A decades-long debate rages amongst electric guitar nuts about how the material from which an electric guitar is made affects its tone. There are similar debates about hi-fi componentry, real ale, assay tests for the presence of exogenous insulin but JC happens to know more about it than those other things, so it will serve as an example. It runs like this:

Crime & Punishment
How important tonewood is in the grand scheme of things
Factor Considerations
The player Attack
Picking style (pick or fingers)
Type of pick
Right-hand dampening
Left-hand vibrato
Instrument Fixed or floating bridge
Tremolo type
Glued or bolted neck
Nut composition
Bridge composition
String gauge
String age
Electronics Potentiometers
Capacitors
Resistors
Pickups: Single-coil/P90/humbucking[1]
Cavity shielding
Length of cable to the amplifier
Stomp-boxes Distortion
Compression
Modulation
Delay
Reverb
Equalisation
Amplification Type: Tube/transisitor/digitial
Class: Class A/B/A-B
Power: 15w-100w
Preamp settings
Power amp settings
Tone settings
Speaker cabinet Open- or closed-back
Speaker size
Speaker configuration
Post-amp signal processing Compression
Delay
Reverb
Equalisation
Public address system Mixing
Foldback
Volume
The band What instruments
What they play
How loud they play
Position relative to guitar amp
Room Size
Acoustic properties
Natural reverberation
How many people are in it
Ambient noise
A nice piece of tonewood yesterday. Alder, since you are asking.
Index: Click to expand:
Tell me more
Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Queen: Hark: a clammy ditch. How deep!

Nuncle: And yet with our temper’d syllogies
We dig it deeper by the minute.

Queen: And behold: fair Triago —

Nuncle: Of open’d mouth and mind,
Well-endowed to drop right in it.

Enter Triago popping his head out of the ditch muttering to himself

Triago: Who wouldst die, wouldst die therein about it?

Queen: How now, Triago?
How fares thy latest batty postulation?

Triago: Most promising, Majesty.
I have it ratified that wren’s eggs,
Broken thus, betray yet unacknowledged villainy.

Queen: How so, Professor?

Triago: Experimental rigour, Ma’am. Nothing less:
A hundred men, detained at your pleasure, were took
And each one bid to strike an egg against a pan.
Every wren’s egg broke. The lot. Not one exception!

Nuncle: Pray, give me air!

Queen: What provenance the eggs?

Triago: I bid each man poach one from the mother’s nest:
Insurance that their hearts were indubitably black.

Queen: Poor Mrs. Wren must be furious!

Nuncle: Not quite so wild as is this correlation spurious.

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.

Triago: (aside) Yet am I here caught, a spider’s prey
Wrestling ’gainst the sticky silk
And by mine own dim efforts
Binding e’er further to my criminous fate.
In this sinking oubliette of mine devise
Am I enchain’d: alack! There is no gate.

Otto Büchstein, Die Schweizer Heulsuse

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 follow a long detailed and increasingly hostile flame war — sometimes multi-handed but usually reducing to two core combatants as it descends further into the unfathomable depths of the Perian spring, where jousters will debate the merits of the climactic sonsiderations, the fibrous character of different woods, the effect over time of electric currents and aluminium-nickle-cobalt alloys (from which pickups are built) on the moisture content, and even the resonant frequencies of different types of varnish.

Now: all stringed instruments rely on the vibration of a string anchored between fixed points. The string’s vibration will indeed depend on the sympathetic vibration of the materials it is constructed from. There will be some sympathetic vibration of any material.

But these vibrations are as the wings of a butterfly in an Amazon forest compared with the other things affecting the tone of a struck electric guitar string. These include (you needn’t read this;it is included to make a point:



See also

  1. for the love of all that is holy let us not get onto the topic of polepiece construction and ageing of copper wire