And show me you can actually hear these differences blind. I have decades of linear audio design behind me (EE) and have done a very large amount of blind DBT and ABX testing.
Ah, the old 'your ears aren't good enough canard'.
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More Sheldon Dingwall and Tone Wood
- Thread starter Dr. Cheese
- Start date
Well, are your ears good enough to hear one of those proverbial "dead spots" sometimes encountered in basses? Do those come from the pickups, the strings, or such? Or do they come from ... wood? Are they not audible when amplified? Just asking? 
Ahem. I'm a Physicist, so when you make statements like this, I gotta chime in. The concept of "tonewood" is that the wood affects (somehow) the tonality of a bass or guitar. If you want to "make mincemeat" out of a theory, you need to do a controlled test that removes the variable you think is irrelevant, and then do very careful tests to show whether or not the 2 things sound the same.
There are two issues with the video that people keep claiming "disproves" the tonewood concept:
1) Controlled listening tests (which I have done, I worked at a company designing high end microphones and other pro audio gear for 4 decades) are very difficult to do well. The guy in the video did not do the things I would do to set up a good listening test.
2) If you want to prove that wood is not affecting the tone of a bass or guitar, you gotta make a guitar or bass without wood. Attaching the ends of the strings to 2 wood benches is not even close to the test you need to do.
Sometimes ol' father time steps in. I know I can't hear things in certain frequencies that I could hear before I got old
But yes, even if I can't hear something doesn't mean it's not there.
Well, are your ears good enough to hear one of those proverbial "dead spots" sometimes encountered in basses? Do those come from the pickups, the strings, or such? Or do they come from ... wood? Are they not audible when amplified? Just asking?
They absolutely come from the eigenmodes of the structure, which is mostly wood. Other things like mass loading (the fat finger is an example of this) will move the resonances some, but anyone with knowledge of the Acoustics of such things knows where they come from, and yes, they are (if you know what to listen for) quite audible.
You're not making the claim. I have tested, probably hundreds of people who have made such claims, who when tested in controlled conditions, couldn't.
All I'm saying is my hearing is bad.
I can't always her my wife, doesn't mean she's not over there yammering away
I don't doubt folks will hear want they want.
They hear what isn't there and don't hear what is or they need to.
See it every day
Regarding the A/B testing, are you trying to say that that your decades of experience tells you that I can't possibly hear what I claim to hear regarding subtle changes in a circuit design. If so, I would love to know how you came to that conclusion about my abilities.
On the subject of "golden ears", are you really going to tell me that, as a EE, it's your opinion that all ears are created equal and that someone with no audio experience is going to be able to hear the same minute details in the audio spectrum as someone like Rupert Neve? If that's true, then I feel really bad for all those artists who got suckered into paying top dollar to have someone like Bob Ludwig master their recordings.
Based upon long experience of design, testing others who claimed they were able to hear these differences, lots of measurement, study of audiology, that based on that, I strongly doubt your claims. I may be incorrect, but you have not backed up your claims with anything more than assertion.
I never claimed anything of the sort. But ALL humans are prone to all sorts of biases and testing without any way to eliminate them is worthless.
Argument to authority. I've not seen any evidence that Neve can actually hear these differences without knowing what he was listening to.
Strawman.
Beautiful guitar. Not the tone of a P90'd guitar that I like however. I'd have to play it myself. The decay at the top of the upper mids made the highs sound tepid. Weak. There was no resonance around those notes. I wouldn't pick that guitar. I've heard P90s since 1967. This makes the case that the body woods matter.
The argument against body wood starts at an unusual premise. It ignores that everything vibrates. It's as if only in our discussions, only in this small part of the universe only the bass's body is in some other dimension where there are no vibrations.
The argument against body wood starts at an unusual premise. It ignores that everything vibrates. It's as if only in our discussions, only in this small part of the universe only the bass's body is in some other dimension where there are no vibrations.
Yes. I’ve seen the opinion that the generation of the signal is a purely electronic occurrence, the metal string swinging in a magnetic field, so has nothing to do with the actual sound of the instrument. Almost as if the sound is actually synthesized. Makes sense in a way, but then a microphone works very similarly, something vibrating in a magnetic field, and those can have great fidelity.
While I believe that the tone of an electric bass guitar is the sum of its' parts, new posts from some of you smart guys like Mr. Baer have forced me to think about body wood differently.
Maybe it's not that maple is brighter or alder is warmer in tone, but rather how the pickup reproduces these vibrations. It's not like bass pickups are designed for super flat response like high end microphones.
I have a 73' J bass that is loud acoustically and resonant. I wouldn't say the unamplified tone is beautiful or that it is made from "tone wood". It does sound VERY good with Fender 55 pups and also did with Model J's. Other J basses with the same pups; not so much.
Is it fair to say that the pickups are reasonably consistent from bass to bass from major builders?
I'm certain that the metal parts like bridges, tuners, truss, rod, etc. all made in the same relative time frame from the same manufacturer are sonically identical. I'd wager a guess that string manufacturing from someone like DR is also very consistent.
This would leave the wood as the main / only variable although one important builder once told me the neck made a bigger difference than the body. Still about the wood but not the body.
But then I see a video of a bass and a piece of 2x6 with the same neck and pups that sound really close.
Is it the video recording or was that particular piece of 2x6 sonically close to that particular piece of alder?
Very confusing and seemingly impossible to predict tone characteristics from specs.
.02
Edit: @R Baer said "and that someone with no audio experience is going to be able to hear the same minute details in the audio spectrum as someone like Rupert Neve? If that's true, then I feel really bad for all those artists who got suckered into paying top dollar to have someone like Bob Ludwig master their recordings."
I used Bob Ludwig at Master Disc and Jack Skinner at Sterling in my recording studio days because we liked how they mastered records better than the other guys. Were we duped? I think not.
Maybe it's not that maple is brighter or alder is warmer in tone, but rather how the pickup reproduces these vibrations. It's not like bass pickups are designed for super flat response like high end microphones.
I have a 73' J bass that is loud acoustically and resonant. I wouldn't say the unamplified tone is beautiful or that it is made from "tone wood". It does sound VERY good with Fender 55 pups and also did with Model J's. Other J basses with the same pups; not so much.
Is it fair to say that the pickups are reasonably consistent from bass to bass from major builders?
I'm certain that the metal parts like bridges, tuners, truss, rod, etc. all made in the same relative time frame from the same manufacturer are sonically identical. I'd wager a guess that string manufacturing from someone like DR is also very consistent.
This would leave the wood as the main / only variable although one important builder once told me the neck made a bigger difference than the body. Still about the wood but not the body.
But then I see a video of a bass and a piece of 2x6 with the same neck and pups that sound really close.
Is it the video recording or was that particular piece of 2x6 sonically close to that particular piece of alder?
Very confusing and seemingly impossible to predict tone characteristics from specs.
.02
Edit: @R Baer said "and that someone with no audio experience is going to be able to hear the same minute details in the audio spectrum as someone like Rupert Neve? If that's true, then I feel really bad for all those artists who got suckered into paying top dollar to have someone like Bob Ludwig master their recordings."
I used Bob Ludwig at Master Disc and Jack Skinner at Sterling in my recording studio days because we liked how they mastered records better than the other guys. Were we duped? I think not.
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Some suggested reading on the unending debate...
On the Audibility of Electric Guitar Tonewood | JASINSKI | Archives of Acoustics
On the Audibility of Electric Guitar Tonewood | JASINSKI | Archives of Acoustics
Wood is made out of fibers that are glued together by lignin - it's a composite structure. What this guy did is take wood fibers and glue them together with a different glue - he's essentially manufacturing wood (probably a very dense wood).
If it sounds good, it can either be claimed that the wood fibers did that, or that wood doesn't matter, depending on which side of the debate you are arguing. Neither of those arguments is at all persuasive, if you understand what's going on. It's not at all a definitive test of anything in terms of the tonewood debate..
It is a cool project, though.
I think if you attach a vibrating string to anything, it will be influenced by whatever it's attached to. Even that test of the string going from.one bench over an air gap to another bench. It still attaches to the benches. Whatever the anchor points are, those are going to influence the string. Even if it was fishing line as you can't suspend the string in air, that line, anchored to something, a bench, your fingers. Those things will interact with the vibrating string.
I think.
I think.
Best explanation I ever heard was from Paul Reed Smith. He described the electric guitar as a system of passive filters that were incapable of adding, only subtracting. The sum of all those subtractive filters is what makes one guitar sound different from another… ie, that it is the sum of all its parts.
