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> On every electric guitar, the pickups have dampening springs. From trolling online guitar forums, it sounds like these are pretty important for dampening some vibrations from affecting the pickup.

This is a strange statement. Many pickup designs have springs as part of their mounting mechanism, but it's not for dampening vibrations - it's to allow the height of the pickup to be adjusted.

Certain pickups (notably, off the top of my head, Fender Jazzmaster & Jaguar pickups) don't even use springs for this - instead there's a block of foam placed underneath the pickup that compresses as the pickup is screwed down.

Of course, it's possible some cork-sniffer guitar nerds will claim that they can hear the effects pickup springs have on tone (and the effects of different metals in the springs, no doubt), but these are the same people who will claim that they can hear the difference different glues make on tone, or will swear up-and-down that a real $5000 Klon has a richer and fuller sound than a $100 clone made from the exact same circuit with the exact same components, or that tube amps sound better because "electrons can't survive in a crystal lattice" [0] (so buy my $100K tube amp!), or...

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVTj08qTwGw

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"Tone" is the sum of many little things (and then some bigger things). There can certainly be differences between guitars that seem quite similar. Since part (most?) of "tone" comes from the player there can be subtle "UX" things that have an influence or even the mental state of the player and what they believe to be true.

I can believe that spring mounted vs solidly mounting to the body can make some difference (physics says there should be) but I can also believe the difference can be so small as to be negligible.

People gravitate towards combos that are known to be successful. Since they don't understand the exact mechanisms at work it's safe to say let's have a mahogany body, a certain pickup, mounted a certain way, a bone nut, certain fingerboard material etc. and expect certain results.

In rough order of significance, electric guitar tone is influenced by:

- technique (absolutely the most important)

- amplifier

- pickups + strings

- everything else (debatable whether you can even notice it)

I don’t know if there’s hard evidence but I think folks who think wood and nut types and whatever make a difference are nuts. The relative difference in stiffness between the strings and the body is so huge that believing that the neck and body effect tone seems to me like believing that asphalt vs concrete effects how a tennis net vibrates.

You can definitely hear the difference between many guitar models. Are you suggesting that pickups are the only difference?

Pickups and amps are by far the biggest difference. In an acoustic guitar, sound is produced by the whole body of the guitar resonating. In an electric, sound is produced by the string vibrating in an electromagnetic field above the pickup poles. The ideal guitar string contacts the body at three points along the body (nut, fret, saddle), on ideally as narrow a surface as possible at each of those points.

If you ever get the chance, try putting together a strat with one of those cheap paulownia bodies and compare it to.. well, anything else that is exactly the same except for the body material. To me, the difference is glaring; the paulownia is so treble-heavy it's intolerable.

By what principle does it make it more treble-heavy? This is the part that I haven't had explained to me and I don't understand it. I have a basswood Mustang and it sounds fine with decent humbuckers in it.

Is it as simple as that though?

Ideally you’d have the same care put into making the “cheap” body. So that we can isolate the difference to just the material.

Energy transfers back and forth between the strings and body, which is why the body can generally be expected to have some impact on tone. How much energy transfer goes on? I don't know, but you can use a mechanics stethoscope to at least hear what the vibrations sound like when they transition into the neck and body.

I also suspect that bridge placement makes a big difference in the amount of energy transfer that goes on. Electric guitars generally have the bridge near a node, so that limits the energy transfer somewhat. Basses have the bridge further back; partly that's due to ergonomics, but it also has the effect that more vibrations transfer to the body, which ought to reduce sustain. In a guitar you usually want more sustain, but in a bass too much can be a problem.

Nut material makes more of a difference on open strings, but in general a plastic nut is squishier and it absorbs more energy than something like bone, causing the note not to sustain as long. The saddle is the same way, but plastic saddles aren't typically used in electric guitar so it's not usually an issue.

Strings can make a tremendous difference. Just throw on a set of flatwounds if you don't believe me.

Yes, strings are one of the most important. Also dirty and old strings vs new and clean strings.

Tried to second your comment about playing quietly on a very loud amp but looks like it was deleted. So I'll say it here: at some point I tried playing out of a very high headroom amp, fingerstyle, and it completely changed my playing and understanding of the guitar. I "wasted" so many years on small tube amps that break up right away.

Sorry about that, reposted ;)

Get a decent acoustic guitar. If it sounds good on it you’ll probably be able to make it sound excellent on an electric. Every little imperfection in technique shows on an acoustic. Being more difficult to play only helps when moving the piece to an electric.

That works to a point, but there are many subtleties to electric playing, especially lead, that just don't apply to an acoustic.

It does matter though.. you can tell that a strat is a strat whether it has humbuckers or single coils, and you can tell that a les Paul is a les Paul with any pickups too. The body of a guitar does resonate; you can feel it vibrating against your body. Whereas as long as they’re new, clean strings I can’t hear much difference between brands. Clean vs dirty strings makes a huge difference though.

Of course, you can make something rather NOT like a Strat that sounds like a Strat, too.

I've got a guitar that is pretty unlike a Strat headless, neckthrough, full floating trem with a wide range...and it sounds pretty straty. Of course, I specced it with single coils, a maple neck, an alder body.

The type of wood the guitar is made of seems to make a big difference, from what I can tell. The shape, less so. I’m on the fence about bolt on vs set necks.

How much of what makes a Strat sound like a Strat and a Les like a Les is the wood of the body vs the scale length and the bridge pieces though?

BB King used his whole big body: his guitar resting on his belly with only one finger holding the note and doing a vibrato let the entire entity vibrate in unison.

My experience is:

technique > SPEAKERS > amplifier > pickups + strings > everything else

Most people don’t have a lot of speakers to swap in and out so don’t notice it, or they use combo amps, or they just leave an amp hooked up to the same speakers. If you switch between an open-back 1x12 and a closed-back 4x12 stack with completely different speakers, the difference is HUGE.

For sure.

I run a pure digital modeling rig that can emulate a range of speakers.

The difference between a sim of say, Greenbacks or Creambacks and an Alnico Jensen is night and day.

What digital modeling rig do you use?

That's a good point, I've only ever used small 1x10 and 1x12 combos (Fenders). I've wanted to try a 4x12 Marshall stack for a while but have yet to find the opportunity.

If you're ever tempted to buy a 4x12, you may want to give the 2x12 format a shot first. It's a lot easier to deal with. I got a 2x12 from Avatar and I'm super happy with it.

In terms of the actual soud you hear, pickups, pedals and amps are going to make the most difference.

In terms of whether you want to listen to it, technique reigns.

The best gear in the world won't make you a good player and a good player can make even crap gear sound ok, but I'm not sure I agree with technique being most important to tone.

Not saying that technique isn't important (obviously it is), but the same player with the same technique is going to sound completely different on a single coil going into a vintage combe versus an active humbucker going into a hi gain stack.

It’s a very complex dynamic system: the strings pull the neck, the neck pulls the body, the body is also pulled by strings. The pickups make noise because they vibrate with the body while the strings vibrate in their magnetic fields. And this means pickups influence the way strings vibrate closing the loop. Add the details of the way PUs are wound, the way their cores warp over time, the way wood dries (or doesn’t) depending on how and what lacquer was used, different woods laminated together etc. and the result is a very complex dynamic system. With all such systems, predicting behavior dependence on a minuscule parameter change is a fools errand without modeling. I certainly can’t make any claims about wood affecting things or not. All I know is, that otherwise identical instruments feel and sound different to me and that’s all that matters. Maybe psychology, maybe physics, maybe math plays a role. Let others work on that while I play the blues on my favorite LP.

Keyboard wood choice creates subtle a difference. Bridge structure changes sustain amount, also the guitar building method changes the outcome.

I have an Ibanez BTB670 bass with neck through construction. In practice it's a very long, 35" neck with two big blobs of wood glued for body. Its sustain is amazing. It just goes on unless you mute it with your fingers.

Similarly pickups have a default tone, but it can be tuned upto a point. Out of the box, a BTB670 and Fender Jazz Bass sounds so different in their default, direct to amplifier configurations. Everything has an influence in that tone. Some things have bigger influence, some less, some negligible.

> electric guitar tone is influenced by ...

> I think folks who think wood and nut types and whatever make a difference are nuts.

I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume that you meant “solid body electric guitar” and not just “electric guitar”.

However, anyone who has even come close to an archtop knows your statement to be false - any guitar which does not sound good acoustically will generally also sound poor electrically. This is definitely _more_ noticeable on guitars with air inside them, but is also true of solid guitars.

Yes, I meant solid body guitars. As soon as acoustic resonance becomes part of the sound, you start getting feedback on the strings and a lot of other phenomena. Wood makes a huge difference with acoustics, or else all acoustics would be made of plywood.

I don’t think you’ll see much criticism of people’s personal preferences or habits for their own guitar playing, even for things that are pretty eccentric or obviously superstitious. What is legit criticism in my view is when people are trying to convince other people of these things (and especially selling these things at exorbitant prices by making dubious claims).

High volume and high gain are two different things, often found working together.

Under extreme conditions the little steel adjusting springs are free to rattle at all frequencies and resonate at some. They are so close to the permanent magnets of these high-impedance pickups that you can really hear it sometimes.

Once you know your desired pickup heights, some players have these springs replaced with precision-matched lengths of flexible plastic tubing instead. Gives a much more limited range of height adjustment though.

Somewhat like the whammy-bar springs in a Stratocaster, if you really crank it with their cover off you can hear it if you "strum" the springs. They can also be dampened.

Bad news is that the most important connections to be well-soldered are in the guitar where everything should be solid as can be, with all dissimilar metals encased by the molten lead alloy.

Changing pickups and changing speakers will still have the biggest effect compared to the slight nuances.

One of my favorite "did you know?" relates to early shoegaze bands using "vintage" jazzmaster and jaguars. The bands would buy those, sometimes original 60's instruments, because they were cheap. And the foam under the pickups would be almost gone so the pickups would be almost bottomed out and be much further away from the strings than originally intended. The guitarists didn't know this of course, but that became part of the "shoegaze" sound so people now buy brand new jazzmasters and dump the pickups all the way to the body.

That is super interesting! How was this discovered?

Some cheap (or expensive but old) pickups rattle when you shake them. Here's a tutorial on "repotting" some pickups in wax to fix this.

https://www.projectguitar.com/tutorials/electronics/repottin...

You don't have to be a cork sniffer to hear small things affect your tone. You just have to play very loudly on half-broken instruments - which isn't everyone's cup of tea.

I'm an electric bassist, and springy pickups unnerve me. For one thing, I sometimes rest my thumb on the pickup. So I've replaced the springs with hard spacers, cut to the desired length. As a result, my pickups are solid, and not adjustable.

For another thing, the foam turns into goo after 40 years, which is how long it's been since I set up the instrument.

I think you don't want your pickup to vibrate. Not sure what happens if it does, is there some interference. I bet you could test it, just take the strings off, vibrate the body somehow and listen to the signal closely.

Guitars with dogear P90’s don’t have any springs at all. They’re just screwed right to the body of the guitar. They were made that way because it was cheap, (and then of course as you say it became magic mojo later..)

Same as Gretsch Filtertrons (and most of their other pickups too, I guess). No height adjustment at all.

I don't know about dampening screws on pickups as I don't think I ever saw them; they use springs on each screw to keep them pushed up and reduce screws play, but I'm not sure they're the same thing.

Anyway, guitars with a spring vibrato bridge, have this faint but audible natural spring reverb inside their body which by contact affects the strings too adding more warmth to their sound.

It would be worth experimenting with a set of all different springs so that the force applied to the bridge is the same, but they would resonate on different frequencies therefore making the reverb effect bandwidth wider.

Good thing it's easy to swap the pickups in my guitar, so I can test things like that easily :)

> trolling

Does the author mean ‘trawling’?

Yep, you're right, I do mean that

Hello! Neat articles on the rest of your site too. As a Home Assistant addict, you have given me plenty to read.

you were right

> The basic difference between these two similar terms is that trawling involves a net and is typically done for commercial fishing purposes, while trolling involves a rod, reel, and a bait or lure," and is typically done by recreational fishermen.

The definition misses a common usage - to antagonize (others) online by deliberately posting inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments or other disruptive content.

I wonder though, based on the professional/enthusiast fishing definition, could you call someone who is paid for (digital) trolling, a trawler?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/troll

As lostlogin noted, words have different meaning in different contexts, and the fishing definitions do not apply to online discussions - except perhaps on a fishing forum!

Here's an example:

I went trawling through your HN comments to find something I didn't like so I could downvote it.

Naw, I didn't really do that, I'm just trolling you!

Their used all the time as metaphors outside of fishing.

I've seen "trolling" in the metaphorical fishing sense used in the context of online forums before.

Are you sure that tube amps don't sound better than solid state amps? This is such a common knowledge in the "guitar world" that I can't believe that it's not true. And I swear that I've heard the difference myself...

Edit to further elaborate I've heard that solid state amps are used in metal more commonly because they have a different tone then tube amps which would be more common in a bluesy type sound.

I think this used to be true, but these days tube amps can be very faithfully modeled. E.g., the fender tone master amps sound great.

Even when it used to be true, I feel like what was true was that tube amps sound more like tube amps than solid state amps.

You’ve also got stuff like the keeper modelling amp and newer axe FX models that can sound indistinguishable when coming through good full range speakers.

One thing that can make even modern solid state amps sound bad is crappy speakers. The bulk of solid state guitar amplifiers are combo amps with a single crappy 10” or 12” inch speaker in a cheap cabinet.

"...I've heard that solid state amps are used in metal more commonly because they have a different tone"

Partially false. The general trend in metal has gravitated towards tube amp distortion (and digital modeling of it) precisely because of the different tone and responses vs solid state amps.

As a guitarist there's a certain response you get with a tube amp vs digital and solid state.

As an HN reader, I struggle to describe and quantify this quality besides the generic descriptors of 'response' and 'feel'.

> Are you sure that tube amps don't sound better than solid state amps? This is such a common knowledge in the "guitar world" that I can't believe that it's not true.

Poets around the world throughout history have tried to quantify beauty and failed. I always find it humorous that guitar players think they can succeed when they are far less well-equipped to the task.

However, a couple of points:

1) Old solid-state amps were mostly built to be cheap, so they sucked. Modern ones are constructed significantly better.

2) Vintage tube amps often have more variation (and may or may not have been repaired faithfully which increases the variation) so you occasionally get one that has "magic".

The downside is that most of the amps don't have that magic--you will probably never encounter the "stage queen" personally. Another downside is that you can lose the "magic" pretty easily.

This is something that the vintage amp guys all gloss over. If you got the "stage queen"--congratulations! Of course the other 300 in the production batch don't sound anywhere near as nice.

3) Dimebag Darrell, for example, liked his solid-state Randall sound very much. Who are you to argue?

4) Modern modeling amps are getting REALLY good at mimicking the tube amps. This means that you CAN have that "stage queen" that you will never encounter personally. And you can create sounds that the stage queen can't. Whether they're "pleasing" is a different story.

5) Each individual amp has a "sound"--whether solid-state or tube. The question at the end of the day is: "Do you, personally, like how that amp sounds?" And, if the answer is "Yes", plug your guitar into the amp, play what you want, and tell the poseurs to go pound sand.

> Dimebag Darrell, for example, liked his solid-state Randall sound very much. Who are you to argue?

Dimebag was paid to play Randalls. When the deal expired, he swtiched to tubes.

I think you have this backward.

Those Randall JFET amps sound like "chainsaws" when they break up, and I'm pretty sure he liked that. And he used them from way back when he wasn't famous.

The KRANK stuff came MUCH later in his career and KRANK paid him quite a lot. And there's lots of discussion about how he didn't really like the KRANK stuff all that much.

I will bet you $1000 that not a single person can reliably determinate which tone is from a real tube amp vs a solid state Axe Fx 3 in a blind A/B test. Why spend 6k on a real tube amp when you can have hundreds of physically modelled amps and pedals, not to mention all the effects and "fake" things you can do like modify internal circuits and stuff... makes no sense

I'll take that bet... and I've been playing through modelers for years.

They've gotten quite good, they're about 90-95% of the way there... but that 5% is pretty stark if you know what it is.

That said, convivence, portability, reliability, etc...

Emotion. I have been able to tell a difference between a digitally modeled amp and a tube one but I have failed to do so for my own amp modeled by a Kemper. I suspect good players will be able to tell even that difference. Playing a tube amp is a different experience, you feel the sound as well as hear it, your instrument works with it as well altering the sound further. Also, the pedals as well as the guitar form a singular circuit (when they are unbuffered) that acts in unison. I don’t think there’s an off the shelf model of my ac15, my sunface fuzz and my LP working together. Too many combinations. Once again, music is a very emotional thing. If the knowledge of playing a good roaring tube amp makes you feel better, you’ll play better. If the knowledge of having a reliable tone stack on a usb stick works for you, awesome.

Experienced guitarists can and they have videos all over YouTube. Most common giveaway? Aggressive pick attack. Valve amps and modeling amps respond in subtly different ways. They also respond differently to volume - that's important for guitarists who set their amp near the breaking point and use the volume pot to control their tone.

Having said that, for the average bedroom/small gig player these subtle differences are too minor to bother with. Especially when a modeling amp can accurately emulate so many different valve amps. Sounds good and you can save a lot of money!

BUT - I would be remiss to say that you shouldn't own at least one valve amp. Take the one you emulate the most and buy it. You'll be happy!

My "real" tube amp was only $200. A $200 modelling amp on the other hand doesn't get me anywhere close to this tone. Believe me, I've tried.

This is just my two cents, but if you break it down into two components - frequency response and latency - then it's easier to imagine. With the latest modelling techniques (neural nets etc) it's possible for solid state amps to get very, very close to the frequency response of pretty much any tube amplifier in my experience. Expensive modelling amps and plugins are really nice. The second issue though is latency - when players say it "feels" different playing through a tube amp, my hypothesis is that they are noticing the latency (or lack thereof). Any kind of digital processing is going to impose some kind of delay compared with a tube amp which is a direct electrical signal. I'm aware that the delay will be on the order of milliseconds (sound travels roughly 1 foot per ms through air) and the effect could be replicated by moving the amp further away etc. It would also help to explain the change in sympathetic vibrations within the instrument. Shorter delays and high SPLs could have a non-trivial effect on the resonance of the guitar body for example.

You’re only able to hear these differences if you use silver cables made by elves under the moonlight!

Like these cables: https://mitcables.com

In the 90's they were trying to sell these to guitar players. Nobody seemed to care that if you sent a regular wave down the line and measured it at the receiving end, then did the same thing after chopping out the magical bit of fake electronics, the signal still came out the same.

Yeah, maybe they aren't that important. Using guitar forums as my source of truth maybe isn't the best. In any case, I have them on my guitar :)

Small point - 'tube amps' unconditionally sound better than solid state. It's a marked difference that doesn't really require a trained ear or anything, if you played a few chords on a 'warmed up tube amp' vs. 'solid state' to someone who's never seen an electric guitar in real life, they'd be able to hear the difference.

They sound "different", but not "unconditionally better", and it's not something you can't replicate in the signal path...

The difference is unambiguous and players overwhelmingly chose tubes, all other things being equal (i.e. cost, hassle). Unless you're playing maybe a very clean sound (jazz?) without the most remote hint of warmth or distortion, tubes are it.

It's ridiculous that someone would call out 'tubes' as somehow being a kind of nerdy/fake/poseur guitarist connoisseur melodrama. It's literally the most important point differentiation of amps, to the point that almost all tube amps sound better than almost all solid state (at least in the same class).

While someone might possibly take umbrage that 'tubes are not always better' - there's basically no room for someone to say it's a 'petty concern'.

> without the most remote hint of warmth

I’m struggling to work out what you mean by “warm” here. By a musician’s definition, low impedance pickups and solid state electronics (usually those with input transformers) have produced some of the warmest guitar tones on record. Even a mid-tier archtop plugged directly into a solid state amp produces _incredibly_ warm.

Distortion (in the musical sense), sure.

A trained guitarist's ear might notice the difference, but I highly doubt a crow would care. Also you are overstating the difference, and by no means is your opinion uncontested (just putting this out for the non-guitarists in the HN crowd). Even for those who can identify and prefer the tube sounds, digital modellers like Kemper do exist and do exist and seem to do a fine job in blind tests (see for example Anderton's on youtube).

Are crows known for their hearing?

I don’t agree with that, but you don’t deserve the downvotes - plenty of people agree with you. I think the magic is in the way the output tubes interact with the speaker, mostly. But you can get the same responsiveness with a carefully designed solid state output stage. It’s just a lot harder. The coupling through the output transformer allows the speaker to push back against the output tube which adds a little resonance and changes the frequency response, to duplicate that in solid state you have to use a complex feedback loop.

I think yours is the most proper explanation in this thread as to why if anything is special about tube circuits. The more sane guitarists will commonly speak of "tube compression" - on the power amp side, coming into play as volume is cranked - being the key attribute that is sought after. It is dynamic and noticeable enough that a non-musician could most definitely tell the difference in an A/B test if given a demonstration.

The downside is that all of those 100W amplifiers sitting in hobbyist living rooms often don't get enough power to achieve this without being too loud. The solution is just to buy a smaller amplifier or apply attenuation to the output circuit.

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