Does body wood matter?

[bucephylus]

It's only likely to affect it destructively. A small amount of energy will become sound, some heat, and only a tiny proportion will find its way back to the string and is vanishingly unlikely to be in phase.

Bingo! No question that the wood in an electric bass asserts its character by the selective damping of audio spectrum. But, the character of that damping quite definitely finds its way to the overtones transmitted to the pickups. Approaching the topic by thinking that the wood is providing reinforcement will get you headed along the wrong path. The closest you can get to an undamped bass would be the all aluminum instrument that I posted earlier in this thread.

Does body wood matter?

And, most players wouldn’t choose such an instrument. Damping and the character of the damping is key to achieving desirable tones. The character of the neck wood and to a somewhat lesser extent the body wood influence that result. And some other aspects.

 

[mongo2]

I found that the bigger part of a bass sound can be modified with different strings configuration.
Steel, nickel, cobalt, gold....

I recently received a new bass and the OEM strings sounded fresh but were awful. I changed them to my usual brand without changing anything else and I was stunned how much the volume and tone improved. In over 45 years of playing I've never heard more of an improvement from a simple string change.

 

[GilbouFR]

I dont know. But a famous french luthier said the wood does participate in the sound, even if it's less than the pickups and the electronics (change that capacitor and see how it changes the bass tonality...). So I guess a luthier has better knowledge (and ears) than I do. He also told me it's a bad idea to put a high mass or big bridge on a bass because the bigger it is, the more vibrations are sucked in and transmitted into the wood, which lowers the bass signal...

 

[-Asdfgh-]

Zombie thread! Run! I offer this story only to further muddy the already opaque waters:
1983 Steinberger XP-2 with EMG pups, graphite/Carbon composite neck, epoxy paint coated rock maple minimalist “flying bee” body. Sounded great, very bright “snappy” tone, maybe a little clinical sounding. Over the years I gravitated towards a less trebly tone.

I wanted to build a more traditional body with a “warmer” tone, found a nice one piece sapele mahogany body blank and carved it up. The new body was a good bit bigger than the old, but neck pocket and pup locations were reproduced as exactly as I could make them, within a few thousandths in all cases.

100% of the hardware, neck, electronics, and even the relatively new strings were transferred from the maple body to the mahogany body.

Result: Played through the same old amp, the bass sounds warmer, less high end snap, maybe a little less sustain. The difference is pronounced enough that I think it exceeds the wishful thinking effect, but I have no before and after tapes to prove it. I am convinced body wood has some small effect based on this inadvertent experiment, but agree that the neck, strings, and pups are the primary contributors to amplified tone.

There are examples on YouTube of guitars with wood swapped for perspex which demonstrate little difference in sound. Controlled tests are difficult.

 

[-Asdfgh-]

I dont know. But a famous french luthier said the wood does participate in the sound, even if it's less than the pickups and the electronics (change that capacitor and see how it changes the bass tonality...). So I guess a luthier has better knowledge (and ears) than I do. He also told me it's a bad idea to put a high mass or big bridge on a bass because the bigger it is, the more vibrations are sucked in and transmitted into the wood, which lowers the bass signal...

I thought the received wisdom was that high mass bridges increased sustain, which must mean less coupling.

 

[mongo2]

I thought the received wisdom was that high mass bridges increased sustain, which must mean less coupling.

Or it could mean there is more efficient coupling permitting the mass of the body and neck to contribute to increased sustain.

 

[Vinnie Boombatz]

Find a bass body made out of cheese. All the pro's know that does best with ADAD tuning.

 

[-Asdfgh-]

Or it could mean there is more efficient coupling permitting the mass of the body and neck to contribute to increased sustain.

Only if the body is about as dense as the bridge.

 

[GilbouFR]

I thought the received wisdom was that high mass bridges increased sustain, which must mean less coupling.

Well I have no idea. I do not have enough experience or mastery of the instrument to really know.
To me, it sounds the same. Very probably because my ear is not up to level compared to better musicians.

 

[mongo2]

Only if the body is about as dense as the bridge.

You're going to have to prove that.

 

[Gilmourisgod]

I never noticed any real increase in sustain with a high mass bridge, crawled down that rabbit hole to no effect years ago. I buy them for ease of adjustability and looks these days. G&L basses have the best production bridge design I’ve seen, the base has a “foot” routed into the top of the bass that makes it really “thrum” into the body. Leo Fender must have thought it was worth doing, I’ll trust his judgement. The G&L bridges have a set screw that locks all the saddles together so nothing appreciable gets lost to vibration of the saddles. That would seem to have more effect on sustain than the mass of the bridge. @Bruce Johnson has some theories about the overall rigidity of the bass as a System that I find pretty convincing. One thing I noticed early on about the Steinberger L2 basses, the original run with carbon graphite neck and body, was that they all sounded exactly the same to my ears unplugged. I attribute that to the materials and molds used, effectively identical basses. Any wood bass is by definition a unique object, a system with too many variables to ever really track.

 

[Vinnie Boombatz]

I still swear that there is not one single component that lends itself to be the one consistent thing that causes increased sustain, lower frequency transfer, etc. I say this just from MY experience, but it's been proven to my ears a few times. If a bass is a dud, and the sum of the parts just doesn't create something stellar, adding a high-mass bridge isn't going to magically bring it to life.

I have a Fender American Standard with the Fender high-mass bridge. I also have a G&L with the massive high-mass bridge with the route that seats it into the body and the screw that locks all the saddle together and supposedly makes it most efficient, solid, etc. I had an older, 10lb '76 Fender Precision bass that I got with a Badass II bridge that I later switched to the original, cheap, bent saddle bridge with the threaded saddles. I also have a Classic 50's P with the stock vintage style bridge and a '96 MIM Standard with a vintage style Fender bridge.

My conclusions...it comes down to a combination of EVEY component and how they all interact and work with each other. It's kind of a roll of the dice and hope for the best. Wood is organic and you can't really predict how it with the body and neck will interact together, resonate, what frequencies it will attenuate or accentuate, and how those materials work with each other, etc.

With that all said, I still prefer the thin, cheap, bent, vintage-style, regular old boring Fender vintage-style bridge. Every bass I've owned that has had or has any sort of high-mass style bridge seems to suck some of the inherent, individual characteristic tone from bass and just makes it sound more "generic". It may or may not increase sustain, but overall I feel like they kill the inherent tone of the instrument, or dulls/attenuates it like a buffer.

On the '76 P with the Badass bridge it sounded like any other P bass, nothing spectacular, not bad, but nothing to write home about. When I put the cheap, original bent stock Fender bridge back on the basses woody, resonant tone came back, while still retaining the same amount of sustain and thump, but had better tone (subjective, of course). My Classic 50's P is my most resonant, fullest and probably best sounding bass I own, and the '96 MIM is a very close second. these two basses vibrate in your hands when you play any string like it's alive, and both have sustain for days, and both of these basses just have the crappy, stock Fender vintage style bridge with threaded saddles, and both basses weigh 8.4 and 8.6lbs. respectively.

I'm NOT convinced high mass bridges do anything other than maybe empty your pockets of cash a little quicker. The way they alter the tone just seems to suck some of the true sound from the instrument, and I don't think they do anything for sustain, and for the sound I'm going for, and seem to rob the bass of some of the natural, woodier sounds.

 

[bucephylus]

I thought the received wisdom was that high mass bridges increased sustain, which must mean less coupling.

Certainly less damping.

 

[-Asdfgh-]

You're going to have to prove that.

I'll see if I can dig up some references, but if you think about wave motion in general then transmission of energy is most efficient at boundaries where properties of the materials on each side are much the same.

 

[mongo2]

I'll see if I can dig up some references, but if you think about wave motion in general then transmission of energy is most efficient at boundaries where properties of the materials on each side are much the same.

Depending on the density of the body there could easily be better more efficient coupling for denser bodies than for less dense bodies.

 

[GreyBeard]

I suppose that if you had 2 otherwise identical basses with the exception of the body woods, one could make an objective comparison. However, I've play played basses that were identical other than the body color but the same body wood and they sounded different. So, good luck ever coming up with an objective answer on this one.

 

[-Asdfgh-]

Depending on the density of the body there could easily be better more efficient coupling for denser bodies than for less dense bodies.

Dense woods commonly used in bass construction are much more similar in density to the less dense ones than they are to metal used to make bridges, so it's unlikely to make much difference.

 

[mongo2]

Dense woods commonly used in bass construction are much more similar in density to the less dense ones than they are to metal used to make bridges, so it's unlikely to make much difference.

Except when it does.

 

[GBassNorth]

...so it's unlikely to make much difference.

Said another way without changing the meaning of your sentence...
...there's certainly a possibility it will make some difference.
Aren't weasel words fun?

 

[JW56789]

I agree with Lindy Fralin that on Fender-style instruments, a harder, denser neck and a lighter-by-comparison wood body seems to be the recipe. I see this especially on my Squiers with their basswood bodies, they just seem to speak easier than an OG Fender with a good alder or ash body.

In my experience, the idea of 'tuning the tone by the wood recipe' is a bit over-sold on neckthru instruments, where the wood seems to make more of an impact than on a bolt-neck axe. In the extreme, sure, a light-wood axe like a Fodera or a Spector will not have that pizzicato tuba attack of a solid African wood Warwick. But these are cases with not a wide recipe of woods involved, and of course, how much of it is pickups . . . . . But once you get into builders where you can have quite a few different woods in one axe (Alembic comes to mind first . . . . . ), to me it's a crapshoot, as wood just varies so much. And as the joke used to go with Alembic guys, what IF it's the sound of all that glue ! ! ? ?

So I'd say that certain woods or recipes will get you into a certain neighborhood, but just like lining up 10 consecutive serial number Martins acoustics of the same model, the same thing will happen with electrics: They'll all sound mostly alike, but 6 or 7 may be identical, 1 or 2 may be kinda meh . . . . , and probably one will stand out. It's just the nature of wood.