Can You Tell The Difference??? ASH vs. ALDER

[mongo2]

DING DING DING. we have a winner!

now, which one is alder and which one is ash?

The lighter one.

 

[stepswork4me]

Get over your self inflated egos. Most tonal differences are in our minds. Sure, somethings change tone, but to allow our egos to trump the experience of those that have spent their lives studying and building instruments is assinine.

 

[johnk_10]

Get over your self inflated egos. Most tonal differences are in our minds. Sure, somethings change tone, but to allow our egos to trump the experience of those that have spent their lives studying and building instruments is assinine.

silly wabbit.

 

[DrSmaggs]

I like the way mids just dominate with Alder. Ash seems to be more mellow, yet delightfully tasty.

 

[Batmensch]

Agreed, Dan.
The response from the "naysayers", as you call them, is pretty much exactly what I expected at the beginning of this thread. I am again reminded of the saying,
"To those who believe, no proof is necessary, to those who disbelieve, no proof is possible."

 

[One Drop]

Get over your self inflated egos. Most tonal differences are in our minds. Sure, somethings change tone, but to allow our egos to trump the experience of those that have spent their lives studying and building instruments is assinine.

FYI many luthiers with as much experience as Dan have come to the exact opposite conclusion.

 

[Batmensch]

FYI many luthiers with as much experience as Dan have come to the exact opposite conclusion.

And many have not.

 

[MrWalker]

Wow. You know, I can't help but laugh at some of these posts. You naysayers are just too much.

The truth is, no matter what method I used to conduct this test, the naysayers would find fault if the results didn't agree with their views.

I will give the nay-sayers right about one thing, your original post indicated that we were looking for a pair... I was personally making up my mind on the 1-pair and then trying to hear the same in the 2-pair... and since I succeeded, I went with that vote.

From a scientific point of view, your experiment has too many short-comings to count as evidence, but heck, this isn't a Master degree discusson of tone woods vs human perception. Nor was it presented as that.

I think you managed to prove that the difference - if any - is very subtle.

It also reminds me of a test someone did once on a Norwegian forum about delay pedals.... where a Behringer and a Roland stomp box were put head to head in a blind test... and everyone was bashing the quality of the Behringer, everyone were dead sure that the Roland was indeed the Behringer, cause it sounded plastic!

Yeah, we hear what we want to hear.

But I repeat, it would be interesting to repeat the experiment with more contrasting tone woods... like mahogany and maple

 

[johnk_10]

FYI many luthiers with as much experience as Dan have come to the exact opposite conclusion.

+1

 

[WoodyG3]

...The truth is, no matter what method I used to conduct this test, the naysayers would find fault if the results didn't agree with their views.

Sure. And you knew that going in.

Anyway, the ash bass looks better to me. No double blind test needed for that!

 

[BassyBill]

I could hear a difference between the 1A and 1B clips, too. But not really much to choose between the 2A and 2B Lemon Song clips. So, I voted the 3rd option in the poll. I only listened to each clip once and went with my initial impressions.

Whatever the answers are, I think Dan's made his point here and there's some interesting things to be learned from this thread, as well as some interesting questions posed.

The first thing to be learned is that in this particular case (with these two particular bodies), the differences are pretty subtle to me. Other people may claim to hear more of a difference than I do.

Some of the interesting questions:

1) If the number of different bodies were used and the experiment repeated, would there be any cases where the audible difference was way, way more pronounced than is the case with these?
2) If several instances were found where there were really obvious and unquestionable differences, would these be directly related to the species of tree from which the wood was taken? Or would the differences between different samples of, say, ash in some cases be just as obvious as differences between two different species?

Yay! I was in the 14%!

I've quoted myself here to get some more thought on the questions (emphasised) in the light of Dan's revelations.

 

[pasta4lnch]

interesting experiment. If I've done testing for a while I might train my ears to know the difference. I have little or no experience w/ the exact same instrument w/ different woods, but I have trained my ears to hear some pretty minute things I didnt think were possible.

I was wrong - I thought A's were ash and B's were alder. though it does seem like both B's are a tad louder.

Dan - I remember your preamp test on GS. Pre amp snobbery runs deep, perhaps deeper than instrument snobbery I will say I can most certainly tell the difference between the preamps I have used extensively. Would I be able to blindly pick one out of a bunch. Probably not. Still interesting to try . . .

 

[One Drop]

"To those who believe, no proof is necessary, to those who disbelieve, no proof is possible."

This works both ways, of course. It is also irrelevant.

Dan, your example has nothing to do with my argument. It is simply another example off the fallibility of our perceptions and how they are not immune to suggestion, intellectual influence, desire to preserve a certain image of ourselves, etc. etc.

This why the scientific method is important.

But you're not interested in any of the so-called nay-sayers' posts, because they might threaten YOUR cherished belief. Think about it for a moment.

 

[Fuzzbass]

FYI many luthiers with as much experience as Dan have come to the exact opposite conclusion.

True, but it points out that there is no consensus, even among experts. On that note, a huge reason why the scientific method was developed was to eliminate human error. Most opinions here are, "my ash basses sound like X and my alder basses sound like Y". Well, so what? You know which ones are which, and it's been proven time and time again that if we expect something to be true, then our senses will reinforce it.

I applaud Dan for making an effort to be scientific: "see if you can tell the difference without knowing which is which". And in saying that the differences are subtle rather than nonexistent, he's far less rigid than many here, who profess absolute certainty about their opinions. Speaking of which, it bears repeating: all we have here are opinions -- exactly no one knows for sure.

 

[JimiLL]

And many have not.

And how successful are the ones that dont?

 

[Spencer!]

The truth is, no matter what method I used to conduct this test, the naysayers would find fault if the results didn't agree with their views.

I don't think anyone's denying that you found a piece of ash and a piece of alder that sound similar. But your test doesn't prove what you think it does.

 

[Flaked Beans]

.......it would be interesting to repeat the experiment with more contrasting tone woods... like mahogany and maple

+1.

 

[BassyBill]

I don't think anyone's denying that you found a piece of ash and a piece of alder that sound similar. But your test doesn't prove what you think it does.

I dunno. It at least proves that differences between ash and alder aren't like night and day in every case.

Even ignoring the 2A/2B bit of tricksiness, the differences between these particular ash and alder bodies in the 1A/1B comparison, whilst real, were so slight that some people said they couldn't really pick them out. And this is on a solo studio recording. In a band mix (live or otherwise) they'd be pretty much impossible to distinguish, I think.

Maybe a different pair of ash/alder bodies might have shown a greater difference in tone. Or maybe two alder bodies or two ash bodies could. I was unconvinced before about people's claims to be able to identify tree species by taking a piece of wood from each, building a bass guitar out of it and then recording string vibrations from it via pickups and the rest of a signal chain. If this thread has influenced me at all, it's made me even less convinced rather than more.

 

[jaibot]

great experiment! thanks for doing this and I would lone to hear a maple/ rosewood fingerboard comparison

 

[danclaro]

WOW - there are a lot of really mean responses here to what was really just a simple - yet painstakingly carried out - brain teaser. I very much appreciated what Dan was doing here because when looking at Fender style instruments it's been one of the big questions: ash or alder?

From what I can tell the main gripe is that Dan led us to believe there would be two samples per bass. I thought that too, until I looked at the third choice in the poll (I can hear a difference between the "1" recordings, but not the "2" recordings).

Anyway, I'd like to thank Dan Atkinson. Fun challenge! And again the point is not that alder and ash sound the same, but that the differences between alder and ash basses can be more subtle that we often think.

@JohnK - I liked what you said about compression... which of your clips is which bass?