Test your ears! Let's play a game!

I found that very interesting and failed miserably. Once I could see which guitars he played it seemed as if I could discern the pickup type but that had to be because the visual image of a given guitar caused expectations. I use a luthier shop owned by two guys who both play. One is a phenomenal guitarist. His electric go to guitar is a vintage Tele. I had my Am Tele in for a minor checkup and relief tweak. Using his vintage Deluxe Reverb to check out the results, Jon tore into some Danny Gatton/Johnny Hiland riffs and just lit my guitar up. It sounded great. I asked him for a critique. He was complimentary, felt the neck was superb, that I had a very good example, but that it lacked some of the soul of his which involved many years of searching. He got his out, and no question, on the same amp settings you could hear the wood and the notes just bloomed. The bridge only pickup was incredible. He winds his own pickups, but stated both guitars had essentially the same vintage style Fender specs. He talked a bit about the shredders hanging around places like GC and how with distortion, guitars lose their potential projected resonance and start to sound the same. To demonstrate he played both Teles through a distortion pedal, same settings. They both sustained well, but the nuances were completely removed. They sounded virtually the same. It was the great equalizer if you like that sound, but neither of us do. Jon just happens to be one of those players who can grab any of my guitars, plug into any decent tube amp with no effects and produce more tones with just pickup selection and guitar volume/tone settings than I could produce in a lifetime of trying. This is to say, the video, as interesting as it is, is really more about the distortion pedal being the vehicle that removes the individual guitar's inherent qualities. I would love to have him run the same comparison with a tube amp set up to have just a bit of hair on the tone depending on how far he digs in to a given note, but not much.

That's where I'm at and have been!

LOL-At least I hope so.....

I kinda lost interest in the process when a few of the guitars were unknown to me, plus the multiple Strats. I did pick out a Strat and the ES3xx, surprisingly whiffed on the Tele. It'd be more interesting to me without the stomp box which really homogenized all the sounds with the exception of the one he points out at the end.

He's using enough gain and the pedal EQ section could make any of the guitars sound like that honestly.

That's the point to take away here. When we ask questions like "does tonewood matter?" or "can only a Les Paul sound like a Les Paul" we really should be asking *when*, i.e. under what conditions? As distortion increases the less important pickups and tonewoods are and the more important pedal and amp EQ and speaker become. It's not controversial. We've all had moments with enough gain our pickup selections can be difficult to distinguish (other than bridge vs something else) and we have to look down to remember what position our selector switch is on. Right? Tones we think are obviously different can get lost. And in this video we are only hearing bridge pickups which makes it more difficult for us. We'd have practically hard square wave a guitar tone for a neck humbucker and bridge single coil to become difficult to tell apart.

Of course to us as the player, all our senses are involved, because guitars are physical, visceral objects. We can never separate the hunks of wood in our hands from the sounds we craft and experience. Nor should we. But put an instrument in someone else's hands and close our eyes? Sometimes all bets are genuinely off. And that's OK. There is no existential crisis here.

8-10. The amusing part to me was when he introduced the guitars, he would do a Spock eyebrow raise at the end of each introduction. lol!

Hey there now, enough of that!

We have salt lamps all around our house.


They make really nice night lights, plus they look pretty (Queenie likes that)

And then of course there are the health and air cleansing qualities as a side benefit. 😜

8/10 but got #2 wrong which surprised me