So, my understanding is that the pickup is influenced by the string moving and tells the speaker to make a sound.
So, everything else should be no consequence, besides maybe sophistication of pickup and size of string.
So, why do other things seem to matter? I’m at a loss for a lot of specific examples, but people are always discussing various elements of their guitars and their impact on sound, but I don’t see how anything really impacts sound. Like why all the cutouts, swoops, materials, different saddles and bridges, etc. I’d understand on an acoustic, but on an electric a lot of it seems like it shouldn’t matter.
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>So, my understanding is that the pickup is influenced by the string moving and tells the speaker to make a sound.
>So, everything else should be no consequence, besides maybe sophistication of pickup and size of string.
Well, no, because other things have an effect on how the string moves.
Just as an example, the sustain of an electric guitar has practically nothing to do with the pickups. That all comes down to the construction of the guitar and how well it can keep the energy from you picking the string “in the system” so to speak.
Any way the vibrations in the string can leave the string is going to affect how the string continues to vibrate… which will affect the sound.
>people are always discussing various elements of their guitars and their impact on sound
And they’re usually overstating whatever effect those things have. I’m sure they believe some little thing makes a huge difference, but IME they can’t pick out those differences in a blind test. For example, if you had two Fender strats loaded up with the same pickups, everything was the same, except one had an alder body and one had a basswood body, I sincerely doubt anyone could tell *the* difference. They may hear *a* difference, but they couldn’t reliably peg which was which.
The pickups are the single biggest factor, that’s for sure. I’d wager that the pickups and electronics are about 75% of the sound. Everything else collectively adds up to *something*, but none of them are individually anywhere close to influencing the sound as much as the pickups.
Just a couple years ago I had a client who basically ruined their favorite guitar (a lawsuit Ibanez Les Paul from the 70’s). It was a great sounding guitar. They recorded with it a lot. After destroying it, they had me pull the pickups out and put them in a fairly inexpensive “Firefly” brand LP. The difference in sound was almost negligible.
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