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Post by guildx700 on Feb 7, 2022 23:04:59 GMT -5
Have to wonder if JB Weld sustains better'n TiteBond... JB Weld is superior in all applications...that stuff it the shintz.
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Post by Pinetree on Feb 7, 2022 23:21:54 GMT -5
I'm surprised that Peegoo™ hasn't made a guitar from JB Weld yet.
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MoJoe
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Formerly Known As: quiksilver
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Post by MoJoe on Feb 8, 2022 4:00:58 GMT -5
Best guitar clip on yt in a long time. 😎
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Post by funkykikuchiyo on Feb 10, 2022 10:44:04 GMT -5
Not bad.
I wish the test clips used a clean tone. TOO clean of a tone is useless because you need a bit of amp character - the amp will respond to what is happening in rather specific ways, and you need that. Otherwise everything will have that awful "plug straight into a TASCAM" sound. But, with enough grit it all bleeds together a little too well. A good clean amp at a point of opening up but before grinding was always the best for my tests. Think a Twin Reverb on 3 or 4.
Agree on "sum of the parts". That is why the conversations get so often confused. Everyone will focus on one element (like a tone cap) and think it'll make all the difference, and the argument becomes whether it is a huge difference or whether it is no difference... without realizing it is just one small step that may or may not have room for improvement.
These things can be random. I often sell bone saddles to my acoustic clients. I rarely sell it as a tonal upgrade. Why? I never know how if it'll make a difference. Sometimes it is night and day, sometimes subtle, sometimes I don't hear any difference at all. I notice some patterns (J-45s improve the most for some reason), but you just never know. I can say that bone is going to be superior to plastic every time, but by how much? Who knows. Same with shims. Sometimes tossing a shim or two in there hurts the tone... usually not. Maybe his bubble paper in the neck joint didn't do much here, but in another guitar it is huge. These are fun experiments, but to have any real definitive answers the scale of the experiments would have to be massive.
Complementarity is huge, too. SO MANY custom builds use all of the "good on paper" things and end up sounding awful because they don't understand this. Remember The Simpsons where Homer finds his long lost brother and is charge of designing a car? It is like that. I routinely see custom built guitars or project guitars that cost well over $2k that would get smoked by an average MIM Fender.
You experience "tone is in the fingers" the most if you are in the habit of passing guitars back and forth between people. If you've ever worked in a music store, you know this. Eventually you can recognize your co-worker's playing as well as you recognize their voices. It doesn't matter what instrument, it always sounds like them. You're more likely to recognize the person than the instrument. It isn't just because of predictable licks (Johnny plays pentatonic licks, Billy plays Steely Dan, etc) - they could all be playing the same thing. Some people are chameleons, but it is rare. Most people have a tone, a personal voice.
Here is the biggest thing he's missing: mass and inertia. Most components in electric guitars act as filters in how they respond with sympathetic vibrations. That is how magnetic inductor pickups can sense tonal changes in things like wood and hardware when all they "see" is a guitar string. His "air guitar" was not an air guitar at all. It was a massive guitar with more mass than you could ever have on a guitar (hence why it sounded like a giant steel guitar), because the giant benches acted as inertia blocks.
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Post by Auf Kiltre on Feb 10, 2022 12:09:55 GMT -5
Again, where the "tone is in the fingers" fails to impress is because of the subjectivity of "tone". Where is the line of demarcation between tone and talent? I suspect I could dial in the crappiest tone possible on an amp and hand the guitar to Greg Koch, then have a number of people post "great tone, man!"
And he may indeed make the tone less "crappy" on his approach to his performance. The ear/hand connection making adjustments, the note selection, dynamics, pick attack, etc.
There is a lot of "magic" between tone and talent. IMO.
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gbfun
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Post by gbfun on Feb 11, 2022 3:32:51 GMT -5
Today I noticed the "tone" I seek every day was not there when my fingers were not warmed up. Ordinarily I do a half hour of silent warmup first and "tone" is there from the beginning of my noise adventures, but not today. Once warmed up though...there it was ! This would seem to support that a lot of tone is in the fingers, when warmed up. But dang, there is something about the tone pot and the mysterious capacitor. Mysterious because either the pot or capacitor could be awry...even BOTH. And all the types of wiring designs are blowing my mind. It doesn't help that there are all sorts of colors and sizes of capacitors strung up in all sorts of ways. We all know that 250K pots are darker and 500K pots are brighter and that they have wide variances sometimes. So do the caps ! And that knowledgeable players/techs know how to tailor them for their purposes. I haven't even figured out why a capacitor, that supposedly stores electrical energy, is even in the picture ! But there they are in their differing shapes, sizes and colors, taunting me ! Clearly they work just fine...unless they don't. Then what ? Do they degrade over time like other caps in devices ?? With these cheap sister guitars, where one works well, but is a little dark, and the other that has a reversed cap, and doesn't work completely, well, I guess I'm getting in the weeds of "tone" from where tone pots and caps are concerned. As soon as my cheapo pots arrive. This will be an adventure for sure. Because many have said over the years, tone can be affected by the capacitor AND/OR the tone pot for sure. How big of an affect remains to be seen. Fingers for tone I believe !
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Post by walshb 🦒 on Feb 11, 2022 6:50:26 GMT -5
Personally, I've never been able to create this kind of tone from any amp on a clean setting, without the use of a pedal.
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Post by funkykikuchiyo on Feb 11, 2022 10:44:20 GMT -5
But dang, there is something about the tone pot and the mysterious capacitor. Mysterious because either the pot or capacitor could be awry...even BOTH. Quick summary: Even with the tone control up, it is still a part of the circuit and slightly shifts the resonant peak of the pickup, as well as the Q and height of the peak. So.... chart out the resonance of a pickup, and it'll have a sort of sine wave looking hump in the upper midrange/treble area, which often gives it its tonal character. The cap lowers the frequency a bit and (if I remember correctly) softens the peak. This is part of why .047uf caps don't work well for humbuckers for me - the more windings on a pickup, the lower the resonant peak, and a higher value cap will lower it even more, so you can a lot more "honk" in the upper midrange that way. The materials affect it.... but not by a lot. Caps are naturally inefficient and some amount of the signal will be lost to heat - that is, it neither goes to ground as wired through the cap or pass on by. This creates a VERY slight filter on the tone, since certain frequencies are likely to behave differently. This is why caps come in so many varieties for dielectric materials. Guitar players aren't the only ones who care about this, it is a known effect of these parts. Put caps in the "sum of the parts" pile. Most often it is a very subtle change. The exception is if you have a completely wrong value for the rig. The aforementioned .047uf cap with higher power humbuckers comes to mind - Carvin did this for years, I think that is why people hated Carvin pickups so much. Swap the cap, and they smooth out a lot. It is all tricky stuff. My MIT educated cousin insisted that AC electronics with all of the frequency dependent stuff was one of the hardest things he had to study. For musicians it is a bit different, because we have these things on the side of our heads that interpret frequency. Try controlling/troubleshooting frequencies in a processor through stuff like this, and your brain might break.
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Post by cedarchoper58 on Feb 17, 2022 18:30:33 GMT -5
cool and interesting. the hands theory seems to be out
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gbfun
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Post by gbfun on Feb 18, 2022 4:22:12 GMT -5
Ha. The "hands/fingers" has less voodoo so easier to accept. Thanks for insights funk ! I checked out some Youtube videos on caps and tone as well. I failed to get two sets of guitars to match in tone already, and project number 3 is my best hope. The working guitar has a pot that measures 3.2 on an A500K pot. I tried 10 B500K pots and only got one close(3.0). Then I realized I needed a A500K pot for a tone pot, so 10 cheapies they are in the mail. (I'm hoping for enough variance I can find at least ONE that measures 3.2.) Clearly SOMETHING is radically affected the tone on the non-working guitar and it could be the 2.2 measurement on it's tone pot. I hope. If it's not that, then it's the cap...and that's a whole different rabbit hole. I ordered two .047 caps just in case. And just to make matters more confusing, I tested everything again with a different tester and all values were off by .2. Neither tester sums to zero when the probes are touched like the manual says. Nor do I know how to test the caps. So I'll be looking for some plain brute LUCK !
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Post by jazzmastertele2020 on Mar 11, 2022 10:10:12 GMT -5
That was an interesting watch for sure and admittedly not what I would have expected.
But I would like to see the results with more depth of playing e.g. beyond strumming an open chord and letting it ring out.
Some fast jazzy lead work could reveal differences in attack. Rock and blues lead with a lot of bending and letting notes ring out could reveal some differences as well (e.g. sustain). Or not!
That guy did a really nice job with his experiment.
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Post by guildx700 on Mar 11, 2022 23:10:57 GMT -5
Hell, all you have to do is ever so slightly change the pick angle and everything is literally different.
With that in mind imagine all the variables that come into play.
Fact is there are FAR too many variables to even begin to pin things down...hell, the humidity, temperature, the condition of the strings, your finger tips....their condition at that moment of playing, in winter my playing always sounds quite different than in summer.
And even the word...tone...WFT is tone exactly, far too general of a word to even pin anything down to a science.
Sound, which is what a guitar makes is basically made up of about 7 characteristics:
1. Frequency 2. Amplitude 3. Timbre, (which is a fancy word for "tone", or if we want to get artistic, the color of a sound, still, vague overall) 4. Envelope (which has attack, decay, sustain, release). 5. Velocity 6. Wavelength 7. Phase
In the end what we hear from a guitar, any guitar, electric or acoustic, is far too complex to think it can be defined with the word tone, and worse yet, thinking one can examine and quantify it with certain specific changes. Like a pot, or a cap...ad nauseam.....
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Post by waxbytes on Mar 19, 2022 19:51:18 GMT -5
I don't know, it seems like he ended up making a non-pedal steel to match his regular electric. What does this really mean?
Or did I miss the boat again?
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Post by rickyguitar on Mar 21, 2022 9:28:03 GMT -5
Tone is in the fingers, when they fiddle with the tone knob. Speaking of which, what is it with these people who adjust knobs with every other note. I don't get it. Posers maybe.
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Post by Peegoo 🏁 on Mar 21, 2022 11:13:22 GMT -5
I tend to believe "great tone" comes from somewhere in the brain of the listener, because there are different camps on the topic. Many different camps.
Great tone, as well as terrible tone, is something that affects the listener in some emotional way (happy, sad, angry, relaxed, afraid, etc.), and that is something that can only occur at the individual level.
As guitar players, we are affected in the same manner--except we also have the added benefit of the physical feedback loop (how our technique affects the sound coming from the amp) through playing the instrument, which is something a listener doesn't experience.
Plucking a string in a controlled environment, e.g., a lab, and measuring the results may be scientific--but it's clinical and unemotional. Hearing a truly great player hit that same note is far different because there are other variables brought into play. Really great players understand this and they can manipulate listeners' emotions by note choice, playing speed, harmony, consonance/disonnance, etc. Many composers that score films use this same approach to create tension/release in the minds of the audience, which enhances the film experience.
For example, the sound of buzzing bees (low-pass filtered) was broadly applied in the soundtrack for The Exorcist. This sound is brought in beneath the music and is not consciously perceivable by the viewer...but subconsciously it creates a 'fight or flight' emotional response for the viewer.
Great guitar tone is what you think it is, and anyone that claims they can prove you wrong is selling something.
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Post by Auf Kiltre on Mar 21, 2022 12:21:07 GMT -5
For example, the sound of buzzing bees (low-pass filtered) was broadly applied in the soundtrack for The Exorcist. This sound is brought in beneath the music and is not consciously perceivable by the viewer...but subconsciously it creates a 'fight or flight' emotional response for the viewer. Interesting! I think I was 13 or 14 when I saw the flick. I'll just say I swore off horror flicks for life afterwards. I believe I'm highly sensitive to sounds. A bird can inspire a melody, tire noise at 70 mph may evoke a song because of relative pitch memory. Then and now in retrospect that movie had an unnatural impact on me. As if the Catholic school upbringing to the 5th grade wasn't enough, buzzing bees, SMH. Bastids, lol.
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MoJoe
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Post by MoJoe on Mar 21, 2022 14:38:12 GMT -5
'I tend to believe "great tone" comes from somewhere in the brain of the listener' Good enough for me. 😎
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