Science? Marketing? Or just a load of old Bollock?

[Guest bassman7755]

[quote name='icastle' timestamp='1381587832' post='2241041']
On an acoustic instrument I can see the benefits of selecting and using different wood types to achieve a particular tone.

On even the simplest of electric instruments you have a tone control of some description and at that point I have to question the validity of getting hung up on wood types to control tone.
[/quote]

This is one of those cases where common sense tends to lead in the wrong direction - a bit like how most peoples "common sense" about how putting holes in a speaker cabinet works is general way off because its not intuitive that the air pathway in the port is a resonant entity in its own right.

Yes the final sound is taken from the string on an electric instrument but the sound will be affected by of all of the other vibrating parts of the bass, especially the neck (being a long thin thing its going to resonate quite a lot). Also since the pickup is connected to the body it actually senses the relative string-body vibration and not just purely the string.

A fixed EQ applied to the whole sound cannot replicate the dynamic interaction of the vibrating parts e.g. certain harmonics getting progrssively more deadened or amplified over the course of a note. Its why synthesizers use dynamic EQ functions that work on each note in isolation and vary over time.

Edited October 14, 2013 by bassman7755

[BigRedX]

It's all very well tapping individual pieces of wood to hear how they "ring" but virtually no electric instrument is made from a single piece of wood. Even bodies these days are mostly made of 2 or more pieces bonded together with lashings of glue. And it's not like acoustic instruments where the contact area between pieces is as small as possible, it's great big areas that are touching. As soon as you glue two pieces of wood together they behave differently.

Even taking something as "simple" as a traditional Fender 1-piece neck with no separate fingerboard and the truss rod covered by the "skunk-stripe" already you've glued two different pieces of wood together. And who's to say that when taking the original neck blank simply deciding which of the two surfaces available is going to form the fingerboard and which forms the back of the neck (or even which end will be the headstock) won't make a difference to the final overall sound of the bass?

Edited October 14, 2013 by BigRedX

[Beer of the Bass]

[quote name='Count Bassy' timestamp='1381694874' post='2242545']
It seems odd to me that we have a forum of mostly amateurs (when it comes to bass building) slagging off someone who has been doing it as a career for quite a few years. i.e. "I can't understand how tapping a piece of wood with a hammer can help predict its tone in a guitar, so therefore it must be wrong". Are these the same armchair experts that shout their valued advice to the professional players while watching Man. U. V. Chelsea on the telly?
[/quote]

I can see your point here to a certain extent, as any luthier who is getting a decent amount of work rarely has time to hang around on forums.
Having said that, this guys process just doesn't seem very convincing. My brother is a classical guitar builder, educated at the Guildhall in London and is lately becoming quite well respected among luthiers. I've seen some of the stuff he was studying and experimenting with during his degree, to do with the mass and resonant frequency of various parts of the instrument and its effect on the final instrument, and it all seemed so much better measured, recorded and understood that what the Fender guy is doing. Sort of like the difference between listening to a doctor and a homeopath explaining a health condition (if that's not too contentious an analogy!).

[Mr. Foxen]

[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1381745890' post='2242998']
It's all very well tapping individual pieces of wood to hear how they "ring" but virtually no electric instrument is made from a single piece of wood. Even bodies these days are mostly made of 2 or more pieces bonded together with lashings of glue. And it's not like acoustic instruments where the contact area between pieces is as small as possible, it's great big areas that are touching. As soon as you glue two pieces of wood together they behave differently.

Even taking something as "simple" as a traditional Fender 1-piece neck with no separate fingerboard and the truss rod covered by the "skunk-stripe" already you've glued two different pieces of wood together. And who's to say that when taking the original neck blank simply deciding which of the two surfaces available is going to form the fingerboard and which forms the back of the neck (or even which end will be the headstock) won't make a difference to the final overall sound of the bass?
[/quote]

In real life when you are making stuff from an unpredictable material, the tapping it and listening is so you can pick out anomalous bits, like ones with a crack in, because you want stuff roughly consistent, and tapping will tell you if its hollow, etc.

[oggiesnr]

A quick explanation of the difference between flat sawn and quarter sawn wood is here [url="http://www.horizon-custom-homes.com/QuarterSawnLumber.html"]http://www.horizon-custom-homes.com/QuarterSawnLumber.html[/url].

Steve

[karlfer]

I doubt the wood makes a lot of difference when it's through a GK MB500/Barefaced S12V, then through a compressor/fuzz/envelope then the spotty 12 year old on the desk does his bit (I'm just guessing with the compressor/fuzz/envelope bit mind, cos I'm a cumudgeonly old git who won't have nothing to do with that sort of cheating .