4 ms·

I play electric bass and this comes up a lot in that community. Besides using different picks where you pick/pluck the strings also greatly affects the tone, wh

I play electric bass and this comes up a lot in that community. Besides using different picks where you pick/pluck the strings also greatly affects the tone, whether it's right over the picks up, towards the bridge, near the neck, etc. Also when using a pick, the angle at which you strike the strings with the pick affects the tone. Such as keeping the pick flat versus angled to the strings. I don't really know how to explain it well in words hopefully that makes sense.

atoav 1y ago
Yeah that also makes sense. String tension/diameter/length/hardness matters a lot, so does the "striking" technique and position, pick material, if you play with fingers, whterher your skin is smooth or you have hard skin on these fingers (I heard Less Claypool (Primus) puts super glue on his fingers before each concert). This all makes sense. The farther you go away from the vibrating string the less things matter. Whether your guitar is made of garbage wood or from the finest tropical one, doesn't matter one bit in an electrical instrument, as the wood vibration just dissipates more or less energy. So if you don't want to dissipate energy (to add more sustain) just use the hardest, stiffest material possible like in a grand piano and you end up with a cast iron body. The same is used in mills and similar machines to stop precision manufacturing tools from becoming inaccurate due to vibration, so we know it works. In the world of popular guitar magazines the "folk wisdom" is literally the polar opposite of what happens in the real world: They say, you can feel the wood vibrating, that means it has a lot of sustain. If the wood vibrates that means energy that should be in the string is now in the body. If you want your string to sustain as long as possible, you'd need to keep all the enery in the string... I love playing guitar (and bass for that matter), but the amount of unchecked bullshit advice floating around is stunning. If you want to sound a certain way, this bullshit gets into your way as a beginner and that is sad.
dfxm12 1y ago
I saw a note on sheet music (for guitar) like "ATTACK the strings". I wasn't totally sure what that meant. I reached out to the composer. He described it as being about the angle of the pick in his mind (but still wanted to leave it open to interpretation). There's a lot to playing music that is hard to transcribe onto paper.

atoav 1y ago

Yeah that also makes sense. String tension/diameter/length/hardness matters a lot, so does the "striking" technique and position, pick material, if you play with fingers, whterher your skin is smooth or you have hard skin on these fingers (I heard Less Claypool (Primus) puts super glue on his fingers before each concert). This all makes sense. The farther you go away from the vibrating string the less things matter. Whether your guitar is made of garbage wood or from the finest tropical one, doesn't matter one bit in an electrical instrument, as the wood vibration just dissipates more or less energy. So if you don't want to dissipate energy (to add more sustain) just use the hardest, stiffest material possible like in a grand piano and you end up with a cast iron body. The same is used in mills and similar machines to stop precision manufacturing tools from becoming inaccurate due to vibration, so we know it works. In the world of popular guitar magazines the "folk wisdom" is literally the polar opposite of what happens in the real world: They say, you can feel the wood vibrating, that means it has a lot of sustain. If the wood vibrates that means energy that should be in the string is now in the body. If you want your string to sustain as long as possible, you'd need to keep all the enery in the string... I love playing guitar (and bass for that matter), but the amount of unchecked bullshit advice floating around is stunning. If you want to sound a certain way, this bullshit gets into your way as a beginner and that is sad.

dfxm12 1y ago

I saw a note on sheet music (for guitar) like "ATTACK the strings". I wasn't totally sure what that meant. I reached out to the composer. He described it as being about the angle of the pick in his mind (but still wanted to leave it open to interpretation). There's a lot to playing music that is hard to transcribe onto paper.