This is the story of how (and why) I had to turn my car into a guitar and play.
I’m a country musician from Nashville. But for now I’m popular change a lot of people’s minds about traditional and industry-backed opinions about the factors that affect the sound of an electric guitar. I did it myself, at home, and I’m not even a scientist.
It’s been an interesting journey, and I think everyone can learn from it about the power of experimentation even for non-scientists like me.
When a guitarist plays a note, it travels electrically through all the cables and gears until it is recorded (or put through a PA system) and can be heard by an audience. It is called the last sound of the note guitar “tone” and it’s part of what makes different types of music sound different. There are many, many ideas about what affects the tone of the guitar. The problem is, most of the sounds that got me into playing music in the first place were created using a lot of expensive vintage gear. But I wasn’t born rich, I don’t have any industrial bloodlines, and I don’t have a story to tell about “grandpa kept this old guitar under the bed since 1952” so I was always worried that there was a financial barrier between me and myself. the kinds of sounds I want to be able to make. It would be crazy if I spent all this time perfecting my craft and couldn’t get that sound out of my fingertips because I didn’t have the right equipment.
At first, like most kids, I was a sponge. I knew nothing, so I could absorb everything. I read anything that had to do with the guitar, and collected jokes like talismans that I superstitiously believed would help get rid of bad guitar tone. I thought that if I could collect all the pieces of gear knowledge from magazines and internet forums, then like puzzle pieces, they would eventually all come together, complete the whole picture, and finally make my guitar sound like I wanted it to play. where I wanted, when I wanted. But that’s not what happened.
Instead, the next step on this journey was dissonance. I still sounded terrible half the time and couldn’t do anything. The temptation was to blame the venue or the recording engineer, but I thought my assumptions about the tone of the guitars were off. So I kept diving in and learning more, but I was no longer an empty sponge. Some of the new things I was learning conflicted with old things I had already accepted. I tried to figure out which sources to trust and which to take with a grain of salt, but no matter how I tried to put the “facts” in order, it didn’t make sense and I couldn’t hear any better.
The last part of this journey was hard work. Instead of relying on outside information, I started from scratch and collected the data myself. My goal was to figure out why my favorite guitarist sounded the way he did when he recorded my favorite music. It’s his name JT Corenflosand was an under-the-radar session musician in Nashville, known to his peers for his unique guitar tone and responsible for many guitars heard on the radio from the 1990s until his death in 2020. It was legendary. He used a custom-made baby blue guitar on several hit singles, and the last thing I asked him a couple of weeks before he died was, “What’s that blue body made of?” and he answered “alder”.
Alder is a medium density hardwood that Leo Fender started making into guitar bodies around 1956. My main guitar is ash, not alder. I had to find out if this difference in body wood was partly why I still couldn’t get the JT sound. The traditional belief is that it is all of these things make a difference. Alder sounds different than ash, and both mahogany (often used in Gibson guitars) and maple boards versus rosewood, and the way the neck is attached to the body changes the sound, as well as the type. and the thickness of the lacquer finish will change the tone of the guitar. Therefore, if you take a professionally built guitar with an ash body and maple neck and compare it to a set of guitar strings strung between a bench and a shelf, they should sound different, even though the electronics are the same. So that’s what I did, and this is what it actually looks like:
But what about guitar amps? I always learned that vacuum tubes, pipe biases, the correctors and the quality of the components were the main reasons as was the sound of an amp (even though I didn’t understand what those things were), and compared to expensive flagship model tube amps from legendary major brands like Fender and Marshall. an amplifier made from an old box, built by a hobbyist on boards with solid state electronics, should sound different, even if some points in the circuit remain the same. So that’s what I did, and this is what it actually looks like:
But what about speaker cabinets? I’ve read about the different resonance of solid pine compared to ply birch, and different joinery methods producing different tones, and certainly if you had a professionally built full-range speaker and compared it to something made of styrofoam and caul, they should sound different. , although they mostly had the same geometry. So that’s what I did, and this is what it actually looks like:
But what about microphones? My favorite music was recorded at Ocean Way Nashville with expensive vintage mics, and I’ve been told that the type of tubes and quality of the components and the iron in the output transformers contribute to the sound of the mic. So comparing one of Ocean Way’s vintage Telefunken ELA M 251 tube mics to an amateur mic built out of a pop can and a cheap circuit found on Craigslist should sound different, though capsules (the part that converts moving air into electricity) had a similar frequency response. So that’s what I did, and this is what it actually looks like:
He got this trip traction on the Internetand some have told me that they are still confused between my tests and years of accepted tradition. Why should people with more experience believe me when they say something different?
Here’s the thing: I never asked you to believe. I don’t need The tests speak for themselves. If you read, “It looks like X when you do this,” and then someone actually does it and it looks like Y, then it’s going to look like Y. Hopefully you’ll get as much out of it as I have.
But as I said above, this trip is not about convincing anyone of anything. It’s about making music, and answering questions about making music that can’t be answered in any other way.
Last time I took my car to the mechanic, he said he wouldn’t fix it for me anymore. Everything was rusted underneath, and he told me I shouldn’t put in another dollar. So I knew what I had to do. I had to go through the windshield and play some music. People say that a car shouldn’t sound like a guitar. It is not ash, alder or mahogany. But I did that. And this is what it really looks like:
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author(s) are not necessarily their own. American scientific.
