This is the story of how (and why) I had to turn my car into a guitar to play.
I’m a country musician from Nashville. But today, I’m best known for changing many people’s minds about traditional industry-supported opinions about what factors influence the sound of an electric guitar. I did it alone at home, and I’m not a scientist either.
This has been an interesting journey. I think everyone can learn a little about the power of experimentation, even non-scientists like me.
When a guitarist plays a note, that note is recorded (or passed through a PA system) and travels electrically through all the cables and equipment until the listener can hear it. The last note of the note is called the guitar’s “tone” and is part of what changes the way different types of music sound. There are so many competing ideas about what affects guitar tone. The problem is that most of the sounds that got me into playing music in the first place were created using a lot of prohibitively expensive vintage equipment. But I wasn’t born into wealth, I didn’t have a pedigree in the industry, I didn’t have stories like, “My grandpa has had this old guitar under his bed since 1952,” so there was a lot of friction between me and society. I was always worried that there would be financial barriers to it. The type of sound you want to be able to produce. It would be a shame if you spent all this time honing your craft and were unable to get that sound through your fingertips because you didn’t have the right equipment.
Like most kids, I was a sponge at first. Since I didn’t know anything, I was able to absorb everything. I voraciously read anything guitar-related, gathering information like a talisman that I superstitiously thought would help prevent bad guitar sounds. If you can collect all the individual knowledge about your gear from magazines and internet forums, it will all fit together like puzzle pieces to form a complete picture that will ultimately help you achieve the guitar sound you want. I thought. Anytime, anywhere, anywhere. But that didn’t happen.
Instead, the next step on this journey was a cacophony. My voice was still so bad that I couldn’t do anything. I was tempted to blame the venue or the recording engineer, but I felt that my beliefs about guitar tone were misplaced. So I jumped in and continued to learn more and I was no longer an empty sponge. Some of the new things I was learning contradicted 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 categorize the “facts,” it didn’t make any sense or improve my opinion.
The last leg of this trip was a lot of work. Rather than relying on outside information, I gathered the data myself from scratch. I set myself the goal of understanding why my favorite guitarists sound the same way when they record my favorite music. His name is JT Corenfloss. He was an obscure session musician in Nashville. Known to his colleagues for his exceptional guitar tone, he was responsible for many of the guitars heard on the radio from the 1990s until his death in 2020. He had a legendary custom-made baby blue guitar that he used on countless hit singles, and the last thing I asked him a few weeks before he passed away was, “What’s that blue body? What is it made of? And he answered, “It’s alder.”
Alder is a medium-density hardwood that Leo Fender began making into guitar bodies around 1956. My main guitar is ash, not alder. I needed to know if this difference in body material could partially explain why I still can’t get the JT sound. Traditionally, all of this is thought to make a difference. Alder sounds different from ash, different from mahogany (the material in many Gibson guitars), a maple fingerboard sounds different from a rosewood fingerboard, the sound changes depending on how the neck and body are joined, and even the type. will also change. The tone of the guitar changes depending on the thickness of the lacquer finish. So if you compare a professionally made guitar with an ash body and maple neck to the strings of a guitar strung in the gap between a bench and a shelf, they should sound different, even if they are. Same electronics. So I did exactly that and this is what it actually sounds like:
But what about guitar amps? I’ve always learned that the quality of the tubes, tube bias, rectifiers, and components are the main reasons for the sound of an amp (even if I didn’t understand what they were). If you compare famous legendary brands like Fender and Marshall to amplifiers made by amateurs from old tackle boxes using solid-state electronics on breadboards, even if some points in the circuit were kept However, they should sound different. same. So I did exactly that and this is what it actually sounds like:
But what about speaker cabinets? I once read that solid pine has a different resonance than birch plywood, and that different construction methods of joinery produce different tones. It’s true that if you compare a professionally made, sturdy speaker cabinet to one made of Styrofoam and caulk, you’ll hear a difference. Even if they have roughly the same geometry. So I did exactly that and this is what it actually sounds like:
But what about the microphone? Some of my favorite music was recorded at Ocean Way in Nashville using expensive vintage microphones, and it is said that the type of tube, the quality of the components, and the iron in the output transformer all affect the sound of the microphone. Masu. So if you compare Ocean Way’s vintage Telefunken ELA M 251 tube mic to an amateur mic made from cheap circuitry found in pop cans or Craigslist, even though the capsules (the rotating parts) are different, they should sound different. air to electricity) showed similar frequency responses. So I did exactly that and this is what it actually sounds like:
The trip gained attention on the internet, but some say they are still torn between my test and long-accepted tradition. Why should they believe me when someone with more experience says different?
The point here is that I never asked you to believe me. There’s no need for that. The test itself speaks for itself. If you read “If you do this, it will sound like X,” and someone actually does it and it sounds like Y, then it sounds like Y. I hope you get as much out of this as I did.
But as I said above, this journey is not about convincing others of anything. It’s about making music and answering questions about music making that couldn’t be answered any other way.
The last time I took the car to the mechanic, he said he wasn’t going to fix it anymore. He told me I shouldn’t put any more money into it because everything underneath was rusty. So I knew what I had to do. We had to string strings to the windshield and play music. It’s often said that cars shouldn’t sound like guitars. Not ash, alder, or mahogany. But I did it. And here’s what it actually sounds like:
This is an opinion and analysis article and the views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of the author. scientific american.
