Mini recto tones using maple fingerboards

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sonoragazzo

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I regularly use rosewood fingerboards and the tones from the recto are awesome, but this is not happening with my maple fingerboard guitar. Have any of you experience the same as I?, any recommendations as far as settings to work better with maple?

Just recently used mi mini recto with my new EVH maple fingerboard guitar and I was not pleased with what I was able to get from it tone wise. The sounds were not real pleasant, as you know tone is hard to describe, hard to explain. It just did not sounded right to my ears as previously using my guitars with rosewood fingerboards. Of course I did have to redial everything up from my previous set up to get something fair from my recto.

Am I missing something?, did the rectifiers are specially designed for darker woods? :(
 
sonoragazzo said:
I regularly use rosewood fingerboards and the tones from the recto are awesome, but this is not happening with my maple fingerboard guitar. Have any of you experience the same as I?, any recommendations as far as settings to work better with maple?

Just recently used mi mini recto with my new EVH maple fingerboard guitar and I was not pleased with what I was able to get from it tone wise. The sounds were not real pleasant, as you know tone is hard to describe, hard to explain. It just did not sounded right to my ears as previously using my guitars with rosewood fingerboards. Of course I did have to redial everything up from my previous set up to get something fair from my recto.

Am I missing something?, did the rectifiers are specially designed for darker woods? :(

Pickups are going to have more of an effect than neck woods...We don't design amps around fingerboard wood ; )
 
sonoragazzo said:
Am I missing something?, did the rectifiers are specially designed for darker woods? :(

Try a yellow guitar. I notice most of my amps sound better with yellow, white, or silver guitar. The brand of your guitar strap will influence the "mids" too.
 
Tongue in cheek aside, maple is noticeably brighter than Rosewood. Are you finding your tone fizzy or percussive? I prefer that, but you'll have to try messing with presence to get it more like Rosewood.
 
elvis said:
Tongue in cheek aside, maple is noticeably brighter than Rosewood. Are you finding your tone fizzy or percussive? I prefer that, but you'll have to try messing with presence to get it more like Rosewood.

Will try to play with the presence knob, thanks
 
It may also help to bring the mids up. If you're playing Ash/Maple, it will be very bright, vs a mahogany guitar with rosewood that will have TONS of mids. You might also try boosting the mids in front of the amp with an EQ or Tube Screamer.
 
If your maple fingerboard guitar has different pickups than your rosewood counterparts, I think the difference is from the pickups my friend. I bet if I blind-fold you and give you identical guitars save for the fretboards, you could not tell which was maple, rosewood, ebony, richlite etc.
 
I've already done that test. I've run a slew of guitars with the same scale and pickups. I can easily tell what the neck and body of a guitar are made of. If nobody could tell, they wouldn't be so particular about them.
 
elvis said:
I've already done that test. I've run a slew of guitars with the same scale and pickups. I can easily tell what the neck and body of a guitar are made of. If nobody could tell, they wouldn't be so particular about them.

I'd like to administer that test to you!
 
You can administer it to yourself easily enough. Get a bolt-on guitar that is available with maple and rosewood. Get one of each guitar or one of each neck. Swap the necks back and forth.

Personally, I like a lot of edge to my tone. I can always throttle the attack and buzz back, but it's subtle and difficult to add. I can get brighter pickups or go maple or both. I like tonally-balanced pickups and maple. Just my preference. The edgy pickups are usually a bit thin for my taste. My experience with maple is more cut and more apparent sustain, where rosewood is softer in the highs and a bit too smooth. I like swamp ash and Alder for the same reasons, though I also have mahogany/rosewood guitars where I've changed pups for some extra bite while retaining the lows. BKP Cold Sweats work great for that.

My three main guitars are
Tom Anderson Mongrel H-H Swamp Ash/maple. Desert Island Guitar. Does heavy rock AND a dead-on tele tone with the coil taps.
PRS SC245 with BKP Cold Sweats. Fantastic guitar. Plays so well, it's worth having rosewood.
PRS Tremonti with stock pups. I use this for down-tuning (usually drop-Db). The overly-bright bridge pup sounds TERRIBLE tuned to E-standard with 0.010, but cuts nicely while retaining some meat with 0.011 tuned down.
 
elvis said:
I've already done that test. I've run a slew of guitars with the same scale and pickups. I can easily tell what the neck and body of a guitar are made of. If nobody could tell, they wouldn't be so particular about them.
If you ran the test by yourself where you knew beforehand which necks you were testing and not in a blind or double blind fashion, I'll suggest that you were heavily influenced by confirmation bias. In a true, double-blind test most players could not tell the difference in tone from one type of fingerboard to the next with any degree of measurable certainty. Playing with more gain/OD, the degree of certainty gets worse. There was a test done with top concert violinists who, when blindfolded, could not tell the difference between a real Stradivarius and a well-crafted copy. There's a lot of other objective data out there that, if not debunks, at least calls into question the sacred nature of "tone woods."
 
elvis says what he knows. His posts are intelligent and insightful. If he says he can easily tell a difference, I belive him.

Violins made to sound as close as possible to a Stradivarius is very different from guitars that are made of different woods trying, in part, to sound different.

From my YouTube experience, this is a debate that cannot be won. :lol:
 
I agree with both of you.

Yes, there is almost certainly some confirmation bias for me. However, I can also say for sure that OTHER people in my band who knew nothing about the guitars I was playing (other than color) had significant preferences for one over another. So they were essentially blind-tested.

Also, I have been able to listen to recordings and predict which guitars were used, and then confirm by reading interviews or looking at studio notes.

IMO it's not nearly so subtle as you suggest. Again, why would there be so many woods available if not for significant preference? I first noticed this when I switched from an Ibanez 540S to an IDENTICAL 540S except that the first had rosewood and the second a maple board. Suddenly I was much closer to EVH tone. I owned both at the same time and could switch back and forth and found a HUGE difference in the attack and "bite". Again, I recommend that you try this for yourself.

And I agree that this debate will never be won.

Thanks for the kind words, SamuelJ!
 
Just to jump into the fray:

TL;DR version: You have different guitars and their sounds differ. That is normal. If you want to figure out why they sound different, look at the pickups first, not the fret board material.


I'm not sure how many of you have been into the Mesa Boogie building. I had a good friend who worked there for 20 years, and I would pop in regularly and go to lunch with him. He would often bring me inside and show me around, or just take me to his desk, while he finished up. During my visits, there was pretty much ALWAYS someone playing a guitar, testing amps.

To imagine the number of guitar and amp configurations that get used in that building on a regular basis everyday for years on end is astounding. When a representative from that company comes in and minimizes how much neck woods alone affect tone across different guitars, I would place a lot of stock in that assertion.

My personal experience, as someone who has owned over 40 guitars, is that I can't tell much of a difference between recorded guitars, especially distorted guitars. With clean tones, I can tell the difference between pickups much easier.

How a guitar feels is an entirely different matter. I do have a preference for the feel of Ebony fret boards, then Rosewood, then Maple, which I do not especially care for. My aesthetic taste follows in the same order, which I'm sure has nothing to do with my bias :mrgreen:

I will acknowledge that it is possible that rare individuals can perceive the tonal differences. It is just not the most likely scenario when no good, objective tests have been done. If you look up the Audiophile contests that no one can seem to win, the Wine "Experts" unable to sort $100 bottles from $10 bottles or who will find huge differences in quality between different labels that turn out to be the same wine.

The reason there are so many choices is that people have different tastes in appearance, feel and sound. Between marketing and the legends, beliefs have been built up, and whether they are true or not, it affects our perception. It's like the people who will swear that there is a difference in sound or image quality with high end HDMI cables. They believed there was a difference, so they heard one.

Watching the fanatics in the Axe FX forums lose their minds when someone does a blind test and no one can figure out which one is the Axe FX is pretty hilarious.

None of this should be construed to mean that Elvis cannot hear the difference. Maybe he can. Sometimes the hoof beats you hear are Zebras, not horses.... but when Occam's Razor is applied, taking into account all that we know about bias and human perception, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and we don't have that.

~Icarusuki
 
Icarusuki said:
To imagine the number of guitar and amp configurations that get used in that building on a regular basis everyday for years on end is astounding. When a representative from that company comes in and minimizes how much neck woods alone affect tone across different guitars, I would place a lot of stock in that assertion.

Just for arguments sake, I would like to point out that some of the mesa amp manuals I've been reading have made suggestions about settings taking wood into account. For example; in the JP2C manual it talks about using the presence control a certain way for mahogany guitars. I'm sure Doug West wrote that, and to your point, he has definitely tested and played some gear in his day.

I hope we can have a peaceful conversation here lol :lol: I agree with Authorized Boogies assertion, they are not designing amps around wood. But that's not to say wood doesn't play a part in the sound.
And I agree, it's small difference if at all, but for some people it can be a deal breaker, swearing by certain woods. As elvis said; why would people be so particular

:p
 
Icarusuki said:
Just to jump into the fray:

TL;DR version: You have different guitars and their sounds differ. That is normal. If you want to figure out why they sound different, look at the pickups first, not the fret board material.

** Please note that I am only talking about similar or identical guitars with the same model pickups.

Icarusuki said:
None of this should be construed to mean that Elvis cannot hear the difference. Maybe he can. Sometimes the hoof beats you hear are Zebras, not horses.... but when Occam's Razor is applied, taking into account all that we know about bias and human perception, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and we don't have that.

~Icarusuki

I don't disagree that pickups can have more of an effect than wood in many or most cases (the exceptions are that some pickups are so similar that switching between them has little effect). It would be ludicrous to claim that they do not.

My point is that it is similarly ludicrous to claim the woods do not affect tone. Seriously, anyone who has played a bunch of the SAME EXACT guitar model must have noticed a difference from guitar to guitar. In my own experience, I have owned guitars that were the same model, with the same pickups, but with different woods (either different body wood or different fingerboard wood or both). I have also read about and spoken with other players and luthiers who have similar experiences. There should be no question that wood makes a difference. If it REALLY did not, then manufacturers would make all guitars from the cheapest wood and call it a day, other than a few boutique guys. I defy anyone to play a Basswood guitar vs a Swamp Ash or Mahogany guitar with the same shape and pickups and find no difference. As an example, I had a basswood guitar that I could not get to sound the same as identical mahogany and alder guitars (I tend to stock up on similar body styles or guitar models). I went through several sets of quite different pickups, but the guitar always sounded spongy. I took it to a luthier who confirmed that the electronics and wiring were fine and that this had been his experience with basswood as well.

As much as Boogie does not design their amps around wood types, neither do they design around pickups. Imagine if you could play only humbuckers through a JP-2C. Or only DiMarzio through the Mark V. I think you may be reading too much into Authorized's comment.

I am familiar with Occam's razor, but I really don't see these as extraordinary claims. I can also point to significant evidence to back it up. If you want real science, I think it would be relatively easy to measure guitars of varying woods with a spectrum analyzer to find the frequency and impulse response, much as they do with speakers. I'm fairly certain that Line 6 must have done this to make the Variax guitar models. The hard part would be getting the collection of instruments together.
 
Man I'm always in this over on the Fender forums. I'm not going to be drawn into it too much here. Except to say. Even Paul Reed Smith says fretboard has little to no affect on tone.
And my own one. Concluding that electric guitars garner their sound on the same principles as acoustic guitars is erroneous. An acoustic guitar has it's amp built in. That's all the body is for, it's an amplifier.

But loads of love and everyone tell me I'm wrong. I don't care and won't argue the point. I love this forum and each and every contributor. don't want fall outs.

FWIW the aggressive tone out of the EL84 mini recto is probably down to those EL84's. I thought the recto to have an aggressive treble anyway. It's that grinding distorted sound. Albeit coupled with a massive bass. That traditional 6L6's focus on, high treble and low bass. Throw in EL84's that have the most unusual anarchic sounding high mid. And you're only going to exacerbate the high end.

I love EL84's my fave gigging amp is a self built 18watt Watkins Dominator/Marshall clone. It cuts like hell. Just don't play a bass through it unless you want to sound like Lemmy.
 
Thanks for weighing in!

I (naturally... :lol: ) have a different opinion about the acoustic nature of electric guitars. The resonance of the electric guitar wood means that the pickups will move relative to the strings at the resonance frequencies. This adds (or subtracts) these frequencies from those captured from the strings by the pickups. Further, these resonant frequencies affect the string vibrations directly.

You can hear the resonance of the wood when you play unplugged. Note that some guitars are louder, some brighter, etc. when played unplugged.

I respect Randall, Doug, Paul, and the rest of you, but I reserve the right to be, as my wife says, "difficult".
 
Just to clarify: I'm referring only to fret board wood. I believe there is a difference in full body woods, and different neck joint and construction techniques, that contribute in a more meaningful way to resonance and tone. Assuming the electronics don't overrule everything , of course. <cough> EMG <cough>

I regularly use rosewood fingerboards and the tones from the recto are awesome, but this is not happening with my maple fingerboard guitar.
The OP mentioned one guitar having a tone that is drastically different, and that he is unhappy.

He is having an issue with tonal variance between guitars, and has theorized that the fret board material is the culprit. I'm saying that the conclusion that the fret board material is making the large tonal difference is unlikely. It is possible that the fret board is contributing to the tonal difference, but that it is minor would not be the most effective place to start the troubleshooting. If the OP is unhappy with a specific guitar's tone, as compared to other guitars, I would recommend starting with Pickup replacement/alteration. I believe that is what Authorized Boogie was getting at.

~Icarusuki
 
I agree in general, and to a point. If the tone is a LOT different, then probably not the wood.

If it is a subtle difference that the OP is especially sensitive to, it could be the wood.
 
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