Tonewood
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Crime & Punishment
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Triago: Ho, Ho.
Let not thy witty fool, nor his foolish wit
Besmirch the fruited science of th’ academy.
“A little learning is a dangerous thing” —Nuncle: Yet not half so dangerous as a lot.
Triago: — So sayeth Pope, you know.
Nuncle: But not the one in Rome:
Queen: Good ser knight: art thou drunk upon the Pierian spring:
A hypoxic draft that suffocates the brain,
So deep no shaft of light can bring it round again?Triago: My conjecture comports a grain of truth
As pure and true and golden—Nuncle: — but yet no more roundly causative
Than are the month-past flappings of a Latin papillon
Upon a brewing Filipino typhoon.
A decades-long debate rages amongst electric guitar fans about how the material from which a solid-body guitar is made affects its tone. There are similar debates about hi-fi interconnects, real ale, chalk-content in soil for vineyards and tests for the presence of exogenous insulin, but JC happens to know more about electric guitars than those other things, so the humble axe will serve as an example.
The argument runs like this:
For:
The precise shape, size and composition of an electric guitar’s body meaningfully affects the guitar’s tone. The sound will change depending on whether the body is made of ash, alder, basswood, pau ferro, chipboard or perspex and even the grain and density of the wood will affect its harmonic resonance.
Against:
Bullshit.
There will then ensue a long and increasingly hostile flame war — sometimes multi-handed but, as they descend into the unfathomable depths of the Pierian spring, usually reducing to two combatants, who will angrily joust over the importance of climactic considerations, the fibrous composition of different woods, moisture content, and even the resonant frequencies of varnish.[2]
Now: all stringed instruments do rely on the vibration of a string anchored between fixed points. The string’s vibration will depend on the sympathetic vibration of the materials it is constructed from. To some extent. In the same way that every object exerts a gravitational force, there will always be some sympathetic vibration, whatever the material.
So there is, if you will excuse the expression, a grain of truth in the tonewood argument.
But no more.
For these “harmonic vibrations” would be so minute as to be imperceptible even in laboratory conditions. They would be “as the flappèd wings of a Latin papillon” when set against all other factors affecting how an electric guitar sounds in real life. See the panel — you needn’t read this in detail: it is included to make a point. But the state of the cleanliness of the strings by themselves would drown out any “tonewood” contribution. That is not even to mention the amp, pickups or room.
Yet that grain of truth is all one needs to sustain an epochal battle between good and evil on an internet forum. And once you engage in that debate — once you accept the question is not whether tonewood affects the sound, but by how much — there is no end to the argument. You have completely lost.
The tonewood argument is a form of prosecutor’s tunnel vision. It is — if you will again excuse a pun — to fail to see the wood for the trees.
See also
References
- ↑ for the love of all that is holy let us not get onto the topic of polepiece construction and ageing of copper wire
- ↑ This is not a joke: it is widely contended, by tonewood aficionados, that modern polyurethane “suffocates” the tone in a way that nitrocellulose lacquer does not, which explains why vintage instruments, which were varnished with the latter, sound more “open”.