Quality with "Unplugged", "Resonant"?

[Larry Mal]

So maybe you never cared about the sound envelope of your electric guitar before, because what comes out of the amp sounds good. And what comes out of your amp is heavily treated, by the way. The sound of the string is filtered through your pickups, through your capacitors and potentiometers, and that's before it has left your guitar.

This was kind of my point, and I'll go ahead note that you address it later in the above post. It seems like, at least to you and maybe a few others like spacecadet, that the unplugged resonance is more of an indicator of the physical aspects of the guitar, like the components and craftsmanship. While I'll accept the theory and premise (and I appreciate a well-put together guitar as much as the next person), I'm not sure I'm going to put much stock into it directly resulting in the amplified sound that's reaching my ears. I won't, however, dispute it

I mean, in reality, you can take the most resonant guitar swap a single component in it like a pickup from single coil to humbucker, and the change will make the guitar unrecognizable to the ear. Even to a non-musician. That change can be for the best or for the worst, but at that point, taste is now the yardstick, which makes it a moot point.

But, you take that same pickup and throw it into a completely different guitar and the sounds will likely be far more similar.

Well, no, that's not quite what I'm saying maybe.

What I'm saying is that since the guitar is an acoustic instrument, it will have an acoustic sound to it. Ideally, you would want the acoustic sound of an electric guitar to be as full ranged (containing as much pleasing harmonic content) as you would consider "good", also, you would want there to be a good amount of pleasing decay and sustain.

Exactly as you would an acoustic guitar or a violin. So that when you put a microphone in front of it- which is what a pickup basically is, although it uses a magnetic field instead of a diaphragm and such- you are able to capture the full range of sound that the instrument would be considered to offer.

I am saying that when you play your electric guitar unplugged, and it has a pleasing acoustic sound to it, full and resonant (good harmonic content, volume, sustain and decay) then your ears are providing you with information that you have a good instrument. Same as with an acoustic guitar or a piano, if your ears hear a good sound, then you have a good sound.

If you play an electric guitar and it sounds lifeless and dead, then that's what it is. You might inject some life into it later with distortion (which exaggerates harmonics), compression (which exaggerates sustain and decay) or artificial reverb (which exaggerates resonance) but all things being said, I'd recommend that one would pick an electric guitar that is first and foremost a good acoustic instrument since it is an acoustic instrument.

If your electric guitar isn't supplying your ears with a good sound, then it probably isn't supplying your pickup with good sound, either. While the two aren't exact parallels, your pickup is sensing vibration and that's what your ears are receiving also in the form of sound waves. Usually you don't hold your ears as close to the strings as your pickup does, but you'll hear something very similar to what a pickup "hears". I'm actually looking up and failing to find what the frequency response of guitar pickups are, but your ears hear around 20-20kHz, and I would really doubt that guitar pickups sense much outside of that range, either.

In other words, if your electric guitar sounds good to your ears, chances are very good it will sound good elsewhere, "better" than a guitar that doesn't sound good to your ears. Because if the guitar itself isn't putting out a good sound, that information is never there, you can only exaggerate from that point on artificially.

That's a totally different concept from the idea of switching out pickups. Of course if you put two different pickups on the same guitar it would sound different. That's the same as putting two different microphones on an acoustic guitar, they won't sound the same because they aren't supposed to or designed to sound the same.

The frequency response of different pickups isn't the same, and importantly the resonant peak of the pickups (combined with the other electronics in the guitar) isn't the same, either.

Here is a little study on a Strat pickup:

http://www.buildyourguitar.com/resources/lemme/

You'll see that the Strat pickup is not an even field, that is, the Strat senses some frequencies much more strongly than other frequencies (so it outputs those more strongly). Almost all microphones are the same way, for that matter, your ears don't sense all frequencies equally, either.

So for sake of our discussion, and leaving aside any other factors, we might put a Strat pickup in a guitar that has a resonant peak at 5k of 6 dB, and then we could put in another single coil pickup that is flat at 5k but has a 6dB peak at 10k, then a humbucker that has a 3 dB peak at 1k and so on. Of course none of those are going to sound the same.

That doesn't have anything to do with what the guitar sounds like, though, same as putting a bunch of different microphones in front of an acoustic guitar changes the way the acoustic guitar sounds. It only changes what sound you capture from the source material that is the acoustic guitar.

That's where the magic comes in, though, since all acoustic instruments will have their own resonant peaks, they don't put out sound equally across the spectrum either. So if you get a medium that works well with the natural resonant peaks of the instrument, whether that medium is a pickup or a microphone, then you have a great combination going.

That's why some pickups sound magical in some guitars and don't sound so magical in others.

But you said, "While I'll accept the theory and premise (and I appreciate a well-put together guitar as much as the next person), I'm not sure I'm going to put much stock into it directly resulting in the amplified sound that's reaching my ears. I won't, however, dispute it "

And I'm not trying to persuade you otherwise, if what comes out of your amplifier is pleasing to you then it's good. The sound coming out of an amplifier has gone through so much changes from where it started with the string that it probably can't even be described by me.

Still, though, when you take anything that makes a sound, you want the initial sound to be as good as possible, no matter how you might change it later. You can spend a million dollars on a concert hall with stunning acoustics but if you play a bunch of bad sounding instruments backing up bad singers in there it still sounds bad.

So when you consider a guitar of any kind, make sure it sounds good to your naked ears, since that's where it all starts. If it doesn't sound good there, then you are going to be compensating for that lack of fundamental good sound at every other stage of it.

[spacecadet]

This was kind of my point, and I'll go ahead note that you address it later in the above post. It seems like, at least to you and maybe a few others like spacecadet, that the unplugged resonance is more of an indicator of the physical aspects of the guitar, like the components and craftsmanship.

That's not what I was saying either...

A house has a foundation of some kind. You can build the nicest house in the world on top of a bad foundation, but it's going to crack and fall apart pretty quickly. The same is true of guitars and guitar tone. You build guitar tone out of a combination of components; it's not one thing that just happens. Acoustic resonance is part of the basis of getting good amped sound out of your guitar, including sustain, a pleasing decay, and those harmonics Larry was talking about. Without it, you're going to have to employ a lot of extra tricks and you'll never get to *quite* the same place you would have otherwise.

I do think a lot of guitarists get overly nitpicky about tone, and I'm not saying a guitar that lacks resonance can't sound good when amped or be perfectly workable as a main guitar in a band. It's not like "oh, that guitar sounds dead when played acoustically - into the fireplace it goes!" It's just one aspect of what makes up how a guitar actually sounds. But it's both pretty easy to find a guitar with good resonance and also one of the few things that can't easily be fixed if you don't, which to me makes more resonant guitars a lot more desirable. It just provides a better foundation upon which to build up your tone.

[InLimbo]

The acoustic with a microphone is a good analogy for understanding the fundamentals of what is happening compared to a pickup, but there's a massive difference in that you don't require a microphone to hear.... the intent? or the actual sound, or whatever, of what an acoustic guitar sounds like (taking human perception, ear response, decibels, etc out of the equation). I'm referring to just sitting in a room and plucking / strumming along.

An electric guitar, by the very nature of it's design, is dependent, and I would argue to an extremely far degree, through the mediation of electric / electronic devices, electrical signals and waves. Granted, it would vary to a degree if the guitar wasn't resonant in that the string doesn't vibrate freely. With the extent of this mediation to just produce the sound as designed, the quality / amount of the resonance diminishes in importance past a certain point, especially to those perceived by our ear sitting in the same room as above. The amount of attack, sustain, and decay that we can perceive is only a fraction of what the electrical signal produced by the pickups can generate, which is then amplified exponentially until we actually can hear through devices that actually allow us to hear it.

Yeah, I get that it's part of it, but I can't fathom that as long as the strings ring out across the fret to the bridge, that's there's any real importance to the varying degrees of more resonance versus less versus good versus bad.

I'm not saying it's a myth or disputing that what your saying is actually true, but just to the extent of it's importance.

[Larry Mal]

The amount of attack, sustain, and decay that we can perceive is only a fraction of what the electrical signal produced by the pickups can generate, which is then amplified exponentially until we actually can hear through devices that actually allow us to hear it.

Well, the pickups can't generate anything that isn't there, though. They can only send what is there in the first place.

Not sure if what I'm saying is making a lot of sense. Let's try this. Go to a store, and pick up an electric guitar. Don't plug it in. Strum it.

That's your sound. That's all your sound can ever be.

From that point on, you'll change it and amplify it in countless ways, but you can't ever add to the original sound, only change and distort it.

Let's think of it like a picture. Take a picture, and from there you can blow it up to any size you want, but you can't ever add any more pixels to it.

Isn't it best to take the most high definition picture in the first place, then? Sure it is- it gives you the most to work with.

[InLimbo]

Let's think of it like a picture. Take a picture, and from there you can blow it up to any size you want, but you can't ever add any more pixels to it.

Isn't it best to take the most high definition picture in the first place, then? Sure it is- it gives you the most to work with.

I mean, yeah. I'm picking up what you're putting down and not saying that it's wrong. I guess we'll agree to disagree on the degree to which it is applicable to the ear after amplification.

But, I like your photo analogy and I'll add to it with saying that it's nice to start with one that is high definition (which in this case is synonymous with a guitar being resonant), especially if it's going to be blown up (synonymous with amplification) but open that photo in Photoshop, change brightness, contrast, do some blurring, remove blemishes, add and remove color, saturation, remove whole things in the photo, add whole things to the photo, mirror the photo, etc. Just keep doing that until there's a point where the new photo, while it, in a way, resembles the old photo, is no longer the the photo that you took. While the old photo is still a photo in the sense of it being a captured image, that was just a means to an end. The photo was taken with the intention of it being altered in such a way that it would become a new photo.

That's the same way I'm thinking of this with an electric guitar; the only difference is that by design and necessity, the electric guitar is required to be ran through the amplification (photoshop) that by it's very nature alters the sound to such an extreme degree that any particularities, nuances, resonances, etc become increasingly less important and probably more unrecognizable once the amp is powered on. Again, it's a means to end.

[Mad-Mike]

I don't really consider it a mark of quality rather than just a part of the guitar's overall make up.

However, there are guitars in my collection you hear more or less unplugged.

Like for example, my Jazzmaster, Hondo Paul Dean II, Harmony 02813, Harmony H-806, and my Swimming Pool Route strat are all very loud (for a solidbody) unplugged because they have a huge whack of chambering under the pickguard, and in the Paul Dean's case it's aided further by 2 1/4" resonance slots parallel to the Truss Rod inside the 3 piece neck.

My Jaguar, Jag-Stang, Mad-Rite, Musicmaster, First Act, and Les Paul are all quiet when unplugged because there is hardly any routing in them, and in the Stang/Master's case the control cavities are JAMMED to the gills with electronics.

I find the hollower guitars more airy, and the Chambered Neck on the Paul Dean causes an enunciating modulation when holding single notes for a long period of time, which when that gets enacted during controlled feedback at stage volumes you can get some pretty cool "blooming" to other notes in the harmonic series that way, whereas my Jaguar with it's minimal routing and the Stang-style guitars, which are packed to the gills with electronics due to active pickups and hot-rodded switching schemes - are really really good at holding the same root note for a long long time using controlled feedback (or even bending it with the vibrato bar if you change position while bending the feedback note). Of course, this is all theoretical, I don't have the time or space to have an amp on 11 all the time.

I have noticed that different guitars resonate/feedback better with different amps and different EQ's though....and that's a whole other can of worms altogether.

[fuzzjunkie]

For me, when I first started buying guitars, there were two choices, used/vintage guitars or late 70s/early 80s boat anchors. The resonate guitars were dynamic and lively amped or unplugged. The boat anchors were unpleasant either way in comparison, so I bought the resonate, and usually lighter, used guitars.

To this day I will strum 10 unplugged guitars picked off the wall at a shop and only plug in the most resonant one. Maybe the others would sound perfectly fine plugged in, but I don't even bother.

Before I check anything else on a guitar, it has to have a certain level of vibration or resonance or its not worth my time.

[Futuron]

If you took 50 photos of the same object with different settings & cameras and natural variation in angle, lighting etc, despite being similar the differences would be very discernable on close-up. But stick them all up on the wall and look at them from 10+ metres away and the difference is not going to be so obvious.

I think it's the same when you plug electric guitars in - the pickups & amp totally overwhelm whatever flavour the acoustic sound had. 1g some kind of nut, 299g chocolate. You're pretty much only tasting chocolate by this point. But maybe some people are super sensitive to nuts?

[Larry Mal]

I personally find it bizarre that guitarists justify playing instruments that don't in and of themselves sound good due to the excuse that the sound will be changed so much later down the road it doesn't matter. To me, that's just lazy, fix it in the mix philosophy.

You don't fix it in the mix. You make sure your sound is the very best it can be at every stage of the process, and that includes the actual instrument.

Besides, regarding your analogy, you aren't the person looking at the photograph on a wall from thirty feet away. You are the photographer, you are supposed to care about the details that other people don't notice.

[sessylU]

I think this is probably a heuristic.

It's something that me head tells me doesn't make a difference, butI always think it's important.

I do have guitars that I think it is easier to play harmonics on than others or that seem livelier. I know that they probably aren't, I probably just play them differently because I'm expecting them to behave differently.

[fisonic]

One of the reasons electric guitars sound better at higher volumes, is not just due to driving power valves, but also due to acoustic feedback. It's hard to discuss sustain & resonance without taking that aspect into account.
I'm just imagining some poor bugger, who's playing their Jag with flatwounds scratching their head, whilst musing about unplugged acoustics.

[otis]

I've read a lot of (to me) valuable arguments why acoustic resonance does bother a lot.
The pickups can only pick up what sound is there in the first place is the most plausible theory for me, the complexity of an electric sound signal and the choice of amps and effects aside.
I have this Costello Jazzmaster (standard pickups) wich I a-b'd against numerous regular AVRi '62's and AV'65's, that keeps on outsinging them all.
More complexity, more warmth etc.
Every nuance I hear in the acoustic sound of these Jazzmasters (ear on the back of the body while chording) is represented in the amplified sound.
The pickups and other hardware are basically the same (AV '65 aside), so its really the wood that makes the difference.
My '64 outclasses them all btw, both acoustically and amplified.
I'm a firm believer in the differences between and influence of acoustic resonance of guitars to their sound and especially to my joy of playing them and thus my creativity.
This is especially the case on my '64; It seems songs just roll out of it.
acoustic resonance is key for me.

[timtam]

Electric guitar pickups are not microphones. They do not pickup 'sound'. They are vibration transducers. They pick up vibration (of metal strings) - basically string movement. A microphone is an acoustic energy (sound wave) transducer.

A vibrating metal string induces a current in the pickup by electromagnetic induction. A vibrating nylon string induces no such current. But both metal and nylon strings will induce sound. But the fact that that a vibrating metal string also produces some sound via a resonant body is incidental to how pickups work. However that body (and other things) can affect the extent and nature of the string vibration induced by plucking ... and sensed by the pickup. But those aspects of the vibration do not necessarily correlate directly with the 'sound' that is heard.

https://www.seymourduncan.com/blog/the- ... microphone

[timtam]

It's a pity that we don't get to hear what this cardboard strat sounded like acoustically, because electrically it seems like it basically sounded like a strat. But I think it's a fair bet that it didn't sound good acoustically - which would highlight the fact that what you hear (acoustically) and what the pickups actually sense are two very different things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Oo2H-W7d6A

[otis]

ok; pickups work with vibration, not sound, but sound also comes from vibration.
I'm not very technical in these things, but I know the difference of a lively, acoustic resonant guitar (you also feel these guitars vibrate more)and a guitar that is less alive when played in the amplified sound.
it's clear to me, and I know what I like.
amen