• TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
    Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
    Join free Log in
    Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.

Tonewood Experiment.

#145
michaelwayneharwood said:
I was not trying to reignite the tonewood war, I just want to know if anyone would be interested in a system where you could apply the tone and resonance of maple, or rosewood, or limba, or.....well any kind of wood, to your output without modifying your instrument.
Click to expand...
TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION Michael.... I would definitely be interested in such a SYSTEM!
It sounds like you just might have something ingenious, different...even amazing, up your sleeve. And knowing you, it's more than likely something really WORTH listening to!
BUT, it just might take a little intelligence, patients, and (heaven forbid) an OPEN MIND to understand!
Maybe, If you would like to introduce your idea to people here on TB ...a separate thread might be in order?
It's pretty obvious that anyone clicking on THIS thread already have their minds closed and made up...and are ready to immediately debate, distrust, dislike, disavow, or just plain "dis" any opinion or idea that isnt already in line with their way of thinking.
Jeez people.... It's not like anyone is trying to make you convert to....well....a different religion or something! !
 
#146
Will_White said:
I wasn't able to watch the video but I'm assuming from the comments he played one guitar that was one wood and another that was another wood and he heard a difference, that really doesn't prove any thing just that guitar A sounds different then guitar B, it could be a difference in pot values due to tolerances, different pickup winding pattern, different tone cap value due to tolerances etc. There's too many variables in an instrument that can effect things one way or the other to make a definitive conclusion from two guitars.
Click to expand...
Nah, you really need to watch the video. : D
 
#147
My answer is no, not interested. For me it would be a nifty distraction, nothing more. Also Line 6 has already laid the groundwork with the Variax guitar/bass, so there's that. With Midi you can do almost anything. But you'll do a lot of analysis and a lot of programming. I'm sorry but I really don't see the value.
 
#148
@David Jayne - Thanks for the honest feedback - I appreciate it!

@Rôckhewer - Yes, I do have something up my sleeve, though it's not really ingenious. I think the wisest course of action is to just drop the whole thing. I am not interested in the vitriol associated with the tonewood debate, and I see no way that my ideas will do anything but fan the flames. Thank you for your generous spirit and the unwarranted praise, though.
 
#150
David Jayne said:
Alright, well now you HAVE to tell us. You MUST. I AM genuinely curious. I'm an engineer.
Click to expand...
I am happy to share, but I absolutely *refuse* to engage in, or respond to the tonewood debate. Fair enough?

The basic gist of what I have done is use a tactile trasnducer and several species of wood as flat speaker cones, and played a sine sweep through the wood. I recorded the resulting audio using a condenser microphone and used a plugin to convert the audio recordings into impulse responses. Impulse responses (IRs) do not capture compression, distortion, and a few other things.....but it *does* capture the EQ and resonance over a time domain. After initial testing of the IR's I sent some results to a friend. One was "flavored" with an IR gathered from maple and he responded that he not only heard a discernible difference in the "maple flavored" example, but also that the change in timbre very much lined up with the oft lauded acoustical properties of maple. I also discovered that by doing a slight modification of the IR in the time domain I was able to reproduce a fair approximation of a maple box in various sizes. This gave me a "tight" maple sound, a "loose" maple sound, and a "big resonant" maple box to play with. Adding the box IR to an acoustic guitar in tasteful small degrees enhanced the recording and made it much richer.

I am currently working on building a library of impulse responses for my own use, and I will be "releasing" them to the public (free of charge of course) once finished. the IR's can be used in a DAW plugin, or even with a pedal that loads IR's such as the Logidy EPSi. The "box" IR's could easily be used in combination with an acoustic/electric instrument to enable some extra richness at a gig. Your guitar piezo sounds a bit too plastic? Load in an IR in the wood and ambient size of your choice. Want your electric bass to have just a little contra bass flavor? Load in a big boxy IR, and add to taste.... And that's just the start. I have some ideas I want to prove out in my lab, but I believe that the concept can be taken even further where Jay's idea might be something you could actually do.

I am not sure if anyone else would be even vaguely interested in it, but I am. I definitely am.

The list of the materials I plan on generating IR's from is below. I am somewhat limited in the woods I have access to - if I had more species I would do those as well. I also recognize that each and every board has different densities, and other properties, within a species that limits me from taking an average from a large number of samples. Unfortunately financial logistics dictate a small sample set.
  • Alder
  • Ash
  • Ash (Thermally modified)
  • Balsa
  • Basswood
  • Bubinga
  • Cedar (Western Red)
  • Cherry
  • Ebony (Pale Moon)
  • Hickory
  • Jatoba
  • Katalox
  • Limba
  • Maple (Hard)
  • Maple (Curly Soft)
  • Maple (Spalted)
  • Mesquite
  • Oak (Red)
  • Pine (Radiata)
  • Plywood (Birch)
  • Poplar
  • Rosewood (Indian)
  • Sassafras
  • Shedua, AKA Ovangkol
  • Teak
  • Walnut (Black)
  • Walnut (Peruvian)
  • Wenge
 
#151
David Jayne said:
Nah, you really need to watch the video. : D
Click to expand...
I found the video, the link in the thread that was linked was dead, so I looked on YouTube, and I did hear a difference between the two, which proves that the wood has an effect on a solid body electric's tone, it was actually a pretty well thought out experiment only thing I can say is that pickup height might of had a roll in it but I'll assume that it would of been close enough to the same. It doesn't prove however that a certain wood has a certain tone that can be attributed to it but the tones did match what is generally considered a "maple" tone and a "mahogany" tone so there might be some truth to that aswell.
michaelwayneharwood said:
I am happy to share, but I absolutely *refuse* to engage in, or respond to the tonewood debate. Fair enough?

The basic gist of what I have done is use a tactile trasnducer and several species of wood as flat speaker cones, and played a sine sweep through the wood. I recorded the resulting audio using a condenser microphone and used a plugin to convert the audio recordings into impulse responses. Impulse responses (IRs) do not capture compression, distortion, and a few other things.....but it *does* capture the EQ and resonance over a time domain. After initial testing of the IR's I sent some results to a friend. One was "flavored" with an IR gathered from maple and he responded that he not only heard a discernible difference in the "maple flavored" example, but also that the change in timbre very much lined up with the oft lauded acoustical properties of maple. I also discovered that by doing a slight modification of the IR in the time domain I was able to reproduce a fair approximation of a maple box in various sizes. This gave me a "tight" maple sound, a "loose" maple sound, and a "big resonant" maple box to play with. Adding the box IR to an acoustic guitar in tasteful small degrees enhanced the recording and made it much richer.

I am currently working on building a library of impulse responses for my own use, and I will be "releasing" them to the public (free of charge of course) once finished. the IR's can be used in a DAW plugin, or even with a pedal that loads IR's such as the Logidy EPSi. The "box" IR's could easily be used in combination with an acoustic/electric instrument to enable some extra richness at a gig. Your guitar piezo sounds a bit too plastic? Load in an IR in the wood and ambient size of your choice. Want your electric bass to have just a little contra bass flavor? Load in a big boxy IR, and add to taste.... And that's just the start. I have some ideas I want to prove out in my lab, but I believe that the concept can be taken even further where Jay's idea might be something you could actually do.

I am not sure if anyone else would be even vaguely interested in it, but I am. I definitely am.

The list of the materials I plan on generating IR's from is below. I am somewhat limited in the woods I have access to - if I had more species I would do those as well. I also recognize that each and every board has different densities, and other properties, within a species that limits me from taking an average from a large number of samples. Unfortunately financial logistics dictate a small sample set.
  • Alder
  • Ash
  • Ash (Thermally modified)
  • Balsa
  • Basswood
  • Bubinga
  • Cedar (Western Red)
  • Cherry
  • Ebony (Pale Moon)
  • Hickory
  • Jatoba
  • Katalox
  • Limba
  • Maple (Hard)
  • Maple (Curly Soft)
  • Maple (Spalted)
  • Mesquite
  • Oak (Red)
  • Pine (Radiata)
  • Plywood (Birch)
  • Poplar
  • Rosewood (Indian)
  • Sassafras
  • Shedua, AKA Ovangkol
  • Teak
  • Walnut (Black)
  • Walnut (Peruvian)
  • Wenge
Click to expand...
Thats something I'd be interested in, what tactile transducer were you using? I haven't looked in a while but the ones I saw were mostly aimed for "subwoofer" duty.
 
#152
I like my guitars. They sound pretty. I don't know why. I don't care why. I only care that they sound pretty. Interesting concept, though. It would be cool to know how mixing a body with layers of cherry and maple with walnut for top will affect the tone for the pickups I have in a mahogany bass of the same design. But it won't change the fact that they sound good
 
#153
Will_White said:
I found the video, the link in the thread that was linked was dead, so I looked on YouTube, and I did hear a difference between the two, which proves that the wood has an effect on a solid body electric's tone, it was actually a pretty well thought out experiment only thing I can say is that pickup height might of had a roll in it but I'll assume that it would of been close enough to the same. It doesn't prove however that a certain wood has a certain tone that can be attributed to it but the tones did match what is generally considered a "maple" tone and a "mahogany" tone so there might be some truth to that aswell.
Click to expand...
I don't think we saw the same video. Or maybe our senses of humor don't quite align. : D
 
#154
Will_White said:
Thats something I'd be interested in, what tactile transducer were you using? I haven't looked in a while but the ones I saw were mostly aimed for "subwoofer" duty.
Click to expand...
I picked up a pair of these from Parts Express, and recorded everything with a Blue Yeti. I recognize that the tactile transducers, as well as the microphone, adds some of their own "flavor" to the sound. The thing that sold me was that even with my ghetto recording setup the maple IR influenced a previously recorded bass line and imparted aural characteristics associated with the acoustics of maple lauded by acoustic, and other, luthiers. I similarly applied a cedar example and the influence was much more subtle, but the bass sounded a bit bigger and punchier, and no "mud" was introduced in the process. The argument can easily be made that you can achieve the same effects using EQ and reverb, and I agree. What I have come up with is not a silver bullet, does not prove anything about tonewood, and serves no real purpose to people who are not attracted by the idea....at the same time I think it's cool, and I will get a lot of mileage from the work.

I will be building a small sound isolation box with some sound proofing foam to provide as much isolation as I can from room ambiances when I get the parts int he mail. If I can get my hands on other wood species I will add those to the list. Everything will be provided to the public for free, and if you find value in the end product there's no risk.

As with many of the things I post on TalkBass my main purpose of putting this out there is so that the information is available to anyone who finds it helpful, or valuable.
 
  • Like
Reactions: David Jayne
#156
One other point to make - the IR's stack nicely. I tested having two IR's in different places in the signal path, in varying amounts, and I found you could add some cedar to get some punchy defined bass, and then brighten it up a tad with some maple. Or punch it up with some cedar, and then add a touch of a big shedua box to introduce a bit of a hollow body sound. The possibilities are endless. Again - a competent audio engineer can elicit the same effect with EQ and verb, but most amp simulators use IR's captured from real cabinets and microphones. There's something visceral about using a real source.

The process of creating IR's has really caught my interest and I am planning on capturing some decidedly odd spaces. I have plans to capture the inside of various skulls, for example. My cousin by marriage is a band director at a high school - if I bribe him well enough he might allow me to spend some time in his classroom and capture IR's from all of the string instruments so I can create a library of real body ambiances such as violins, cellos, and contra basses. I might get brave enough to take a trip to a local acoustic guitar shop and do some guerrilla recordings of acoustic guitar bodies as well. I know a guy at the local harp shop - that has some interesting possibilities as well.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Will_White
#158
David Jayne said:
So you hope to translate this to electric bass... ? Interesting stuff for sure. How does this work for us?
Click to expand...
That's a fair question. "How does this affect me as a builder?". I have several ideas that translate directly into a custom bass or guitar:

1. A modular system similar to Jay Jillard's concept. Signal comes off the the pickups and is split to route both to a blend pot and though a small amp driving a tactile transducer, which excites the wood, and then is captured and routed to other side of the blend pot. You can dial in a little, or a lot, of the tone of the module. Modules can be changed to get the tone you like.
2. Imagine an acoustic bass that has very little in the way of projection. If you put a sound board in the middle of the bass you can do something similar to item 1 you can possibly get bigger projection, and if you add in a small condenser mic in the body you can get some seriously good sounding tone that eliminates the need for a piezo for a gig. If you like the sound of your piezo, but want to add some resonance to the output signal you use a blend pot to mix and match your tone.
 
#159
One last thing in regards to convolution and IR technology. I mentioned in an earlier post that you can't capture compression, distortion, and other dynamic effects using impulse responses. That not 100% true. You *can* capture those types of dynamics using Invalid Link Removed products, but since they have the corner on the market with this tech it means that you have to use their product. They have a free product and if I can manage to get IR's captured using their software, and exported for other users, I will create a set of these on top of the "normal" IR's.
 
#160
Are the impulse response that are captured, and then impressed on another instrument more than just an EQ curve? Do they effect the sustain and decay? In other words, are they time-based?

You know, whether or not one believes in tone wood, a set of time based EQ tone palettes might be interesting to use. I would venture to say that there may even be a market for such a system.
 

Latest posts

Top Bottom
Back