswood. The neck and body were quite mismatched, and the only way I could get a usable neck angle was by shimming it. So I added layers of thick paper to the neck joint at the body end till it was built up quite a bit. It took a few tries to get an angle that I liked, with my paper shim, and when I finally liked the look of it, I strung it up.
Amazing. The damn thing just about played itself, and it sounded great, a really warm but raunchy rock and roll sound that worked clean or distorted. It looked terrible, but it sounded great. Everyone who played it was amazed at how well it played and how nice it sounded. I borrowed it to use at gigs instead of my uber-heavy Yamaha.
Sadly, it was ugly, and my friend eventually pawned it for a stupidly small amount of money and lost it. I and several other guitar players who’d used that guitar were really upset that it was lost for so little money - we’d have all paid more for it. Ugly and all wrong, yet somehow that guitar was magic.
Just to recap: skinny Charvel neck, rubbish amateur (I freely admit) neck shim to get a workable angle, and a basswood body which was no doubt soaked in polyester finish. That thing sounded great. It remains, to me, the standard of what a really good solidbody electric guitar sounds like. The pickups, by the way, were an unidentified bridge humbucker and two strat-types. Nothing special, as far as I could tell. The bridge was a Floyd knockoff that I set up to be non-floating.
The moral of the story? That there are no rules to getting a good sounding guitar, and that whatever anyone says is “wrong” or “bad” in guitars is, at best, a set of guidelines that real world conditions will on a regular basis cheerfully disprove.
I feel all responsible now.
I’ll cross my fingers and hope you don’t hate them. 
First part - embedded in. Hmm - sure; that makes sense. Stainless steel frets also have a brighter tone (and last longer) vs. standard frets, which I think are nickel.
Last part - yep. That is why I refer to any tone things as “rules of thumb” - at best they are tendencies. There is no replacement for playing and listening to a guitar first hand. Cool story about your mongrel guitar; sorry to hear how it got away.
Time-Lapse of a Strat being made in the Corona, CA Fender factory:
http://devour.com/video/a-strat-is-born/
The vid seems to emphasize the human element - lots of manual steps. Must be a high-price-point guitar; they even hand-shape the neck - to my knowledge that is done via CNC computerized routers for most price points. Big headstock - must be a 70’s reissue Strat…
Watching that is 4 minutes well spent!
The jury is still out on The Resurrection.
When I got to the studio last night, I broke out Candy (which is what it (and I, by extension, (thanks bandmates)) was dubbed last night and we all poked it and prodded it and oohed and aahed and all that dopey stuff that musicians do when someone presents a new intstrument. I regaled them with stories of Van Halen paint jobs and heat presses. Then I plugged it into my little Marshall for a little test run – and it sounded great. I cranked it right up and riffed and diddled around for a minute or two and I was happy. So, I put it down, giddy with anticipation for when we actually started jamming.
Then we actually started jamming. My Marshall - the one I spoke of last year suffering from a horrible buzz - started buzzing again. Worst then it ever has. I still don’t know what the deal is on that. The only thing I can think of is a bad circuit board or something (it’s solid state, not tube), because all winter long I had no buzz. As soon as the warm weather rolls around … buzz. That and some of the boys were goofing around in the studio over the weekend and did … something, I don’t know. I still think there’s a bit of bad wiring afoot.
Anyhoo … as usual, we fiddled and farted around with the amp, but we couldn’t lose the buzz. Fuck it, the only other amp to play through - and we wanted to jam - was our bass player’s spare bass cabinet. It was not optimal. Way too bassy, no effects, the amp was positioned badly so I couldn’t really hear it until I was way too loud for the rest of the room.
Couple that with the 30 minute argument we had over the form of a song, and I’m beginning to think that Candy is cursed.
In the meantime, I’ll be shopping around for a new amp (that I can’t afford).
Best of luck with Candy - but w/r/t your Marshall - argh. Hmm - could be bad wiring /outlet in the building, could be something inside the amp - and from the sound of it, could be warm-weather related, like a wire is justhisclose to another wire, and in warmer weather, the wires expand a bit, touch and you get a buzzy short. I assume you are plugging it into a surge protector? Or, put it another way, does it buzz when you plug it in at other locations? That would be the easiest way to tell if it is the amp by itself, or the amp at that location…
Some Squier teles are top-loaders. And all Xaviere Tele-variants have the potential for doing both. Including the Creamsicle telemaster I have.
Yes, sure; sorry. Up through the 80’s or so, when reissues started to appear and a bunch of other makers jumped on the “let’s build T and S style guitars” bandwagon, the Top Loader had mainly just surfaced on the late 50’s Teles. Now that every Tele variation ever made is being reissued (and plenty that were NEVER made before, like your Telemaster or those Fender Pawn Shop hybrids they came out with a year or two ago) I am sure that option is on a variety of Fender and non-Fender makes, and that parts suppliers like StewMac or Allparts offer top-loader variants…