Tested: Where Does The Tone Come From In An Electric Guitar?

What people said

fenomas · 2022-04 · Strong recommendation

An adjacent topic, since TFA is about acoustic guitars and this is about electric, but I recently came across an excellent video where a guitarist tries to determine exactly which parts of an electric guitar affect its tone. He did it by methodically swapping parts around on a cheap kit guitar and comparing the sound to a quality model, and he winds up finding the body shape/material appear to have no effect at all. He even gets closely matching sounds out of a "guitar" with no body at all, by keeping certain other elements (strings, pickups, electronics) the same as the real model. Really surprising results! Source: [VIDEO]

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gadtfly · 2026-03 · Recommendation

If this is appealing to you, check out this guy who ran a much more systematic set of experiments on even more sacred and sensitive targets: Tested: Where Does The Tone Come From In An Electric Guitar? [VIDEO] Tested: Where Does The Tone Come From In A Guitar Amplifier? [LINK]

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dmbche · 2023-07 · Recommendation

[VIDEO] If you're interested, this is pretty fascinating - he shows experimentaly that the guitar itself has little to do with tone. Other than that better made instruments could (no promises!) hold their tuning a little better, but you can cheaply buy locks or spend some money having that re-done. More than this and I have a hard explaining what a "pro" guitar could do to help an amateur. You get the same tones out of it, pedals and amps have much more impact on sound anyway. And seriously, unless you have musical training, you'll never hear the difference between epiphone and gibson, or squier and fender.

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