Well, no, that's not quite what I'm saying maybe.InLimbo wrote: ↑Wed Nov 29, 2017 1:54 pmThis 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 itLarry Mal wrote: ↑Wed Nov 29, 2017 12:56 pmSo 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.
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.
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.