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

The main reason the air guitar sounds so good is that you are using the air in a very old shop, which gives it that vintage sound.

Take a moment to appreciate the amount of string tuning this video takes.

The first comparison strum on the air guitar is one of the funniest moments in guitartube history

How has this video not exploded and broken the guitar community?!

My list of most important tone factors: 1. The player 2. Pickups 3. How cool the guitar looks 4. The audience's blood alcohol content 5. How your preferred deity is feeling on that particular day

Having played the air guitar for years it always sounds exactly just like the album. Remarkable.

Thank you for your faithful service to the world of tone. We can all finally give up the search for the perfect guitar and instead look for the perfect pickup.

Next step, obviously, is to try weighing the bench with something other than honda... ducati engines, yamaha engines, harley engines, indian engines, etc. And then you will need to try them in every possible combination and engine size. Will an 80cc sound different than a 500cc? And of course, it is necessary to consider the implications of engine size for touring. It would not surprise me if you developed a guitar you could just ride to the gig. Thank you for helping to move science forward! I very much enjoy your video. Good ear on that slide, with no frets to visually guide you.

What an absolute legend of a video. VERY interesting

This guy really understands the importance of research methodology

It's insane that even after doing all of this, some people will still die on the tonewood hill. This table&shelfcaster just got a tie with the fencecaster in the functional guitar tierlist for me lmao. Good job mate.

You know what's funny to me? There are still people who can't accept they've been wrong this whole time so they resort to "well, it's not a scientific test without the measurements so it's invalid and we still don't know!". As if the fact that a real guitar and one made of air sounding extremely similar isn't enough to tell us how much could wood really matter then. So I'm supposed to believe a guitar and a bench could sound so similar that I couldn't tell a difference in a blind test but if you somehow compared it to the same guitar but swapped the fretboard for rosewood it would sound different.

The message I get from this is: buy yourself a cheap guitar with a neck that feels comfortable to you, replace the cheap pickups with decent ones, have the guitar properly set up by a pro, and you're in business. Great video !

I think air from the equator brought north by the gulf stream would make that air guitar sound more organic and giving it that ethereal tone that you just can't get anyway else.

This is a FANTASTIC video. The "air guitar" alone is a piece of art I don't have a guitar yet and as a habitual overthinker, this helps take the pressure off of choosing

This great experiment confirms some notions I’ve had based on my background in physics and electrical engineering. The heavy and stiff body and neck of a solid body guitar just doesn’t absorb a lot of the energy from the waves that propagate between the nut and bridge. That’s why you don’t hear much sound when a solid body guitar is being played without an amp. Since a solid body doesn’t interact much with the strings, it has little effect on the sound. That leaves the pickups and pots and capacitors, along with the strings themselves. So: with same strings, pickups, spacings and lengths, pots and caps, the sound is gonna be much the same. Other effects are subtle. I’m not saying they don’t exist or that they can’t be heard or that they don’t matter. Just that strings, pickups, spacings and lengths, pots and caps dominate. Then there’s the effect of the amp, which can be anything but subtle! Thanks!!!!

"This list is long, but it's finite. So I started chipping away at it." This is a beautiful message applicable well beyond the bounds of this video.

I spent about two years switching out every part there was on my guitars and came to the conclusion that I should just play more. This video proves that.

A Very interesting demo. Both Mark Knofler and Chet Atkins told me in NYC in 1999 that they felt that at least 50% of tone comes from the player, and how we fret & strum the strings.

Hi Jim. Commenting again here to let you know this video has changed my life as a recording engineer and producer of artists. This video, and the others youve made, have changed everything for me. I really do owe you. Thanks man.