[font=trebuchet ms]An important step in selecting an electric guitar is playing it [u]without plugging in to any amp[/u]! A guitar that does not sound good on its own will not sound better plugged in - just louder.

Choice of materials very definitely has an effect on the sound of an electric guitar. A pickup can be designed to shape the inherent sound of a guitar by enhancing or reducing parts of the frequency spectrum, but it can only work with what the guitar produces in the first place.

That's why another important selection step is to play with the amp set up [u]clean[/u]. You want to assess what the pickups are doing to the original sound of the guitar.

If you use massive amounts of gain to get huge distortion, then the pickups and the amp become the dominant factors in the final sound, and the guitar itself is almost reduced to irrelevance.


... Which is kinda sad, I think...[/font]