This should make an interesting discussion (possibly old) and may even ruffle a few feathers...

What is the key ingredient to sustain in a solid bodied electric instrument - the wood or the pickups?

Please support your personal opinion with something other than...'cause it sounds like ...'

MHO = the magnetic field of the pickups is key, the hardness of the wood 'may' be a factor as solid anchor for the bridge and nut, but theses are lesser effects...

Reasoning: the core principle of electric guitar sound generation is based on Lenz's Law ...

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C.LYDE
http://soundcloud.com/c-lyde

IMHO it is a combination of: the shape of the wood, the kind/hardness of the wood, the construction of the guitar. I think the pickups play a minor role unless you overdrive your amp. When you play a solid body guitar unamplified, you can hear the diffecence in tone and sustain between different guitars!

not a physics expert so can't give you the science, but most people would say a fixed-bridge, string-thru, neck-thru guitar will give you the most sustain, followed by glued-neck, fixed bridge, then bolt-on/fixed bridge, and trem-equipped guitars after that. i guess to do with minimising transfer of the energy of string vibration out of the guitar itself...pick-ups will help in overdrive situations, but then fretting/vibrato technique is as important i'd say.

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My metal music! My other music!

Sustain is in the guitar.

It's not the wood, construction, hardware, pick-ups, magnets, strings, set-up. It's in how a luthier balances all of those variables to deliver sustain relative to how important it is relative to all the other considerations.

IMO the real problem is summed up by the assumptions built into the question asked in the topic. A guitar is more than the sum of it's parts, and that's the whole point. The reductionist view of looking at the ways different parts contribute is important, but it is only of value when you can put it to one side and instead look at the instrument as a whole. A guitar is a complex system assembled from other complex systems, linear models of 'changing A results in a predictable change to Y' are completely inappropriate. Inapplicable at best, and downright misleading at worst.

Andy

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When the going gets weird, the Weird turn Pro.

Spam link removed...

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Ohm's Law states, "Your PA isn't as powerful as you think it is".

Edited by James Perrett (24/05/12 09:05 AM)

Quote mhaigh:

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not a physics expert so can't give you the science, but most people would say a fixed-bridge, neck-thru guitar will give you the most sustain,

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Yep, that's why I have a Yamaha SG2000!

(which also carries my GK3 Roland wart)

Edited by Pin (20/05/12 09:58 AM)

Zen Guitar!
+10!
It’s the sum and the assembling of the different parts that defines ‘sustain’.
Cheers!

IMO 'sustain' is a parameter relevant to the musical task at hand.

As a wise man once said, the sound of an acoustic guitar is inherently tragic, in that its note will die away soon - and the challenge lies in squeezing out every once of feeling you can in the short lifetime of that note... and I'm sure no one will disagree that an acoustic guitar is in no way inferior to an electric.

More sustain is not necessarily better...and all other things being equal, a guitar that sustains longer is not necessarily better than one that doesn't - except for a Gary Moore type solo, maybe...

Good question.....Spoke to an exhibiting luthier @ the London Bass Guitar Show and asked him the difference in tone from the different woods he used. His answer was that there was v. little difference, only really noticable if you went from a v. dense to a v. lightweight wood. Tend to believe it's the sum of the parts including the player, who probably contributes over 50% to the tone.

Sorry for the late contribution to this thread. Don't normally post here but this topic caught my eye.

I should say from the outset that I have no experience of building guitars. My only experience comes from playing many bass guitars professionally for nearly forty years.

IMV There are many factors that contribute to sustain. If we ignore the feed-back effect then Pickups would be way down the list of important factors. If a string dies after 4 seconds then no pickup in the world will make a string sound for longer - sustain needs to occur acoustically before the electrics can weave their magic.

Wood type would make a difference, as would (to a lesser degree) bolt-on or thru-neck.

Good quality strings would make a fairly significant difference.

But, IMV, the biggest improvement to sustain can be had by having a good quality, well adjusted bridge and an overall well setup instrument. To maximise sustain strings needs to vibrate unimpeded. If a string makes any contact with other frets then that will lessen sustain - Of course this may mean the action is too high for comfort, so a compromise is usually needed.

IME the sustain of an instrument can be fairly accurately judged even before it's plugged in.

Sustain comes out of the ends of my fingers, and only stops when I tell it to.

Quote Alfie Noakes:

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Sustain comes out of the ends of my fingers, and only stops when I tell it to.

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The lack of smiley suggests that you're serious. How do you get an open string that would normally die after 3 seconds sustain for 8 seconds?..I'd be interested to know your technique.

Wood we be an extra factor in the sustain but isn't it relative to tension and resonance of materials?

Call me an old fraud but I'm more concerned with resonance than sustain, in my guitars. Which again is a product of the sum of its various parts and how they got put together. If I'm looking for more sustain I tend to step on my compressor. Works for me!

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Strictly project and just for fun

Quote KevetS:

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Quote Alfie Noakes:

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Sustain comes out of the ends of my fingers, and only stops when I tell it to.

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The lack of smiley suggests that you're serious. How do you get an open string that would normally die after 3 seconds sustain for 8 seconds?..I'd be interested to know your technique.

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Hang on, why do you need an open string to sustain when you can fret the same note somewhere that will?

In any case, my strings sustain forever until I tell them stop. I can hear the three guitars in the next room now....sustaining....

Without effects and concentrating on how the guitar is made - This guy explains things really well:

Frudua

Quote Alfie Noakes:

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Hang on, why do you need an open string to sustain when you can fret the same note somewhere that will?

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Open chords?

Fretted note or open string - sustain will suffer on a poorly built and setup instrument.

FWIW I am firmly in the "Sound/tone is in the fingers" camp, I also think that too much importance is often placed on sustain - there are more important considerations when choosing an instrument. These other "important considerations" have probably been discussed a million times here.

Quote Music Manic:

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Without effects and concentrating on how the guitar is made - This guy explains things really well:

Frudua

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Essentially, what I said towards the beginning of the thread. And I'm afraid he doesn't explain it well at all. It's clear he has a good conceptual model of what is going on, but he makes no effort to really explain it. Just tells you that what he does is good.

Andy

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When the going gets weird, the Weird turn Pro.

To understand how I achieve the answer you must understand the basics from which I draw my conclusions.

First, the known. It is possible to change the pickups, it is not possible to change the wood.

Second, the unknown. You probably have no idea of where the wood came from, when it was harvested or what the climate was like during the time the tree was growing. Closer rings results in denser wood. Denser wood results in better sustain.

Third, the pickups will age over time changing their sound. Wood will not.

Now where all of this comes into play is that I firmly believe that any guitar, even the best hand built PRS or whomever, will not exhibit as good a level of sustain if it has never been played. I remember a young man suggesting that I could buy a PRS Dragon and put it in my closet for 20 years and triple my investment.

Well, he shouldn't be selling guitars because like a bomb is only made to go off, a guitar is only made to be played, and without being played, even if all of the technical specifications are met, the guitar will always sound like a piece of crap.

For you see, the guitar is but one piece of a system, that system being a player, a guitar, and an amp. And if a guitar doesn't get broken in over a period of time by playing, it will set into a piece of wood with strings stuck on the front. It cannot BECOME a good guitar unless it is played, and I mean frequently and for an extended period of time.

If you're going to pick up a guitar to simply play (don't know what that actually means), then make it one of the least played of your guitars. If you have multiples of relatively new guitars then rotate them, but play them.

There is no such thing as a 20 year old guitar that's a player when it spent the entire time in the case in the closet.

Just my thought.

Roger W. Norman
SirMusic Studio
http://rwnorman.typepad.com/rwnormans_beer_food_and_p/
http://www.reverbnation.com/rogerwnorman

Quote RWNorman:

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Third, the pickups will age over time changing their sound. Wood will not.

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Er...

Quote RWNorman:

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Third, the pickups will age over time changing their sound. Wood will not.

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Not true, according to Paul Reed Smith.

Quote RWNorman:

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...even the best hand built PRS or whomever, will not exhibit as good a level of sustain if it has never been played.

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.

Apart from anything else, are these two statements contradictory?

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Ohm's Law states, "Your PA isn't as powerful as you think it is".

For what is worth I think active pickups take most of the wood out of the equation. A friend had 2 guitars - Gibson USA and Epi Les Pauls, both with EMG 81/85. They sounded virtually identical. The Epi is built from several pieces of mahogany pieced together and joined in an industrial process (glued?) while the Gibson should've been one piece mahogany. Essentially no sonic difference.

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www.descentintomadness.com

I'm very interested in this discussion because I'm on the point of retiring my very heavy 1978 Tele because it is too heavy for me now I'm stuck in a wheelchair. I'm off tomorrow to buy a virtually new (pre-owned but mint) Chinese 'Modern Player' series Tele which I tried out the other day. I'm kind of worried that the lightweight pine of this new instrument won't sing like the dense ash (I think- though could be alder) of the old one. Realise there are all sorts of other factors i.e. pick-ups etc.
I won't really know until the next band practice. Anyhow, I'm not selling the old one. Worth quite a bit, I'm led to believe, but the market is not a seller's one at the moment.

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http://www.kevadams.co.uk

Tone-hounds will hate this but... Sometime in the early '80's a few friends and me were trying to get a band together, doing some covers but mostly original songs in the Magazine/Banshees/Cure vein - you get the picture!

We were auditioning for a bass player in some old rehearsal rooms in a really dodgy part of town - you had to be real quick getting your stuff in and out of the cars or it got nicked swiftly!
Anyway, this strange guy turned up with a home made bass guitar, a home made amp (looked like it had been a HiFi amp at some point) and cab and a bag of home made leads.

In the bag was also a home made pedal with (IIRC) 2 knobs and a flickswitch, not a footswitch. He plugged in and started playing and he was AWFUL - worse even than we were. He made all sorts of apologies about being tired and smoking too much dope and people hassling him and all of that.
He hadn't plugged into the pedal so I (somewhat sarcastically) said that maybe that would do the trick. "Oh that's not for bass, it's for guitar but I haven't finished it yet - needs work. Try it and see what you think" he said.

I was the guitarist and thought it might be worth a laugh as we were ready for going home by now. I plugged in and flicked the switch (there was no sound unless you flicked the switch IIRC - no bypass sound, just on or off) and hit the bottom E string. It sustained forever - so did every other note, everywhere - or as much like forever that I've ever heard. It wasn't that fuzzy/dirty sustain, just sustain like a keyboard sustains.
I played through it for about 20 minutes and was totally gobsmacked by it. I offered to buy it from him there and then, but he turned me down, "Nah man, it needs work." and put it back in the bag.

I took his number under the pretence of getting back to him about the band but I just wanted that pedal, and off he went to his car with his bag and bass. We helped him down the 3 flights of stairs with his amp and cab and there was his Vauxhall Viva boot open, and his bass and bag gone!

He shrugged, put the amp and cab in the boot and drove off. I rang the number he'd given me but his Mum said he'd moved out a couple of weeks before and she didn't know where he was?!
So there it is, absolutely true story. What was it? I still wonder. I've tried many combinations of pedals; compressors, overdrives, boosters but I've never got close to the sound of that one pedal. If only I'd warned him about the thieves in that area...

Basically this is simple really.

The less the body adsorbs the energy of the vibrating strings - the longer the sustain. This is easily achieved by using heavy and hard woods in the construction ea. maple, mahogany. The downside is the very fact that at the same time the construction does not lend much to the sound character of the instrument. Guitars famous for their long sustain and dismal sound is for example the forementioned Yamaha SG2000.

As opposite, the more the body resonates the more it sucks the energy from the strings - hence short sustain. Semi hollow jazz guitars are examples of this sort.

Something between is Fender Strat -type of designs where the neck is hard maple and body light and soft ash.
For me this is the smartest compromise between these two precious properties. No wonder that Leo Fender is still regarded as the luthier of all time.

Naturally the actual "sound" of the guitar is a sum of a huge number of variables in the the whole instrument.

Quote Samuli:

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Basically this is simple really.

The less the body adsorbs the energy of the vibrating strings - the longer the sustain.

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Really? And here's me thinking the scale length, the mass of the string, the string tension, the break angle, the amount of resonant string between & beyond the pivot points, the magnetic pull of the pick ups, the joinery gaps, might be a factor. True, the greater the mass of the guitar the less energy is likely to be lost from the system but plywood guitars often weigh a ton but don't always sustain well. I'm with Zen on this one, it's a complex system, if mass & density were the only factors you could just nail your guitar to a tree and sustain notes for days.

Also Leo wasn't actually a luthier. He was an accountant with an interest in electronics, who employed luthiers.

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Not much in life worth running for. Or from.

Quote suedehead:

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Tone-hounds will hate this but... Sometime in the early '80's a few friends and me were trying to get a band together, doing some covers but mostly original songs in the Magazine/Banshees/Cure vein - you get the picture!

We were auditioning for a bass player in some old rehearsal rooms in a really dodgy part of town - you had to be real quick getting your stuff in and out of the cars or it got nicked swiftly!
Anyway, this strange guy turned up with a home made bass guitar, a home made amp (looked like it had been a HiFi amp at some point) and cab and a bag of home made leads.

In the bag was also a home made pedal with (IIRC) 2 knobs and a flickswitch, not a footswitch. He plugged in and started playing and he was AWFUL - worse even than we were. He made all sorts of apologies about being tired and smoking too much dope and people hassling him and all of that.
He hadn't plugged into the pedal so I (somewhat sarcastically) said that maybe that would do the trick. "Oh that's not for bass, it's for guitar but I haven't finished it yet - needs work. Try it and see what you think" he said.

I was the guitarist and thought it might be worth a laugh as we were ready for going home by now. I plugged in and flicked the switch (there was no sound unless you flicked the switch IIRC - no bypass sound, just on or off) and hit the bottom E string. It sustained forever - so did every other note, everywhere - or as much like forever that I've ever heard. It wasn't that fuzzy/dirty sustain, just sustain like a keyboard sustains.
I played through it for about 20 minutes and was totally gobsmacked by it. I offered to buy it from him there and then, but he turned me down, "Nah man, it needs work." and put it back in the bag.

I took his number under the pretence of getting back to him about the band but I just wanted that pedal, and off he went to his car with his bag and bass. We helped him down the 3 flights of stairs with his amp and cab and there was his Vauxhall Viva boot open, and his bass and bag gone!

He shrugged, put the amp and cab in the boot and drove off. I rang the number he'd given me but his Mum said he'd moved out a couple of weeks before and she didn't know where he was?!
So there it is, absolutely true story. What was it? I still wonder. I've tried many combinations of pedals; compressors, overdrives, boosters but I've never got close to the sound of that one pedal. If only I'd warned him about the thieves in that area...

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Can't get enough of stories like this, brilliant

Quote Dynamic Mike:

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Quote Samuli:

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Basically this is simple really.

The less the body adsorbs the energy of the vibrating strings - the longer the sustain.

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Really? And here's me thinking the scale length, the mass of the string, the string tension, the break angle, the amount of resonant string between & beyond the pivot points, the magnetic pull of the pick ups, the joinery gaps, might be a factor. True, the greater the mass of the guitar the less energy is likely to be lost from the system but plywood guitars often weigh a ton but don't always sustain well. I'm with Zen on this one, it's a complex system, if mass & density were the only factors you could just nail your guitar to a tree and sustain notes for days.



Also Leo wasn't actually a luthier. He was an accountant with an interest in electronics, who employed luthiers.

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I may not be the best guitarist in the world, in fact I'm probably not the best guitarist in the building, but I do have a Physics degree.

Yes it’s all about energy transfer / conservation. When you set the string vibrating you impart energy (chemical energy from your double cheese burger gets turned into kinetic energy in the muscles etc). The vibrating string then converts some of this energy into sound (either directly from the string or by setting up vibrations in the guitar body), some of it gets turned into electrical energy through the pick ups and some of it turns into heat. As the energy is transferred into other forms the string comes to rest.

The ‘system’ has lots of elements as previously described and mass is just one of them. Tone and sustain are not the same but I see a link. Some of the more complex vibrations that we associate with ‘tone’ come from interactions with the body which will take energy out of the system. The longest sustaining note will be the ‘purest’ one but won’t sound particularly nice. IIRC Les Paul had something of an obsession with sustain and his first prototype electric guitar was built out of a railway sleeper – this is taking the mass thing to extremes.

The fact is that it’s very difficult to isolate the mass effect alone, especially as the heavier woods are more expensive and so only used on the better guitars which are, in turn, better made. It’s up to the individual to say how important sustain is to them when choosing a guitar. Out of my small collection of guitars the one with the longest sustain is not the heaviest but it is made out of the most dense wood, does have a set neck, has a shorter scale length and has a Wilkinson locking trem. It’s also the most expensive guitar I own but, critically, it’s not my preferred guitar at present.

Point well made about Leo Fender. As well as not being a luthier I get the impression that Leo couldn’t actually play the guitar. Just for info, my guitar of preference is my US Standard Strat.

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http://www.random-thought.co.uk/

Much in what you say Music Wolf. To my ear there has always been a trade off between 'sustain' and 'resonance'. As it happens the latter excites me far more than the former, so I have always been very happy to sacrifice sustain in favour of more resonant sounding tone woods and chambered bodies. In any case, the kind of sustain I want is not very difficult to fake, as I suggested in my earlier post. Resonance is. Actually I'm not sure it can be faked? For a purist sustain hound, the density of the wood and the way the neck is attached is paramount. But it takes more than just those two factors to find sustain heaven!

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Strictly project and just for fun

Cool feedback gents..thanks - I decided to sit back for a while before commenting further.

Some of my thoughts based on the "thoughts" shared...

1) How does one define length of a note to make a clear distinction between the end of the mechanical vibration (due to the tension & mass of the strings) and that caused by the feedback of the amplifier (which btw works only after introduced to an electrical signal - no pu, no sound)

2) Whilst we know that the PU are magnetic, we also know that different PUs produce magnetic fields of varying strength, and depending on the width of the string, directly influences the amount of current and its harmonic content.

3) Anecdotal evidence (my own of course) - humbucking PUs (parallel or vertical) always sustain slightly more, regardless of the wood or workmanship that contains them
Hot magnetic PUs definitely sustain more, even attached to a broom!

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C.LYDE
http://soundcloud.com/c-lyde

ooooh nice.... maybe if Gibson focused on the better pickups, they wouldn't have to strip the forests .. illegally




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C.LYDE
http://soundcloud.com/c-lyde

Quote zenguitar:

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Sustain is in the guitar.

It's not the wood, construction, hardware, pick-ups, magnets, strings, set-up. It's in how a luthier balances all of those variables to deliver sustain relative to how important it is relative to all the other considerations.

IMO the real problem is summed up by the assumptions built into the question asked in the topic. A guitar is more than the sum of it's parts, and that's the whole point. The reductionist view of looking at the ways different parts contribute is important, but it is only of value when you can put it to one side and instead look at the instrument as a whole. A guitar is a complex system assembled from other complex systems, linear models of 'changing A results in a predictable change to Y' are completely inappropriate. Inapplicable at best, and downright misleading at worst.

Andy

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Cool answer Andy - however,.. that's why we 'engineering types' love the principle of superposition.. take something complex and reduce it to essential bits... else one would stay in a loop of "is it this or is it that -- no its everything"

Btw to create 'balance' - like creating a meal, the impact of the individual elements/ingredients must be fully understood - the cook cannot offset too much salt with more garlic..

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C.LYDE
http://soundcloud.com/c-lyde

Quote C.LYDE:

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ooooh nice.... maybe if Gibson focused on the better pickups, they wouldn't have to strip the forests .. illegally

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I think you'll find it was ebony they'd harvested from Madagascar, i.e. fingerboards.

On that note, the sole owner of the company with the only licence in the world to harvest ebony is a certain Bob Taylor, owner of Taylor Acoustics.

I think Nigel Tufnel may be the world expert here...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB6zw6RSZzU

Daft discussion...
Hang a Tele, sans strings up by the neck, at the nut and strike the lower bout with a soft mallet.
You will hear a soft "Booom".
Hang a Tele pickup up by its wires and strike that. Nothing. Conclusion? PUPs have nothing to do with sustain.

A silly experiment to end a silly thread.

Dave.