What a difference a neck makes

It reminds me of a customer a couple years ago...

A regular customer had two high end vintage-style Strats. He loved the sound of one and the feel of the neck on the other, so he wanted us to put the neck he loved on the guitar body with the sound he loved. Didn't work... the resulting guitar sounded worse than either of the original two guitars, and he had us switch it back.

Many years ago I knew a guitar teacher who had an SRV Strat, but kinda hated the signature name plastered all over the guitar. He put the SRV neck onto another body (Kramer? Charvel? I don't remember, but pretty far removed from the original), kept that guitar, and sold the guitar with the remaining pieces. I don't remember the guitar that well, but it was striking how much it sounded like an SRV Strat, even though the only thing "SRV" about it was the neck.

It is both incredibly counter intuitive and also makes complete sense. We think of the "body" as having all of the tone, and the neck is utilitarian. But, the body is basically a big inertia block and mounting board for hardware and electronics. The neck exists under a larger proportion of vibrating string. The neck is also an "inertia block", but because it is long and thin, it is more likely to have sympathetic vibrations and color the tone. If we changed the size and shape of a body, or how it is routed, we would expect changes in tone, but for some reason we expect to dramatically change neck specs and leave the tone unchanged.

The body has "hardware" and we know hardware impacts tone. But, we forget that the neck also has "hardware". There are tuners, and there is also a truss rod. Truss rods are sometimes small bars, other times they're larger, more complicated pieces. Frets? Whole other avenue.

The body is often made up of multiple pieces of wood, and sometimes multiple species, like on a Les Paul. A neck is almost always made up of multiple pieces, often dramatically different species. The fingerboard is a big reflecting surface, and the thickness of the fingerboard can make a difference to the resonance and density of the overall neck. We hear about fingerboard materials, but other than that it doesn't get talked about much. People obsess over 1-piece vs 2-piece vs 3-piece vs whatever bodies, but no one thinks about the pieces of wood in the neck?

This is (part of) why I feel so strongly about not chasing the "thin neck for fast licks" dragon. I don't think it is as simple as "chunky neck = toney goodness", but making every neck thin is like deciding every guitar out there, whether a super Strat, Tele, Les Paul or Rickenbacker 360, needs to have a Floyd on it. We all know routing out a guitar for a Floyd is going to change the sound, even if you get some convenient benefits from the process, but few people stop to think about what dramatically changing neck specs will do. Of course, the other part of my anti-skinny neck tirades is that I think a fuller feeling neck is actually BETTER for ergonomics, but that's another rant.

I have liked chunkier necks ergonomically for some time now and my experience has been they have more stability (less seasonal affected disorder) and produce a better sounding guitar. The one exception has been an early partscaster build where I went all out and ordered a AAA Birdseye maple neck with all the appointments from Warmoth. Things never sounded right no matter what body I attached it to. It's made me avoid Birdseye maple all together, but who knows. I'm not into going down the Jim Lill bunnyhole over the anatomy of sound. If I was doing research to better my efforts as a builder then maybe I'd pay more attention. But I'll stick to what has worked for me and learn the little lessons that come along. This latest endeavor with the neck change has reinforced the notion to not be too quick to indict or sing the praises of a particular brand/style of pickups.

That's a good description of how wood works on electric guitars. Some people get themselves confused because when the pickups only sense things that are magnetic, it can seem like wood should make no difference, but it is a question of what frequencies they absorb effectively dampening the string, at what time, and what frequencies they may really like and actually cause the string to vibrate more relative to other frequencies. Hot spots and dead spots are the most blunt manifestation: the neck's own resonance might cancel out certain frequencies, and your bass might seem to disappear in the mix every time you try to hit an Ab, but your F might be crazy loud. That's why it is best to think of woods in electric guitars as just being different kinds of inertia blocks, like the trem block on a Strat bridge.

I'd take exception to saying there is zero evidence on the body making a difference, and it seems self-evidently false... though maybe he just means evidence within documented studies. Just yesterday, I was able to tell one of our sales guys exactly what a Les Paul would sound like relative to other Les Pauls based simply on the fact that it was crazy heavy (over 10 lbs) and they played it and confirmed that I was 100% correct. I would say we need to modify our understanding of how wood works in the body... it is possible that there are no differences between a chambered Les Paul and a non-chambered Les Paul if the weights are identical, for example.

Auf Kiltre - how big was that first neck? I've found a point of diminished returns with neck chunk. I like the boat necks/fat backs that are 1" all the way down, but the sweet spot seems to be medium-ish in the open position, and a steady transition to just under 1" around the 12th fret. Lots of mid-60s Strats are in this range, as are most variations on the "'59" profile. Lots of modern carves stay thin right up until they have to transition to a heel or a body joint, and those ones tend to be kinda wimpy.

Also, Warmoth has a few other things going on. Their modern build necks use a dramatically thicker fingerboard, their truss rods are much heavier than most other brands, and the pegheads are thicker. Warmoth neck buyers have a habit of going for heavy locking tuners instead of lighter sets, which will further add to the mass. So, it makes sense to me that a boatneck from All Parts might be a little lighter than a Warmoth neck. Part of going chunkier/heavier is moving the resonance up into the stratosphere, which can make the tone really dry.