Strat-style guitars with alternate control layout?

Gear
#21

Just a general FYI I have not seen any footage of Shawn doing continuous DSX alternate picking. I think the form you’re referring to is actually USX, just done with dart-thrower wrist motion, as opposed to reverse-dart. It’s not as common as using a pinky-side anchor, there are examples of it, like our very own Bill Hall!

The form looks like it would be DSX because of the thumb anchor, but it’s actually USX where upstrokes escape. I think Phil X’s USX technique is similar. There are probably others, Guthrie maybe? I haven’t looked at him in a while but I know I thought that previously. Shawn is maybe the most famous “fast” USX dart-thrower player with a flat form or thumb anchor that I can think of off the top of my head.

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#22

Slightly off topic question :slight_smile:

How do you come up with some of your musical ideas like the ones in the videos you posted? Do you have something in mind you aim for or do you improvise and through a combination of feel and your learned vocabulary put together really cool sounding passages?

#23

:thinking:

Yes, for example, if one has two such extreme samples and exchanges their necks, what happens? I am sure that all of the manufactures know the answer to this question, but what could it be?

#24

The best comparison of this that I have seen was done by Warmoth. They did a whole series, where they swapped bodies, necks, etc. They kept all the variables identical, and I mean identical, so that only one component was changed. These videos are far better than the supposed “debunking” videos where the guy clamps a guitar bridge to a desk or some other stupid thing.

The result of the individual tests was pretty subtle but still audible:

Based on these, I think if you combined a mahogany neck and body you would definitely get a darker-sounding guitar. So the idea that the wood doesn’t matter, I don’t actually buy that at all. I think these tests are hard to refute.

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#25

The red guitar clean tone clip was a composition, I don’t remember how I came up with it. I think I was just messing around with trying to crosspick four-string chord shapes.

The other stuff is just purely improvisational and I’m sure it shows — it rambles a little. Very generally it’s just chord progressions I like, using whatever single-note fingerings are nearby to the chord shapes. At various points I just play whole chords literally so you can hear the progressions I’m using. Other times I’m just outlining the progressions with arpeggiated figures, but you can still hear them.

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#26

I never really questioned it but I generally used to believe whatever I read in Guitar World or what some great player said haha! Definitely “conventional wisdom” that the materials matter.

I’m a PRS owner and back in '03 or '04 I had a really bad guitar accident that I’ll never forgive my bandmates for (or myself, since I left the guitar on a stand and didn’t put it in the case where it belonged). I lived about 1.5 hours from the PRS factory though and I took it to them to repair it. The guy who worked on my guitar was one of their veteran builders. I asked him a few questions about their building and materials and so forth and he definitely was of the opinion that the wood mattered re: tone and even mentioned how they try to make instruments that sound great even prior to plugging in. He was very cool and the whole thing was super “off the record”. I guess he’d still have motivation for hamming that up since their materials are a big reason PRS price tags are high.

Still, given that his day job was building guitars that (at the time, not sure about now) were known for having great quality control, where you could be confident that any guitar of the same make/model would play/feel/sound the same, I think it’s at least a little more evidence that there’s more to it than just pickups.

And again, (on topic) I just picked up that guitar to play it since I haven’t for a while. I don’t like where the volume knob is!!!

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#27

I really enjoyed Aaron’s analysis! Alas, he didn’t answer my ultimate question:

“Can you apply an EQ to make all of those [UPDATE: Aaron] guitars sound the same?”

Watch at around 8:30 to see how ZZ Top tries to make [UPDATE: all of] their guitars sound the same:

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#28

Not really. This becomes more obvious when you compare very different-sounding guitars like a Strat and a Les Paul. There is no way to EQ the twangier-sounding guitar to sound like the Les Paul. You can add bass but it doesn’t sound the same. You end up with a twangy-sounding guitar with more bass. But you don’t get that fat-sounding chunky muted thing you get on a Les Paul. The attack is totally different, whether single notes or chords.

Where that comes from, I don’t exactly know. The Les Paul is mahogany with a layer of maple glued on top (“maple cap”). And I think a mahogany neck too, also glued in. You can A/B ours with any other guitar we have, even strummed acoustically — it has a very obvious low-mids hump that just sounds totally different than anything else we have.

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#29

Sorry for not being clear, I meant to ask a much more limited question,

  • Can EQ make the same model of guitar always sound the same (e.g., Aaron’s test guitars)?

So, can any two Les Pauls be made to sound the same with EQ? Billy Gibbons will tell us “no,” there is only one Mistress Pearly Gates. But I wonder, could he pass a double-blind test between that and a MPG clone? My guess is, “no.”

I don’t even know the answer to this most fundamental question! The answer, however, might be that wood has a lot of non-linear behaviors that depend on how it grows, how it was dried, etc., and this is what shapes the sound, hence EQ won’t work exactly even for the case of Aaron’s guitars.

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#30

Oh really? Sorry my mistake.

I sware I see him doing dsx often. But I guess I’m wrong. The hand position should be good for dsx tho?

#31

Exactly, it’s that hand position. You can do either USX (dart thrower) or DSX (reverse dart thrower) from that setup. If you analyze the phrases he’s playing, everything I’ve ever seen from him is escaping on the upstroke. As far as I know, we have no “clear” footage of him with that nice “down the neck” angle that you’d really need to see if someone is USX or DSX. From the audience perspective looking straight at him, sure. It looks like a DSX setup.

And you’re absolutely correct that you could use his setup and get a DSX motion. It’s similar to what @Scottulus has been up to lately. Pronated, trailing edge grip, but DSX.

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#32

Materials and construction matter, a lot. I worked in a shop for 17 years. 20 of the same make/brand of guitar all sounded different and more importantly, played and felt different. You can’t play a bridge and pickup bolted to a table with any comfort. Fret height and material matter, the truss rod matters, everything matters. It’s cumulative.

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#33

I think thats an excellent point, and something lots of youtube comparsions miss - a $200 and $2000 dollar guitar may sound similar (or at least not $1800 dollars worth of difference), but how do they feel to play?

Ultimately, even if a guitar sounds incredible, you probably will be less inclined to play it if it feels terrible or goes out of tune every few minutes :slight_smile:

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#34

Just built this from Warmoth, I hate close vol knobs as well. I wired it with a five way so you can coil break the humbuckers. Build your own, super fun

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#35

I think this is essentially the same question, to a matter of degree. Some models of the same guitar differ greatly in materials, hardware, etc. Depends on how you define “model”. Warmoth tested two identical telecasters with a different shape of pickup route — individual routes versus swimming pool. There was a difference, but not one you could easily capture with EQ.

Even when the differences are related to frequency response, I think it’s more like you’re describing where they are dynamic and related to the envelope of the note in a way that is not just “this much % more bass” or “this much % less bass”.

The Warmoth tests where they isolate a single variable are so subtle as to be undetectable in a normal playing situation. But I think they are still these dynamic type changes which, when they become more obvious, can’t be effectively simulated with EQ.

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#36

I saw a video a while ago and I think it was this…

Essentially having an EQ pedal totally overrides any material aspect of the guitar.
Is this wrong?

#37

Tim is great. I don’t have time to watch this right now so I can’t comment on what he’s asserting. But I’ve done tons of work with EQ pedals and Match EQ, and I can tell you that applying even sophisticated EQ before the amp is not enough to make two different guitars sound the same.

It’s also really easy to test. Do you have a copy of Logic? Get two very different guitars and DI them right into Match EQ. Play the same sequence of open-string chords and generate the match curve. This will be a much more sophisticated curve than you can generate with a graphic EQ pedal. The overall average frequency response of the two recordings will be nearly identical when you play them back. So for example, you could use the two recordings in the same mix.

However… when you do this, the two guitars will still be easily identifiable as themselves, especially when you start playing single notes. It will just sound like they’re running though the same tone stack / amp.

Again, I’m not familiar with the physics of this. But a static EQ boost or cut in specific frequency ranges is probably significantly less complicated than whatever dynamic process is going on that makes individual notes on one guitar sound twangy and “Strat-like” versus chunky and “Les Paul-like”.

The Line 6 Variax does a host of sophisticated modeling to simulate different guitars. I would guess it’s more than just applying an EQ curve.

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#38

I’ve tried that, EQ can shape the tone to a degree, but there’s something that is physical and the response seem to change depending on the physical position of what you are playing.

A simple example of this is playing open high E, then playing it on the B string, then the G and D strings. They sound different yes? How do you emulate that with simple tone shaping? I don’t think you can because it has to do with the string thickness, length, tension, density, reactivity, etc. It’s a fascinating thing to think about though, and makes me want to learn physics so I can explore it properly.

#39

Plus the amplitude of the fundamental frequencies harmonics. There are so many variables that are never going to align exactly.