Tone-chambered guitar bodies.

Warmoth offers a "hollow" Strat body, and if I'm not mistaken, the double-cut Les Pauls are "hollow" or "tone chambered." I hear tell it decreases weight and it also enhances tone and sustain.

What about if you like to go back and forth between clean and high gain/distort? I like to be doing weird jazz-type stuff and then *STOMP* launch right into the death grind thrash and then *STOMP* some dirty blues sounding stuff.

A semi-hollow guitar, with F-holes and stuff, is generally a no-go for that... *EEEEEEEEE URRRRRRRRP EEEEEEE KXXKXKXKXXKXXXX EEEEEEEEEE* Not good.

Would the same thing happen with a... tone-chambered guitar? Would you be limited to clean and to not-quite-dirty blues? Or could you cover the same ground as a true solid body?

I'm no expert, but I tried out a Tom Anderson drop top strat which is very chambered, and managed to play the usual screaming hi gain with no problems...

The chambering of the body is an option on the Warmoth guitars, if I'm not mistaken... It's not a standard procedure...

You're correct in assuming that the chambers hel decrease weight... obviously. However the one thing in your post I want to draw attention to is the fact that you said it would help sustain... In a way yes... but essentially no. The chambering of the body will increase resonance. The difference between sustain and resonance is sustain is the lenght of the specific note... and resonance is the loudness of the note... People can mistake resonance for sustain because a semi hollow body will make the notes louder, allowing you to hear the note longer... but in reality it is still vibrating at the same frequency... you're just hearing a range of frequencies that a solid body guitar wouldn't normally resonate..... It's like comparing the "Sustain" of an acoustic guitar to the "sustain" of a solid body electric... the solid body electric doedn't allow you to hear the frequencies like the acoustic... but the string is vibrating in the same fashion.... Obviously string gauges are different and scales are generally slightly different.... But if you were to do an expirement and make all variables such as scale, string gauge, and intonation constant... you would find that the acoustic still appears to have more "sustain".... if you measured the vibrational frequencies however you would find that both string would vibrate at the same frequencies... But the solid body acoustic is unable to resonate certain frequencies.....

There are also differences between a Semi Hollow body and a chambered body.... A semi hollow will have much much more open space within the body... and generally takes more of an acoustic sound. With a chambered body though, the chambers are designed to keep the over all tone of the guitar but enhance the qualites of the tone... That's why the chambers are broken up and not one solid chamber. This keeps the over all tone of the wood and the guitar... while enhancing the resonance of the guitar and reducing the weight... Honestly... I would never buy a chambered Strat body...... I would however spring for a chambered Les Paul... The reduction of the weight would be very much welcome. As for the tone... generally chambered bodies get a little bit warmer of a tone than a solid body guitar does... But it also depends on the specific woods...

If I go with a Warmoth Strat, here's what I have in mind:

- Tone-chambered mahogany body.

- Maple neck with ebony fretboard and jumbo frets.

- HSS pup configuration, I'm thinking the "Nailbomb + Irish Tour (x2)" from Bareknuckle Pickups. Either that or some combination from DiMarzio, with maybe rail-type single coils and a hot'n'heavy humbucker (I think I'd opt for normal pole-pieces over the ceramic rail thingies, just to be prudent).

- Either string-through hardtail or... if I can find the right tech to set it up juuuuust right, a Kahler trem.

- Big fat .13-.56 strings. Which is why I'm hesitant to get a Kahler... although SRV had strings like that and he had some weird beefed-up lefty Strat trem (and he used it to great effect). And they make Kahlers for bass guitars :eek: , so I imagine the design has got some beef to it. I have a guitar with a Floyd Rose (which I never touch anymore because I've come to despise FR) and I still have 13s on it... massive pain in the arse to set-up (gotta have five beefed-up springs instead of the usual three), but it can certainly be done.

- I want to run it through two 2x12 combos (ideally, Hughes & Kettner), which would amount to a half stack. One for sparkling clean and the other for rude/edge-of-dirty (still clean enough for weird chords not to get too barfed up). I'd have a Metal Zone type pedal hooked up to the clean amp (and maybe a Grunge, too) that I'd stomp every now and then (or maybe to the dirty amp) and there'd be an Ibanez Tube Screamer in there somewhere.

Also, since I'd be running both off an A-B/Y box, I might also have something ridiculously extreme (like that Death Metal Pedal, which I'm told can blow an amp pretty easy if you're not careful) ahead of the box so that when I stomp it, it applies to both amps. So I'd stomp it every now and then for certain purposes, i.e. eardrum torturing solo noise stuff.

- I would maybe add a half stack to that later on (head + 4x12 cab) if I found I needed a full stack. If that were the case, I think I would go with Madison because they're incredible for extreme grind-death-thrash stuff, but they also have an exceptional clean setting, from what I'm told. So I would keep the half-stack on pure untouched clean most of the time, 2x12 one would be rude dirty blues, and 2x12 two would be reverby California surf type stuff (or, throw in James Bond theme if you like).

So, the Madison would handle the "xtreme" stuff with aplomb, without any additional pedals. I'd have a mixture of the aforementioned pedals running into the combos, and I'd probably have a Death Metal running into both of them in instances where I want them to compete with the Madison.

- I'd probably have a wah pedal in the mix... it'd be the first thing my signal reaches. I'm thinking the Zakk Wylde signature, which I hear is really well-made.

So that's my grand master plan, in a nutshell. I'm hoping that tone-chambering would enhance what I'm after!