With an acoustic guitar there are sorts of acoustic and physical resonance parameters that go into it’s sound. With an electric guitar it appears to be just a slab of wood with strings and pickups screwed to it.
What makes a “great” electric guitar distinguish itself from the rest of the field?
WordMan and others are far more qualified to answer than I, but I’ve recently built a guitar.
After years of desire, I’ve gone a little overboard. I bought the '93 Fender Telecaster I’ve posted about, and then I got Fender’s economy-brand twin, and then I built a Tele. I used a Fender body and added Fender SCN pickups and a four-way switch and upgraded electronics. I also shielded the cavities with grounded copper tape. It sounds much better than the '93, and I’m doing the same to the cheapo.
So choice of electronics makes a difference. There’s also the wood. Some resonate better. I’m not experienced enough to make heads or tails out of the neck, but the shape will have an effect on playability that experienced players will notice. I’m guessing that someone who really knows his stuff can take (or make) a ‘great’ guitar by choosing the components well.
Here are some of the factors that affect tone, more or less in order of how they influence the sound and timber of a guitar.
Design: Not all electric guitars are built as “slabs of wood with strings and pickups screwed to them.” That pretty well describes most solid body guitars, but there are also hollow body guitars (used mostly for jazz) and semiacoustic models that fall somewhere in between.
Hollow body guitars are pretty much like acoustic guitars with pickups and have a more rounded attack. Semiacoustics are like thin hollowbody guitars with extra reinforcement and sound like Chuck Berry (or Ted Nugent.) Solid body guitars have a sharper attack and the notes tend to sustain longer (Supposedly, one design criteria for the original Gibson Les Pauls was that a plucked string had to stay audible for at least twenty seconds.)
Wood: One of the original boutique guitar builders made the claim that all guitars are acoustic guitars, and even without an amp the difference in tone between, say, a Fender Stratocaster and a Gibson SG is obvious.
Wood affects tone in a similar way to guitar design. Softer woods absorb higher frequencies and provide less sustain than harder woods. For example, the maple top on a Les Paul provides a warmer sound than a Les Paul Jr.–roughly the same guitar without the maple top.
Strangely, wood selection in basses may work in the opposite direction. Softer woods tend to dampen the attack at the start of a note, giving what seems to be greater sustain.
Pickups: Pickups have about as much of an affect on tone as design and the type of wood. Pickup design affects both the pickup’s tone and how much of the string’s length is “picked up.”
There are two basic pickup designs, single coil and dual coil “humbuckers.” Traditionally, single coil pickups tended to be brighter while humbuckers tended to have less background noise. Humbuckers and single coil pickups with wider windings pick up sound from a longer section of the string; they may pick up more harmonic content but the string harmonics may also cancel out. Beyond that, the same pickup will deliver a deeper tone when closer to the neck and away from the bridge.
Electronics: Beyond pickups, electronics make a difference. Sure, there are guitars with active electronics and some made to hook up to synthesisers, but even the components used in passive wiring can affect tone. Capacitor ratings for tone controls affect frequency rolloff; the quality of the components affects how noisy the guitar is, and with the weak signal given by the pickups, I assume that even the type of wire used might make a difference (Please note: I am NOT talking Monster Cable stuff here; I’m talking about the difference between printed circuit boards and 16-18 gauge wire.)
Beyond that (FINALLY!), the quality of the guitar makes a world of difference. Sure, more money can be spent on paint, inlay work or whatever looks good, but it takes a lot to make a guitar that just plays good. A guitar with the strings just a few millimeters above the frets will be a lot easier to play than one with the strings a quarter inch above the frets. There are other factors as well, and what makes someone want to play a particular guitar sometimes just can’t be quantified. Luthier work is an art as well as a science.
Finally, names and reputations matter. Someone might buy a $6,000 Taylor acoustic when they couldn’t tell the difference between it and a Yamaha. The same thing happens with electrics.
Oh hells yes. I’d break the quality down into two categories even. First, there’s the basic quality of manufacture where you look at how tightly the neck fits, how well the frets are finished, is the nut cut right, etc.
But also critical to my mind is the QC process. How willing the manufacture is to hold back guitars that just aren’t quite right and things like that. Go to Guitar Center and play Fenders of the same model and line. Most will be good, a few might be great, but there will also likely be some dogs. You might find a dead spot on the neck, or certain frequencies that won’t resonate, or maybe even a guitar that won’t intonate properly. In my experience, Gibsons are a little more consistent, but I sure wouldn’t but one without playing it first.
I’ve only bought one guitar without a chance to play it and it was a G&L. They seem to do a great job of weeding out the poor guitars long before the finishing steps, much like the even more expensive boutique brands. The guitar I got was astonishingly nice, better than any Strat from Fender that I was able to put my hands on. Of course I sold it a couple of years ago, something that I regret to this day. I’ve emailed the new owner a couple of times and he doesn’t want to sell it back. Jerk.
Which reminds me, I’m selling my archtop as soon as I find a buyer. Maybe I should rethink that.
If all you do is run the thing through a heavy distortion box and a few other effect boxes, then the quality of the guitar doesn’t really matter much. If you don’t completely mangle the sound, though, it matters quite a bit.
As others have posted, quality makes a huge difference. Any idiot can pound frets into a fretboard, but a high quality neck will have the frets all at exactly the same height. The neck will fit very tightly, which makes a big difference to the sustain that you get. People tend to concentrate on the body for sustain, but the wood used in the neck also affects the sustain.
As already mentioned, the type of wood affects the sound that you get. Admittedly, a lot of the sound of an electric guitar comes from the amp and any effects that you use, but the sound from the strings and body of the guitar does still have a noticeable effect on the overall sound. There’s more to it than just softer woods having less sustain. The grain of the wood determines what frequencies resonate well through the wood and what frequencies don’t.
This site has a pretty good description of different woods:
http://www.jemsite.com/jem/wood.htm
Layering woods also has an effect. The Les Paul’s legendary sustain comes from the fact that it has a maple top over a mahogany body. You get better sustain than you would from either wood alone, and the maple tends to make up for some of the acoustical deficiencies of the mahogany. Mahogany has good sustain but its frequency response is a bit thick. It’s good for blues type guitars, not so good for others. The brightness of the maple tends to counter this, giving it a better all around sound.
Pardon? I think those metal heads (and I’m not one of them) care a great deal about how a guitar is constructed. Like any competent guitarist. A crap guitar from Walmart will never sound proper, played any style.
First, you must have the basic mathematics of the instrument right:
Are the frets in the right place to play in tune?
Is the bridge in the right spot as well, and adjustable to correct for intonation?
Is the curve of the neck correct so that the action is a reasonable height and you don’t get fret buzz?
Plus many other things. Ignoring the materials, the pickups, everything else – if you don’t have all the technical parts of a guitar right, or as close to right as you can get, that guitar better off as is firewood.
IF you have all the math right for the frets, the nut, the neck angle and curve, the bridge, other things… THEN you can consider what materials, pickups, tuners, blah blah arf arf, would make that guitar better than another guitar. If the mechanics aint straight, there’s just no point.
I might have missed it, but I didn’t see anyone mention the neck.
The trueness of a guitar neck is critical to its playability, and allowing it to be “set up” the way the player likes. Setting up is deciding the height of the strings above the neck, and perhaps filing or replacing frets here and there to ensure that good clean notes can be played anywhere on the neck. For this to work, you need to be able to finger a note, say fourth fret, third string (B), and the string has to be able to vibrate freely all the way from the fifth fret on up to the bridge. The way this is achieved is that the neck is not exactly straight, but very slightly bowed. It’s almost impossible to see this, or to verify that a neck is properly constructed, with the naked eye–much like that one dinner fork everyone has in their utensils that has one or more tines ever so slightly bent. Just as it’s a bitch to scoop up your veggies with the Ugly Bent Fork, so is playing on a bad neck tiresome and frustrating.
Oops, I see now that you did cover most of my points.
I’ll add, not only does the guitar need to play in tune, but also stay in tune. Cheap, poor quality guitars are notorious for going out of tune if you so much as think about playing them.
The action!
I bought a cheap Sears guitar as a child, thinking, since I could play other instruments, I could learn to play this one, too, without an instructor. Perhaps I had Elvis in the back of my mind and the school’s talent show in the future.
But no matter how hard I practiced, I couldn’t make the guitar sound right. After a long time, I found out the problem, and I present it here so anyone else doesn’t fall into the trap. Beware of cheap guitars like the one I had.
Guitars don’t play well if the frets are only painted on.
**cornflakes **did a great job of summarizing the major points. You can (and people have) go on at length about any one of them. For example, there is a raging discussion about whether it’s better to use nickel or brass bridge pieces on a Telecaster. Many discussions about guitar construction turn into religious wars.
There is perhaps too much emphasis on the type of wood, IMHO. Robert Benedetto, a preeminent luthier, wrote a bookabout how to build an archtop guitar[sup]1[/sup], and there is a photo of a guitar that he built out of knotty pine that he claims sounds nearly as good as some built from prestige tonewoods. He puts the emphasis on finding the sweet spot in the piece of wood and proper shaping.
But there are definitely poor, good, and great guitars (mineare in the “good” range).
Your selection of strings makes a difference, too, but wouldn’t make the good vs. great distinction.
Just a note from a casual observer here, but this thread is chock-a-block with wanksterism. The OP asked a legitimate question and has received a load of total bollocks in return. There has been a feeble claim that the type of plywood in the slab makes a difference, and a seemingly legitimate discussion of the shape/clearance of the neck and frets, and a rather obvious reference to different electronic components, but what the fuck do you mean by “quality” for crying out loud? That doesn’t explain jack.
This thread sounds like a fucking wine bar. Is it the electronics and the neck construction or not?
Plywood?? Where the hell have you been buying your guitars? Wal-Mart? lol
S^G
Yes. No. Didn’t you (fucking) read the posts? :rolleyes:
Electronics makes a difference. The neck construction makes a difference. Everything makes a difference. To be great, it has to sound great *and *be a joy to play. But it does come down to a matter of taste, like cars, pizzas, and everything else in this world.
There is not one bullshit post in this thread. Every poster backs up their position with specific objective criteria. Nobody has said anything totally off the wall like, “A great guitar is one that has chocolate fudge bass with breaking glass treble.”
Tuners can make a huge difference as well. I replaced the stock tuners on my AS Strat with locking ones. It made restringing easier as I had hoped but changed the tone for the worse, IMHO.
It’s already been stated and answered, but a good guitar is just like any other good instrument. The quality of the ingredients and the workmanship of the craftsman is what makes a good product.
Word.
Its funny, my son (9) is learning guitar using one of my old instruments. I need to tune it, even with a beginner playing it, maybe once or twice a week. SqueegeeJr mentioned to me that he saw guitars in Walmart (with the implication that maybe he could get one of those one day); he has no idea the pain he’s been saved playing on a properly setup, stable instrument, vs what a POS guitar is like to play.
With respect, you’re the one wanking here.
Look. There are purely mechanical things that separate an ‘adequate’ guitar from a POS that really is pickups screwed to a plank. My previous post (and other posters) gave a quick rundown. If all those things (frets, neck setup, action distance, good bridge and tailpiece, good tuners, yada yada) are correct, you probably have a guitar that is playable, sounds adequate, and plays in tune as well as has stable tuning. All of this is purely mechanics. ANY guitar needs these things. If they are lacking, the guitar sucks, and possibly cannot be improved in a reasonable way.
On top of that, you have some considerations that will make the guitar better, but in different ways that matter entirely to the person who is playing and is very subjective: what kind of pickups, the shape of the neck, the fingerboard material, the weight and density of the wood body, and so forth. These are the things that make a properly made guitar “great”, but they are extremely subjective.
Exactly. 99.942% of guitar “greatness” is the experience of the guitar player. There are a few geometric and construction requisites, but the rest is art and subjective preference. Like wine.
Nonsense! That isn’t at all what I said – a guitar needs to be constructed properly, within very measurable metrics, or it is crap. That’s not 0.058 of the equation, its 100% of having a usable guitar. Please stop mischaracterizing what I’ve written.
Anything beyond those metrics is what makes a good guitar better. “Better” is certainly subjective, but without the proper engineering of all the important bits (see above, and most of the posts in this thread), a Bad guitar will never be a Good guitar.