5/21/2025 at 7:02:56 AM
As a guitar player (20+ years) and a audio engineer/electrical engineer/dsp programmer one thing that really keeps baffling me about the field of guitar playing is how much myths about what affects the sound in which way exists. With people trying to get the sounds of their stars by buying products that were made in the 60s and somehow assuming the wild quality fluctuations and effects of the recording chain during that time don't matter all that much. Meanwhile you can get extremely good (studio quality) sounds with a 200 Euro guitar and a 250 Euro amplifier and the rest you can do with 2 or three effects pedals and (crucially!) the correct strings, instrument setup and above all playing.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?
by atoav
5/21/2025 at 10:52:08 AM
We should be grateful for the people that get a new guitar every month since I bet they keep that industry alive. I don’t think it would survive on professional musicians alone, though I could be wrong. We would certainly have professional luthiers, but I’m not sure about production lines…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” :)
by fipar
5/21/2025 at 3:06:40 PM
You're probably right, their obsession makes it cheaper for the rest of us. So maybe I should have just kept silent haha.by atoav
5/21/2025 at 3:56:39 PM
People with more money than reason to play who can't seem to find "the one" have been supplying me with excellent second-hand guitars for years.by marpstar
5/21/2025 at 7:57:35 AM
Jim Lill has several excellent videos on Youtube testing guitar tone myths: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.
by mrob
5/21/2025 at 2:15:12 PM
I play electric bass and this comes up a lot in that community. Besides using different picks where you pick/pluck the strings also greatly affects the tone, whether it's right over the picks up, towards the bridge, near the neck, etc.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.
by tarentel
5/21/2025 at 2:44:05 PM
I saw a note on sheet music (for guitar) like "ATTACK the strings". I wasn't totally sure what that meant. I reached out to the composer. He described it as being about the angle of the pick in his mind (but still wanted to leave it open to interpretation).There's a lot to playing music that is hard to transcribe onto paper.
by dfxm12
5/21/2025 at 2:42:15 PM
Yeah that also makes sense. String tension/diameter/length/hardness matters a lot, so does the "striking" technique and position, pick material, if you play with fingers, whterher your skin is smooth or you have hard skin on these fingers (I heard Less Claypool (Primus) puts super glue on his fingers before each concert).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.
by atoav
5/21/2025 at 8:50:00 AM
> You’ll find people in every hobby who are more into the gear than the actual activityHonestly, 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.
by zabil
5/21/2025 at 11:15:07 AM
That’s been exactly my experience with photography as well.by etrautmann
5/21/2025 at 8:57:03 PM
Don't get me wrong here, I am deeply interested in gear and sound, after all I design and build my own modular synthesizer modules, guitar pedals, speaker cabinets and so on.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.
by atoav
5/23/2025 at 3:37:20 PM
Good cables (Though maybe not silver, that shouldn't matter much), ironically, actually do make an audible difference. Just good, oxygen free, low capacitance cable is what you want. Because guitars are high impedance and how tone pots are wired and the input your plugging into (Be it a pedal, amp, or interface) also usually being high impedance, how much capacitance (Not resistance, not really) matters a lot in where the natural cutoff of the passive LRC circuit your making. Go listen to some demos on Youtube just swapping cables, it matters.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.
by vegadw
5/21/2025 at 2:36:25 PM
In each hobby you will find people that are in it for the gear more than anything.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.
by dfxm12
5/21/2025 at 10:54:51 PM
> Did you know wood has next to no influence on the sound of an electrical guitar, despite being called "tonewood" by the press?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).
by alexjplant
5/21/2025 at 12:53:11 PM
Similar history and similar peeve here. It's much the same as many other fields though -- the people who think loudspeaker cable is directional, and so on.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).
by dboreham
5/21/2025 at 8:13:45 AM
What is a "a 200 Euro guitar and a 250 Euro amplifier" setup that you recommend? Honest question.by lrmunoz
5/21/2025 at 10:51:49 AM
You can't go wrong with a Yamaha Pacifica, although you'll pay closer to €250 - the build quality is consistently excellent and the 112J is extremely versatile. Harley Benton (Thomann's house brand) offer a very wide range of guitars at under €200 with shockingly good specifications, but the quality control is a bit more patchy, so I'd suggest getting a guitar-playing friend to look it over or paying a local guitar store for a setup.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.
by jdietrich
5/21/2025 at 6:13:14 PM
Seconding Harley Benton and the Positive Grid. I bought an HB-35 B Stock (a return) and a Positive Grid Spark Go (I'm a bedroom player atm). With setup, the whole thing set me back 350 USD.by jackthetab
5/21/2025 at 9:03:30 AM
A Harley Benton or similar guitar paired with a 100 Euro audio interface plugged into a computer that runs Neural Amp Modeler has been the perfect setup for me https://www.neuralampmodeler.com/by mahmoudhossam
5/21/2025 at 10:27:52 AM
I play guitar to get away from computers!by rwmj
5/21/2025 at 4:46:25 PM
My experience is that amp simulators sound pretty close to a valve amp, but they don't feel and react to your playing like one. This may or may not matter to you. That said, you are never going to be able to turn up loud enough to get the sound in an average apartment, and digital works better for me volumeby jimnotgym
5/21/2025 at 11:12:36 AM
But everything is computer!by mahmoudhossam
5/21/2025 at 8:45:15 AM
I own some Fenders and Gibsons, but over the last couple of years, Harley Benton produces very good guitars that are very affordable.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.
by 0xPIT
5/21/2025 at 2:49:39 PM
That guitar: <https://www.thomann.de/de/harley_benton_hbt1952.htm>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.
by atoav
5/21/2025 at 4:35:59 PM
That's a solid amp for the money, but IMO you get even more bang for your buck if you can snag a used Boss Katana 50. Loud enough to play in a band, hundreds of possible tones, excellent software for recording and customizing tones while plugged into your PC.by entropicdrifter
5/21/2025 at 8:21:11 AM
Not sure about the amp, but the Yamaha Pacifica I have is decent. It's been used in a stage show successfully (not played by me), and the artist was very happy with it.by gtr
5/21/2025 at 4:48:25 PM
A second hand Squier Classic Vibe strat and a second hand valve amp.by jimnotgym
5/22/2025 at 9:00:15 AM
Yep. I have a genuine 1959 Strat that feels and sounds amazing. I also have a 2024 Squier Debut that goes for $130 new and sounds every bit as good, though it doesn’t feel as nice. Action is perfect and it stays in tune.by tomcam
5/21/2025 at 12:02:22 PM
> you can get extremely good (studio quality) sounds with a 200 Euro guitar and a 250 Euro amplifierYes, 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.
by Supernaut
5/21/2025 at 1:53:27 PM
I agree with your take. I've definitely owned and played some excellent sub-$1000 guitars, but at the lower price points things it can be frustrating to deal with things like low-quality tuners, improperly shielded components, etc. I'd say 90% is about pickups, strings, and frets. Most of the 60s guitars I've played were not great tbh.by jhpacker
5/21/2025 at 3:01:48 PM
The channel I mentioned measured the internal cabling of an 60s Les Paul and it had a WILD capacitance swing changing with humidity (more than 100% of the orignal value). Meaning the capacitance-induceed resonant frequency of the guitar would shift strongly over the course of a gig.Needless to say, this is probably not a thing anybody is looking for.
by atoav
5/21/2025 at 1:13:11 PM
Justin Sandercoe (Justin Guitar on YouTube) did a series[1] where he bought the cheapest electric guitar on Amazon (£60 I think) and then had a guitar tech friend of his do a complete setup. Many times through the series both Justin and the tech remarked at how good the £60 guitar is.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].
by criddell
5/21/2025 at 2:06:28 PM
Toms amps were anything but budget. Electric guitar tone is 75% a good tube amp with rest being pickups and intonation.by cpursley
5/21/2025 at 3:57:26 PM
Jim Lill has a video testing amp tone: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.
by mrob
5/21/2025 at 5:15:51 PM
Sure but it’s only been relatively recently that the modeling and solid state stuff has gotten close. And even then, it’s still not quite right. Also, even a good solid state or modeling amp is gonna cost a decent amount. Luckily, we have more choices than ever, and I even have a tube powered preamp that’s absolutely killer paired with an IR cab response loader.by cpursley
5/21/2025 at 2:31:25 PM
The amp in that photo is a 20 watt solid state practice amp. Those usually aren't very expensive.by criddell
5/21/2025 at 4:39:37 PM
Electric guitar tone is ~95% the tone of the speaker, distortion (if applicable), room/mic positioning, and EQby entropicdrifter
5/21/2025 at 11:38:10 PM
iirc a 50W JCM800 into a Peavey 4x12The heads aren't so cheap these days, but not particularly hard to come by
by arprocter
5/21/2025 at 4:50:34 PM
And a million dollars of studio equipment to record itby jimnotgym
5/21/2025 at 4:56:54 PM
Close mic it with a SM57 like your favorite recordings probably did. You don't need any fancy room treatment when close micing. Or just run the direct input through an amp sim and cab impulse response. Unless you're going for a 1950s sound where mechanical speaker distortion actually matters, IRs capture the cab/mic sound very well.by mrob
5/21/2025 at 2:59:01 PM
That was my point. I play a US Strat, that now costs more than 1200 Euros. The guitar I got for my family member plays just as good. And that isn't because my Strat plays bad, I play that instrument since 15 years and it is setup correctly etc.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.
by atoav
5/21/2025 at 11:27:36 AM
Spoke like somebody who doesn't own a Rickenbacker.by Applejinx
5/22/2025 at 9:25:21 AM
Not following?by tomcam