Does fretboard wood make a consistent difference in tone that you can hear?

[bass12]

Another hardness scale of "tonewoods":
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Please note, Bolivian Rosewood is another name for Pao Ferro, and like Amazon Rosewood and Nicaraguan Rosewood, is not actually Rosewood, which comes from India and is an entirely different species. Please also note the many varieties of ash and their hardnesses relative to alder, and the varieties of mahogany, and their hardnesses relative to both ash and alder. What were we saying about sustain and wood hardness?? How does it relate to anything actually measurable outside your head??

Where did you read that Amazon is not a true rosewood and why would you suggest that rosewood necessarily comes from India?

 

[MtManiac]

Where did you read that Amazon is not a true rosewood and why would you suggest that rosewood necessarily comes from India?

Derp. I'll stand corrected - Amazon Rosewood is Rosewood, and Nicaraguan Rosewood is also Rosewood.

Rosewood - Wikipedia

Bolivian Rosewood (Pao Ferro) has nothing to do with Rosewood.

 

[tfer]

Derp. I'll stand corrected - Amazon Rosewood is Rosewood, and Nicaraguan Rosewood is also Rosewood.

Rosewood - Wikipedia

Bolivian Rosewood (Pao Ferro) has nothing to do with Rosewood.

It's grain structure is very similar though.

 

[GrapeBass]

Pickups create a magnetic field through which the string vibrates, which creates an electrical signal that travels down all those little wires to your amp. Nowhere along that path is there any wood.

I guess you cannot comprehend that the structure of the system (wood, esp. neck) affects how the strings vibrate by absorbing some of the harmonic content. The stings are making contact with the bridge and nut/fret). Can't wrap your head around that can ya? What happens when you dampen the strings with a piece of foam?

Now go eat some pasties

 

[MtManiac]

I guess you cannot comprehend that the structure of the system (wood, esp. neck) affects how the strings vibrate by absorbing some of the harmonic content. The stings are making contact with the bridge and nut/fret). Can't wrap your head around that can ya? What happens when you dampen the strings with a piece of foam?

Now go eat some pasties

Sure I can comprehend that. *** is a pastie?

Not sure why you guys fee the need to be rude. You can't see how this is purely subjective, and that your opinion/experience might be completely untranslatable to somebody else?

 

[GrapeBass]

Sure I can comprehend that. *** is a pastie?

Not sure why you guys fee the need to be rude. You can't see how this is purely subjective, and that your opinion/experience might be completely untranslatable to somebody else?

What affects the string is physics, its not subjective. Whether you appreciate it or not, is subjective.

You can find some pasties here, they're quite delicious. Peggy's Cove has a few shops that sell 'em too
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[Figjam]

It's grain structure is very similar though.

read it as gain structure

 

[MtManiac]

What affects the string is physics, its not subjective. Whether you appreciate it or not, is subjective.

You can find some pasties here, they're quite delicious. Peggy's Cove has a few shops that sell 'em too
Invalid Link Removed

I agree, physics are all that matters here, but we have Tobias saying that maple is harder than rosewood and that's why it sounds brighter and offers more sustain (false, it's softer) without mentioning the finish, and Sadowsky describing the tone of Rosewood using words like "sweet" and "warm." Purely subjective descriptions - if the fretboard wood is so important to the tone, differences between them would be measurable with an oscilloscope. Instruments would be sold using those measurements, not subjective descriptions. I'm not contending it's impossible, I'm saying produce the data. No one yet has produced any data, they're just offering insults and anecdotes. Sounds pretty weak, man. If you can hear differences, great - some people can tell the difference between two nearly identical shades of blue, and that may make them qualified as an artist or an interior designer, or they may just have a job on an assembly line wearing their favorite blue shirt and not that other blue shirt. But the differences between those two shades of blue would be measurable. So measure it - put your physics where your mouth is. Because any other physics I've seen says fretboard wood makes zero appreciable difference. Show me "sweet and warm" using data that is reliably consistent across multiple samples of rosewood fretboards, prove it with something that exists outside of your head and your personal experience. I'll wait, and if you can, I'll admit I'm wrong. Now go eat a truckload of effing pasties yourself, whatever that was supposed to mean.

 

[MtManiac]

I guess you cannot comprehend that the structure of the system (wood, esp. neck) affects how the strings vibrate by absorbing some of the harmonic content. The stings are making contact with the bridge and nut/fret). Can't wrap your head around that can ya? What happens when you dampen the strings with a piece of foam?

Now go eat some pasties

Here's what matters to an electric instrument's tone, not in any order:
- strings
- thing used to vibrate the string (finger, bow, pick, thumb, whatever)
- anything touching the strings that interferes with its vibration, such as a foam mute or the palm of your hand or side of your thumb or a slide or the fretboard on a fretless instrument (I didn't say the type of wood or fretboard material) or the hang tag at the store
- pickup placement
- type of pickup: p, J, MM, piezo, microphone, etc
- build of pickup
- existence of onboard preamp, type of preamp
- tone pot
- any electrical signal interference
- effects
- preamp gain and EQ
- power amp
- speaker and speaker cabinet
- venue
- the listener's brain

Fretboards don't touch the strings, except above where you're fretting the note. You might as well tell me a bass played in Arizona sounds totally different from one played in Mississippi due to differences in ambient humidity in the air through which the string is vibrating. Arizona sounds warmer, right?

Unless someone shows me data that's consistent across multiple samples with controlled variables, I say it's a bunch of hooey. Not saying you're wrong, just saying it's meaningless to anyone else. The responses are more along the lines of outrage that somebody has pointed out the emperor's new clothes are invisible.

 

[GrapeBass]

Here's what matters to an electric instrument's tone, not in any order:
- strings
- thing used to vibrate the string (finger, bow, pick, thumb, whatever)
- anything touching the strings that interferes with its vibration, such as a foam mute or the palm of your hand or side of your thumb or a slide or the fretboard on a fretless instrument (I didn't say the type of wood or fretboard material) or the hang tag at the store
- pickup placement
- type of pickup: p, J, MM, piezo, microphone, etc
- build of pickup
- existence of onboard preamp, type of preamp
- tone pot
- any electrical signal interference
- effects
- preamp gain and EQ
- power amp
- speaker and speaker cabinet
- venue
- the listener's brain

Fretboards don't touch the strings, except above where you're fretting the note. You might as well tell me a bass played in Arizona sounds totally different from one played in Mississippi due to differences in ambient humidity in the air through which the string is vibrating. Arizona sounds warmer, right?

Unless someone shows me data that's consistent across multiple samples with controlled variables, I say it's a bunch of hooey. Not saying you're wrong, just saying it's meaningless to anyone else. The responses are more along the lines of outrage that somebody has pointed out the emperor's new clothes are invisible.

You are misguided in your interpretation. Here's something I found that explains better than how we discussed this.

"Yes, it can. Although a simple treatment of a guitar (electric or acoustic) regards the strings as having fixed endpoints, this is not actually true. Instead the whole instrument is involved: when the strings are plucked they transfer energy into the neck and body of the guitar (and, of course, the other strings) via the nut & bridge and the whole thing ends up being some hugely complex system. For an electric guitar played loud there are yet further complexities introduced as the amp feeds energy into the system (short of out-and-out runaway feedback) which makes a further contribution to tone). Everything about this system tends to matter: the wood, how hard the varnish is, the neck joint, the neck (a lot), how the bridge and pickups are mounted &c: it is just a complicated nonlinear mass of interactions.

It is clearly the case that it matters rather less for electric guitars than acoustic ones, but it definitely matters.

There some easy, related, experiments you can do, although they all require multiple guitars. I've done these but not in a controlled way, although I am confident of the results.

The first is to compare the acoustic loudness of different electric guitars. What you will quickly find is that it varies, quite a lot. I have a couple of Les Pauls (actually Heritage H150s) and a Tele (again: actually a hacked-around Yamaha), and the tele is very significantly louder acoustically than the other two. Well, why? The answer really has to be that more energy from the strings is being coupled into the body and hence the air. What you are hearing is the body of the guitar, and what you hear depends on the physical characteristics of what the body is made of: wood (it also depends on the shape and everything else in sight, of course).

The second is to knock the body of various guitars with your knuckles. You will immediately find that the 'clonk' noise you get is different for different guitars. Some have a really noticable pitch, some are much broader spectrum, some are much louder and so on. People often judge teles by tapping them like this.

And finally it is interesting to compare the sustain of various guitars. This differs radically. My two Heritages, which really should be identical, have significantly different sustains, and, worse, they have different sustains (than each other) at different places on the neck: one is not uniformly longer than the other. Well, sustain differs because more or less energy is being removed from the string by the structure of the guitar (not the air, which is the same air). And, of course, the structure of the guitar preferentially removes some frequencies (the experiment above established that it has resonant behaviour), and this affects tone.

Finally, you'd expect that a guitar which was loud in the first test would have poor sustain in the last. Well, to some extent yes, but not as much as you'd think. A guitar which is loud also tends to 'hear' the amp more, so at high volumes it can have more sustain (I don't play at high enough volumes to do these tests as I have irreplaceable ears).

In summary: yes, wood matters. Everything matters as musical instruments are complex nonlinear resonant systems."​

 

[MtManiac]

You are misguided in your interpretation. Here's something I found that explains better than how we discussed this.

"Yes, it can. Although a simple treatment of a guitar (electric or acoustic) regards the strings as having fixed endpoints, this is not actually true. Instead the whole instrument is involved: when the strings are plucked they transfer energy into the neck and body of the guitar (and, of course, the other strings) via the nut & bridge and the whole thing ends up being some hugely complex system. For an electric guitar played loud there are yet further complexities introduced as the amp feeds energy into the system (short of out-and-out runaway feedback) which makes a further contribution to tone). Everything about this system tends to matter: the wood, how hard the varnish is, the neck joint, the neck (a lot), how the bridge and pickups are mounted &c: it is just a complicated nonlinear mass of interactions.

It is clearly the case that it matters rather less for electric guitars than acoustic ones, but it definitely matters.

There some easy, related, experiments you can do, although they all require multiple guitars. I've done these but not in a controlled way, although I am confident of the results.

The first is to compare the acoustic loudness of different electric guitars. What you will quickly find is that it varies, quite a lot. I have a couple of Les Pauls (actually Heritage H150s) and a Tele (again: actually a hacked-around Yamaha), and the tele is very significantly louder acoustically than the other two. Well, why? The answer really has to be that more energy from the strings is being coupled into the body and hence the air. What you are hearing is the body of the guitar, and what you hear depends on the physical characteristics of what the body is made of: wood (it also depends on the shape and everything else in sight, of course).

The second is to knock the body of various guitars with your knuckles. You will immediately find that the 'clonk' noise you get is different for different guitars. Some have a really noticable pitch, some are much broader spectrum, some are much louder and so on. People often judge teles by tapping them like this.

And finally it is interesting to compare the sustain of various guitars. This differs radically. My two Heritages, which really should be identical, have significantly different sustains, and, worse, they have different sustains (than each other) at different places on the neck: one is not uniformly longer than the other. Well, sustain differs because more or less energy is being removed from the string by the structure of the guitar (not the air, which is the same air). And, of course, the structure of the guitar preferentially removes some frequencies (the experiment above established that it has resonant behaviour), and this affects tone.

Finally, you'd expect that a guitar which was loud in the first test would have poor sustain in the last. Well, to some extent yes, but not as much as you'd think. A guitar which is loud also tends to 'hear' the amp more, so at high volumes it can have more sustain (I don't play at high enough volumes to do these tests as I have irreplaceable ears).

In summary: yes, wood matters. Everything matters as musical instruments are complex nonlinear resonant systems."​

This is again anecdote, not evidence.

 

[GrapeBass]

This is again anecdote, not evidence.

There's over 50 years of electric guitars given as evidence to prove this, I suggest you start comparing them yourself.

 

[Wisebass]

For all carrot lovers!

How to get a bright dark sound (or a dark bright sound)? With that fretboard?

Does this bass sound as inconsistent as it looks?

questions, questions, questions

Wise(b)ass

 

[MtManiac]

There's over 50 years of electric guitars given as evidence to prove this, I suggest you start comparing them yourself.

You're making the claim that physics is what matters, you provide the evidence and the data.

 

[MtManiac]

For all carrot lovers!

How to get a bright dark sound (or a dark bright sound)? With that fretboard?

View attachment 2932781

Does this bass sound as inconsistent as it looks?

View attachment 2932791

questions, questions, questions

Wise(b)ass

You will get all of the tones.

EDIT: except a P bass with flats.

 

[Deleted member 165050]

Prove it!

Already done - see equation f1.

Invalid Link Removed

 

[GrapeBass]

You're making the claim that physics is what matters, you provide the evidence and the data.

This is an old and tired topic with much information that can be resurrected. If you're so determined, go do the experiments yourself and disprove it to yourself. I cannot convince you of anything, you must discover it yourself.

Have a great day!

 

[GreyBeard]

Those who voted yes, can hear a difference. Those who voted no, can't hear a difference. Issue solved.

 

[tfer]

You are misguided in your interpretation. Here's something I found that explains better than how we discussed this.

"Yes, it can. Although a simple treatment of a guitar (electric or acoustic) regards the strings as having fixed endpoints, this is not actually true. Instead the whole instrument is involved: when the strings are plucked they transfer energy into the neck and body of the guitar (and, of course, the other strings) via the nut & bridge and the whole thing ends up being some hugely complex system. For an electric guitar played loud there are yet further complexities introduced as the amp feeds energy into the system (short of out-and-out runaway feedback) which makes a further contribution to tone). Everything about this system tends to matter: the wood, how hard the varnish is, the neck joint, the neck (a lot), how the bridge and pickups are mounted &c: it is just a complicated nonlinear mass of interactions.

It is clearly the case that it matters rather less for electric guitars than acoustic ones, but it definitely matters.

There some easy, related, experiments you can do, although they all require multiple guitars. I've done these but not in a controlled way, although I am confident of the results.

The first is to compare the acoustic loudness of different electric guitars. What you will quickly find is that it varies, quite a lot. I have a couple of Les Pauls (actually Heritage H150s) and a Tele (again: actually a hacked-around Yamaha), and the tele is very significantly louder acoustically than the other two. Well, why? The answer really has to be that more energy from the strings is being coupled into the body and hence the air. What you are hearing is the body of the guitar, and what you hear depends on the physical characteristics of what the body is made of: wood (it also depends on the shape and everything else in sight, of course).

The second is to knock the body of various guitars with your knuckles. You will immediately find that the 'clonk' noise you get is different for different guitars. Some have a really noticable pitch, some are much broader spectrum, some are much louder and so on. People often judge teles by tapping them like this.

And finally it is interesting to compare the sustain of various guitars. This differs radically. My two Heritages, which really should be identical, have significantly different sustains, and, worse, they have different sustains (than each other) at different places on the neck: one is not uniformly longer than the other. Well, sustain differs because more or less energy is being removed from the string by the structure of the guitar (not the air, which is the same air). And, of course, the structure of the guitar preferentially removes some frequencies (the experiment above established that it has resonant behaviour), and this affects tone.

Finally, you'd expect that a guitar which was loud in the first test would have poor sustain in the last. Well, to some extent yes, but not as much as you'd think. A guitar which is loud also tends to 'hear' the amp more, so at high volumes it can have more sustain (I don't play at high enough volumes to do these tests as I have irreplaceable ears).

In summary: yes, wood matters. Everything matters as musical instruments are complex nonlinear resonant systems."​

Great read. If the vibrations of the string didn't get transferred by the neck and fretboard combination, we'd never have to mute a string.

If I'm playing the C string on my 6er, I shouldn't have to mute the B, since it's so far away, but I do have to, or eventually it starts to hum it's own tune.

Taken to the next step, it takes a lot longer for that string to play along unaccompanied than it does for say the D string. I omitted the G, because the way that I play, my finger rests against that string after it plucks the C.

However, when I play the B string without muting the other 5, the rest of the string immediately begins to hum.

The mass of the B is much higher than the rest, which causes a greater vibration, but it's also playing harmonic content that is sympathetic to those strings. If that harmonic content affects the rest of the strings, it's only logical that it's picked up by the pickups...

 

[mesaplayer83]

This is an old and tired topic with much information that can be resurrected. If you're so determined, go do the experiments yourself and disprove it to yourself. I cannot convince you of anything, you must discover it yourself.

Have a great day!

Agreed - IMO, it was a troll thread from the beginning...