Tonewood
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Crime & Punishment
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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.
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 Perian spring, usually reducing to two combatants, who will angrily joust over the importance of the climactic considerations, the fibrous composition of different woods, the effect over time of moisture content, and even the resonant frequencies of different types of varnish.[2]
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.
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 impossible to detect in perfect laboratory conditions. They would be “as the flappèd wings of a Latin papillon” when set against all the other considerations affecting the tone of an electric guitar in real life. See the panel — you needn’t read this in detail: it is included to make a point. The state of the guitar strings by themselves would drown out any “tonewood” contribution to how an electric guitar sounds.
The harmonic resonance of the solid body of an electric guitar will be utterly swamped by other factors. There is no chance a human ear could detect it.
Yet that grain is all that is needed to sustain an epochal battle between good and evil on guitar fanciers’ internet forums. 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.
 A nice piece of tonewood yesterday. Alder, since you are asking.
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==See also==
- ↑ 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”.