Measuring Wood Resonance?

[crankyrayhanky]

People speak of "this has good wood" but I'm curious if there is an objective & inexpensive way to somehow measure resonance? Or is it just a matter of playing the axe and feeling the vibration?
I ask because I have a MIM Strat that I am thinking about investing in some upgrades (BK pickups, new wiring/pots, pro setup)

Years ago I thought this MIM was a killer axe, loaded with tone, one of those MIM gems you hear about. I played it this past week and thought yuck. Good playability, but cheap sound. I don't know if it's worth the investment or not

 

[marvcus]

John Suhr has talked about this on other forums, I think. Do a search here and on HRI or TGP and you might find some good info.

 

[Bill Brasky]

There's videos online of Paul Reed Smith using his tapping method on pieces of wood to determine their tonality. It's definitely audible, the difference between pieces of wood.

You could mount a transducer to one end of a piece of wood and mount a PZM surface mic to the other end and send a fixed tone through the wood to be recorded. That way you could evaluate the way the wood is muting or accentuating certain frequencies or tones.

Or you could ignore all this and just pick lightest bodies made of the species of wood you want, EX. alder for painted body or ash for a clear/stained finish with nice grain. I've read that the woods we now consider guitar tone woods (alder, ash, basswood etc.) weren't chosen by Fender et. al, because any special tonal properties. It was because they were the cheapest, easily available and easy to paint/machine. It's hard to determine how much of the tone of the wood is carried through the string vibrations which are then picked up by the pickup. There are those guitars made of resins/foam which sound fine without any wood.

 

[SLOgriff]

 

[Bob Savage]

I whisper to the wood. If it whispers back it's good otherwise I use it to smoke meat.

 

[Anonymous]

I whisper to the wood. If it whispers back it's good otherwise I use it to smoke meat.

See, I smoke my wood till it burns and is letting out a lil moisture at one end...

 

[glpg80]

sig'ed

 

[thegame]

There's videos online of Paul Reed Smith using his tapping method on pieces of wood to determine their tonality. It's definitely audible, the difference between pieces of wood.

Yeah, any luthier worth his salt knows about the tap tone testing method, but unfortunately its not really feasible for mass production instruments. Takes too much time and not every guitar maker's employees will have the ear for this task.

Here's a guy who made my custom explorer, using the Chladni resonance technique for acoustic instruments. I'm sure the method could be easily adopted to solid body instruments.

 

[crankyrayhanky]

^ That is some crazy video- very interesting

 

[Bob Savage]

sig'ed

Yeah, any luthier worth his salt knows about the tap tone testing method, but unfortunately its not really feasible for mass production instruments. Takes too much time and not every guitar maker's employees will have the ear for this task.

There's also a subjective nature to it making it even more difficult but that aside, mass production cannot tolerate the amount of scrap that would be produced if they did test every piece of wood.

 

[robertkoa]

When I say a Guitar is Resonant - correctly or incorrectly - I mean the Resonance you can HEAR not just FEEL.

If you can hear it -it means the strings are vibrating louder or deeper or brighter or fuller- depending on the Guitar of course- and if you can hear it ( in a quiet room ) the pickups will pick it up.

Technically - if it's JUST the wood vibrating- the pickups don't pick it up.

So you want to listen very carefully UNPLUGGED for the qualities you want- for example a Guitar with a deeper , fatter unplugged
tone will be fatter , deeper plugged in ( assuming the same electronics ) than a thinner sounding ( unplugged ) one of the same type ( both Strats, both LPs etc. for example).

Once you find one with the great unplugged audible resonance- you still have to plug it in to make sure- but if you play 10 Strats unplugged and one is much louder and fuller, longer sustain at full volume- sort of sounding like .011s when it has .010s- that's usually the ONE most people will want-, assuming playability and intonation are good. IMO.

All I'm really saying here is Guitars IMO - even solid body electrics lean very strongly in the direction of their unplugged tones- pretty obvious actually ( why did I make such a Big Deal about it? - Ha.).

So if the wood "rings" or reacts when they tap test it - does that mean it affects the sound of the Guitar ?