Originally Posted by: Lordathestrings[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]

you mean the type of the wood used in the construction does affect the way the strings vibrate? or does the vibration of the wood itself is captured in the pickups?

I did notice that Les Pauls have a rigid body, while Strats (at least the ones I played) tend to vibrate with the strings when played, which is not the case with Les Pauls (again, the ones I played). However, Ibanez JEMs & RGs don't really have that strat-type body vibration when played, probably due to their tremolo design.

I always thought that strat & les pauls have different tone mainly due to humbuckers & single coils used in them.