OK, a bit lengthy, but just my two cents.Gibson Custom Shop is the pinnacle of craftsmanship, quality, and sound excellence. As you may expect, muting strings is a serious task with my Explorer, too. However, these two are my most lively guitars in general, hard to beat for cutting through, and take most muting efforts to avoid unwanted string resonances. It sounds like a feedback, even at low gain and low volume settings. My massive Les Paul Traditional - with a short neck tenon, by the way - and my American Deluxe Telecaster Ash have one each with a certain frequency distinctively growing in loudness for a while after string attack, no matter if fundamental or harmonic. The highly asymmetrical body design may play an important role here - I don't have any other explanation.įinally, guitars may have live notes, too, and they can be as extreme as deadspots. Her dull notes are unobtrusive and hard to detect across all strings and along the entire fretboard. However, and this didn't come as a big surprise to me, my only Explorer - the one from my avatar - doesn't fit into any scheme of all the previously mentioned guitars. Maybe more symmetry of the body means less sustain. My double cuts, SGs, Stratocasters and two Ibanezes, a bolt-on neck and a set-neck guitar each, clearly reveal deadspots there. Les Paul guitars, L6-Ses and Telecasters, have no audible dull note there. Furthermore, the fretboard timber has an audible impact on timbre, but affects deadspots negligibly.Īt the highest frets, that is past the neck heel, guitars behave significantly different. Neck profiles and neck tenons shift them about no more than a half note. Typical SG deadspots are a small third below.
Those of Les Paul guitars, L6-Ses, Stratocasters and Telecasters are within two half notes. Neck, body, materials, design and construction are not the culprits.ĭull notes of many guitars are pretty close to each other. Strats and Teles with typical humbuckers reveal that, too. Try the acoustic sound of a Stratocaster or a Telecaster featuring a piezo bridge - you will find no lack of sustain at all. Wider magnetic fields and neck pickups transduce fundamentals with higher level which makes slender single coils sound thinner, often misconceived as less sustain.
Therefore the term "dull note" mostly refers to a lack of the fundamental in the audible sound. Perceived sustain is strongly based on fundamentals. Even when dried properly, sapwood is less brittle than heartwood. Maple may seem to have less tendency to break, but that could be due to the fact it's all sapwood, not heartwood as with mahogany and most other timbers. All of the pegheads snapped off among pals were mahogany but also were angled, in contrast to most of the maple necks in their possessions. Although Fender rarely uses mahogany, this includes both materials of both Gibson and Fender necks. All I write in the following is due to comparisons of a quite respectable number of guitars, including four or more each of the "Big Four" solidbody designs.įirst a point which honestly surprised me: There's next to no difference in rigidity and stiffness between mahogany and maple necks of similar profiles. No luthier here, so I have no experiences in evaluating wood blanks. I think the thickness of the neck is a big factor, and even more so, when dealing with mahogany, a relatively flexible wood compared to maple, the thickness of the hog neck plays a bigger factor. We tend to focus on the body, but the neck accounts for at LEAST half of the string length, so that long piece of wood sticking out from the body where ONE SIDE of the played note happens is a huge factor. When it comes to the neck, there IS a lot of truth to that. Wood density, stiffness, weight, bridge coupling, materials of the bridge will all have a greater effect on the sound and tonality of the guitar than how the neck is attached. So a note played on an LP will sound the same longer than one on an acoustic, or a brighter sounding guitar. A darker sounding guitar that has more emphasis on the bass and mids will SEEM to have longer sustain because it's the treble frequencies that die out first. One reason the LP has the "sustain" has more to do with the resonant frequency of the guitar, it's weight, the tonality of it. Of all the things that make a guitar have "sustain", neck tenon is way, way low on the list.