How does electric guitar’s body shape affect its sound?

Question

So electric guitars use pickups to “pickup” vibration of strings to determine the sound. How does the body of the guitar play a role there? Moreover, how does the type of material the body is made of play a role?

In: 4

Answer 1

It doesn’t. The reason different guitars are associated with different sounds is because of their scale length and the pickups, both the type of pickup and where that pickup is located on the body.

The scale length is the distance from nut to the bridge saddles. For Gibson’s this is usually 24.75 inches. For fender’s this is usually 25.5” or 24” for some of their offset shapes. PRS’ uses 25” or 24.5” for single cut shapes.

The reason for the sound differences between scale lengths is because all the harmonics and overtones produced along the length of the string are all closer together the shorter the scale length. It’s why a strat with humbuckers doesn’t sound like a Les Paul and a Les Paul with single coils doesn’t maintain the top end chime that strat players are looking for.

The other differentiator is the type of pickup and it’s location along the length of the string. Strats, teles, jags, and jazzmasters all use single coil pickups. But they are all inherently different and their exact placement along the string influences their tone.

Generally tone has more bass and less treble the closer a pickup is to the neck and more treble and less bass the closer you get to the bridge. Strat pickups are usually all the same in a single guitar, just in 3 different positions. Strat pickups are different than tele pickups. A tele neck pickup is smaller than a strat pickup. A tele bridge pickup is supposed to have a metal plate mounted to the underside of the pickup which influences the shape of the magnetic field. And it’s distance to the bridge is not the exact same as a strat pickup. Jazzmaster pickups are wound not very deep but cover a larger area. This gives them a distinctive sound. Jaguar pickups are surrounded by a thick metal enclosure on the sides and back.

Dylan talks tone is a pickup maker on YouTube that has done dissections and in depth discussion about the construction and subsequent tone of different types of pickups that is very interesting if you want more in depth information.