A Secret Trove of Rare Guitars Heads to the Met
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
In each hobby you will find people that are in it for the gear more than anything. I play the same guitar since the past 15 years and I know exactly how to play to make it sound a certain way. I wonder how the people who buy a new guitar each month even manage to get to know theirs..
There is a German youtube channel by a former university professor of acoustics that picks many of the myths surounding electrical guitars (especially those repeated in the press) apart scientifically (website: https://www.gitarrenphysik.de/). I am not aware of any english resource on that topic that goes into the topic even at a fraction of the depth. He made laser measurements of various parts of the electrical guitar to measure power dissipation and model it, influence of the whole electronic chain, etc. If there is an aspect to the guitar, he probably measured it.
Like did you know that strings don't just vibrate up/down, but also left/right and how this directional change plays out when you pluck a string differs depending on the guitar? Yeah me neither. Did you know wood has next to no influence on the sound of an electrical guitar, despite being called "tonewood" by the press?
https://www.youtube.com/@JimLill/videos
The "air guitar" demonstration in his first video memorably shows that the wood doesn't matter.
One non-obvious thing that does affect the sound is the type of pick (a.k.a. plectrum). Both the shape and the stiffness of the pick affect the sound, and playing with fingers sounds different too. I don't see a lot of discussion of this, even though it's cheap and easy to experiment with (you can buy sample packs of many different picks). I recommend trying it if you haven't already.
Also when using a pick, the angle at which you strike the strings with the pick affects the tone. Such as keeping the pick flat versus angled to the strings. I don't really know how to explain it well in words hopefully that makes sense.
This all makes sense. The farther you go away from the vibrating string the less things matter. Whether your guitar is made of garbage wood or from the finest tropical one, doesn't matter one bit in an electrical instrument, as the wood vibration just dissipates more or less energy. So if you don't want to dissipate energy (to add more sustain) just use the hardest, stiffest material possible like in a grand piano and you end up with a cast iron body. The same is used in mills and similar machines to stop precision manufacturing tools from becoming inaccurate due to vibration, so we know it works.
In the world of popular guitar magazines the "folk wisdom" is literally the polar opposite of what happens in the real world: They say, you can feel the wood vibrating, that means it has a lot of sustain. If the wood vibrates that means energy that should be in the string is now in the body. If you want your string to sustain as long as possible, you'd need to keep all the enery in the string...
I love playing guitar (and bass for that matter), but the amount of unchecked bullshit advice floating around is stunning. If you want to sound a certain way, this bullshit gets into your way as a beginner and that is sad.
There's a lot to playing music that is hard to transcribe onto paper.
I have one of their telecasters, and it’s on par with a squier or a cheap fender, provided that you get it set up properly.
When I got to that cheap telly, I initially had planned to replace the pick ups, but guess what, the stock pick ups are good actually.
For amps, that strongly depends on your personal taste, but usually you go used. For example, if you’re into metal, you can get Peavey ValveKings for low $, they just require a good speaker. There are also several cheap clones available. YouTube has you covered with demos.
Also, digital amps have become good enough, even those software only, for example GarageBand. You just need some audio interface.
If you're just practising at home, the Positive Grid Spark 40 is an astounding bargain at under €250. It sounds great out of the box with a simple interface, but connect the app and you've got near-endless tonal options and tons of really useful practice features. It also does double-duty as a good Bluetooth speaker. Spend a little over €250 on something like the Fender Mustang LT50 or the Boss Katana 50 and you've got a versatile modelling amp that'll just about keep up with a drummer in a rehearsal room.
And that amplifier: <https://www.thomann.de/de/harley_benton_tube15_celestion.htm>
The amp is based on the Monoprice Stage Right 15W which is a clone of the Laney Cub 12R which is losely inspired by the Vox AC15. So you get a decent 15W tube amp with a real spring reverb for 260 Euros. There is not a lot with that amount of bang for the buck out there.
If you're playing in a loud band it might be a little underpowered, but it is perfect for playing at home, and if you want it to be any wilder than it is, just use pedals in front of it.
Honestly, that’s part of the fun for some of us, even early on. I’ve been playing guitar for a while now, and while I enjoy it, the repetitive nature can sometimes get dull. Exploring new gear and chasing different tones has been my way of breaking through those ruts.
Yes, it’s expensive and it eats into practice time — no doubt. But some of us are just wired to enjoy the experimentation. I eventually found a setup I really like, but I don’t regret going through the gear phase. It kept things exciting and helped me stay connected to the hobby.
So the reality of what forms a sound matters to me because I like to be in control of the result. And that means that I can't rely on the countless wrong poetic fantasies of people in the market to sell more gear, consisting of cosmetic stuff that doesn't impact the sound.
That does not mean I spend no time researching gear, quite the opposite. I just complained that what people think impacts their sound isn't what actually impacts their sound, because they have been given factually wrong mental models. And I know they are factually wrong because I experimented with applying them in practise.
E.g. one laughable mental model is sound per material analogy. You use silver in a cable (a good conductor at least), so that must therefore make for a "silvery" tone (typically they hear that in the high frequency range somewhere). Oh no the manufacturer used metal in the speaker enclosure? So now it sounds metallic and sterile. They used wood? Warm and rich. They used spongy mushrooms? Probably very psychadelic, you get the idea. Reasoning on the level of a kindergardener.
And that is it. No measurement, no blind A/B test, just mumbo-jumbo and fools who swear they could hear the gras grow if someone just tells them there was gras growing while the lawn is made of plastic.
For silver cables you can do a null test. Run the same signal through 5m of copper and 5m of silver and subtract one from another, while carefully making sure the levels match. The difference will be some noise down there at the edge of your audio interfaces recording capabilities. And that difference is absolutely inaudible. But what about the different higher conductivity of silver? Just use more copper. If there is any topic we know a ton about it is how electrons transmit charge in conducters and so far no impactful special frequency and dynamic-changing properties have been found in a piece of wire.
Meanwhile everybody skips room acoustics, cause that is boring and labour intensive and involves having to understand how complex sound behaves in confined spaces and how to measure that. And lets not ponder why Hifi people use unbalanced connections..
It is easier to sell someone highly pure silver cables than it is to sell them bass absorber their room would actually need to listen to the music some sound engineers mixed in decades ago on NS-10s.
TL;DR: I just find it sad that people can't just enjoy music listening or music making without buying into esotheric nonsense that does not describe reality as it is. Music is already magical. The hear it is made on and the stuff it is played back on is purely physical however. And that does not take away from the magic, IMO it adds to it.
It does mostly matter for noise though, yeah.
Also, active guitars largely get around these problems, as do low-impedance pickups.
I find it weird that people chase all these different pickups and sounds instead of just getting a modern, active, flat-response pickup (See Cycfi's Nu & Spectra series) and EQing and compressing to the response they want.
In any case, your comment on a 200 Euro guitar reminded me of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/$100_Guitar_Project
And to confirm your “and above all playing” part, a couple of years ago I updated my 90s epiphone s-type (“Gibson’s Strat”, ha!) with ‘68 Strat pickups (reissue, obviously, I’m neither rich nor that crazy) and I told a friend “I now sound just like the guy that tunes Mark Knopfler’s guitar” :)
Yes, exactly. Does a guitar that costs €1200 sound and (equally importantly) feel even better? Yes, in my opinion - but with modern instruments, diminishing returns do set in quite quickly.
I noted this comment from the guy in the article: "All the guitars they made after [1964] were junk.” Utter nonsense. I can't stand that kind of boomer gatekeeping.
The problem with buying an inexpensive guitar is mostly psychological. Do you really want to pay for a $200 setup on a $100 guitar? People don't and so they end up learning on a guitar that could be so much better for a small investment.
Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine fame is well known for doing amazing things with budget tools[2].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcBEOcPtlYk
It's almost entirely EQ and distortion, applied in various orders (the exact signal chain matters, because EQ after distortion sounds different than distortion after EQ). By getting this right you can simulate any tube amp tone with solid state to a high degree of accuracy.
The heads aren't so cheap these days, but not particularly hard to come by
Needless to say, this is probably not a thing anybody is looking for.
That is because the new cheap guitars can be (depending on the manufacturer) really good nowadays. I have to admit I felt a bit of envy with my family member, because during my youth this was a fucking struggle, with weird Squires that had all kind of problems and twisty necks and whatnot.
Of course the cheap guitar doesn't add the placebo effect of having a guitar with the real Fender logo to it. And if you're struggling to get out good sounds you might feel that the only thing that will make you sound better is that Fender logo. Probably everybody goes through that stage at some point during their instrument-playing. But as of now I am good enough of a guitar/bass player that I stopped caring about brands for the most part. There is big brands with shit products and small brands with good stuff. Brands do not matter nearly as much as the press or guitar snobs say.
There is some hope -- if you look for interviews with Billy Gibbons' "tech" guy he talks about how they ran his favorite guitar (Pearly Gates) through a SA while playing an open G cord. Then for every other guitar he plays live they program an EQ spectrum to bring it to the same spectrum as that baseline guitar. So they all sound the same (because it's only EQ that differs between pickups not 1960s magic smoke).
Playing guitar and collecting gear are two different hobbies. This is not the only hobby like this. The people who play magic: the gathering are not necessarily the people who collect MTG cards for the sake of collecting. There's some overlap, yeah, but these are still distinct hobbies.
Yes it does. I have two EC-1000s made in the same factory with the same electronics that sound different because one has a maple top and neck whereas the other is straight mahogany. I have two guitars from another brand with similar (but not identical) construction that sound different because one's made out of ABS plastic instead of plywood like the other. Hell, I've swapped necks on a guitar or two and that had a fairly pronounced effect on sound too. I think this "counter-myth" has blossomed because people are tired of the cork-sniffery about collector grade PRSes and such. As a guy that plays sub-$1000 guitars that are modded to hell and back for live use I don't blame them one bit for being put off by some of the more ridiculous internet discourse around collector's grade instruments.
That being said pretty much everything affects the tonality of an electric guitar even before you get into the signal chain. To me the more pertinent questions are whether 1) more expensive or exotic woods consistently sound "better" and 2) wood is the biggest contributor to the tonality of a solid-body guitar. I would answer "no" to both of those but then again I haven't played a tube amp live in the past decade so I clearly have no taste :o).
He’s worth $7 billion, now.
The curators are an unusual mix of artist, scientist and engineer. They all have PhDs, and apparently there’s a concept of tenure.
Also the Met is just incredible. It’s my favorite thing to do in the city. I’m not sure if this exhibit is the same one that I saw, but I remember seeing an exhibit of old instruments, like guitars from the 19th century and even older than that iirc.
There’s also an amazing weapons exhibit that I believe is permanent. Some eccentric rich dude collected them over a century ago, and when he died it was donated to the museum. Everything from royal armor to samurai swords. Very cool.
This is fun, it looks like they have many important prototype and early production guitars.