questions about gear

[shiggityshwa]

Yeah HHH is superior to universal imo, because it has a couple more ounces of wood on and will increase sustain a tiny bit but still letting you do whatever the hell you want with it. My favorite is SSS because then you can have single coils or hot rails, but keep a lot of the wood that is gone with the other routes and letting you keep sustain.

[etingi]

admin said:

i have a few questions about pickups and amps and some other things.

5. how do bolt-on and glued necks differ?
6. why don't single-coils sound good with heavy distortion, and why don't they last long in ringing out?
8. does electric guitar body shape effect sound?
9. is there a list of common wood materials used for guitar bodies and why they are used (what sounds they best make)?
12. for acoustics...does body shape & neck position effect sound?
13. i once saw a guitarist with a strat with humbuckers...how do you modify a strat like that?
14. why is the third strat pickup angled?

thanks, guys.

This might fly right over your head, but I'll give it a shot anyway.

5. Bolt-on necks allow for easier production and replacement, glued-in (set) provide a little more sustain and transfer of resonance, especially if hide glue is used on the joint. Hide glue shrinks over time, becomes brittle, and forms a more natural bond between the two pieces of wood than Tite-Bond or whatever other stuff companies use. It's like the nitrocellulose of glues. Major companies don't use it anymore except for some runs of acoustics that Gibson did a little bit back because they say it's too hard to work with. It's a load of bullshit though. If the people building the guitars took one hour to learn to use it, they'd be fine. Since it isn't commonly used anymore, it's now a good selling point of super-high-end acoustics. We're talking like over $5K.

Anyway, then there are also neck-thrus. It's when you build a neck that's the length of the entire guitar, and then glue "wings" onto either side for the body. Because there's no joint by the neck pickup, you can carve the heel real smooth, like on a Jackson SL1 Soloist for example.

Really though, once you start adding distortion, pedals, etc, the differences become less and less noticeable. The main reason Soloists have neck-thrus, I believe, is for the access to the upper frets. I mean, come on, they have a Floyd Rose, high output pickups, a poly finish, and are usually used for high gain metal. You can't tell me that Jackson makes them neck-thru because they want that little bit more sustain.

6. Single coils do sound good with overdrive, but not "distortion". Plug a Strat or Tele into a tweed Fender, JTM45, etc, crank it up, and it'll sound amazing. Plug a Tele into a Triple Rectifier and it probably won't be the sound you're looking for.

The sustain of a guitar has to do with a lot more than just the pickups, although the pickups do alter it when playing through an amp. If you really want to test the sustain of a guitar, play it unplugged because natural sustain is due to the types and amount of woods used, bridge/tailpiece type/material, nut material, fret size, neck joint, string angle at the headstock... pretty much everything except the electronics. And the player too, of course. Using good vibrato will make a note ring out a lot longer than if you just hold it.

8. The shape doesn't necessarily affect the sound, although the materials used does.

9. Mahogany, alder, ash, and maple are commonly used for bodies. Maple and mahogany are commonly used for necks. Rosewood, maple, and ebony are commonly used for fingerboards.

www.warmoth.com/guitar/options/options_bodywoods.cfm

12. What do you mean by neck position? Body shape on acoustics does affect the sound, yes. Whether or not you can tell the difference between, say, a standard dreadnought and a cutaway dreadnought of the same model is up to you. A lot of other factors come into play though -- the strings, the bridge/bridge pins material, nut material, top wood, back/sides wood, neck/fingerboard wood, and the player (more so for acoustics than electrics).

13. You just use a router and make a rout in the body big enough to fit a humbucker, either cut your current pickguard to fit the humbucker or buy a new one, and then solder the pickup to the electronics mounted on the pickguard. The pickup is mounted on the pickguard with a screw on either end.

14. The third Strat pickup is angled because having the pole pieces closer to the bridge on the treble strings give it a brighter sound. It's the same as when you pick near the bridge, the sound is brighter and more metallic.

Also, I'm not 100% sure on this, but the string spacing gets wider the closer you get to the bridge, so if the bridge pickup is the same width as the other two, then you'd need to tilt it to the side some to get the pole pieces to line up under the strings. This is why Eddie Van Halen had his bridge pickup angled on 5150. It was a modified Gibson PAF, and the spacing on Gibson humbuckers doesn't match the string spacing on most Strat-style guitars because of the difference in the nut width. This is why if you look at Seymour Duncan pickups, for example, you'll see regular spaced humbuckers and F-spaced humbuckers. Regular are for Gibson style guitars and F-spaced are for Fender style with tremolos. Eddie wanted to use a PAF though (because, put simply, they're the shit) so he just tilted to the right a bit so everything would line up correctly.

[freya]

thanks, man, that helped too.