This is the story of how (and why) I had to turn my car into a guitar and play it.
I'm a country musician in Nashville. But right now I'm best known for changing a lot of people’s minds about traditionally held and industry-backed opinions regarding what factors affect the sound of an electric guitar. I did it by myself, at home, and I'm not even a scientist.
It’s been an interesting journey, and I think everyone can learn a little from it about the power of experimenting even for nonscientists like me.
When a guitarist plays a note, it travels electrically through all of the cables and gear until it gets recorded (or put through a PA system) and a listener can listen to it. The final sound of the note is called the guitar “tone,” and it’s part of what makes different types of music sound different. There are many, many competing ideas about what affects guitar tone. The trouble is, most of the sounds that inspired me to play music in the first place were created by using a lot of prohibitively expensive vintage gear. But I wasn’t born rich, have no industry bloodlines, and don’t have a “grandpa kept this old guitar under his bed since 1952” story to tell, so I was always worried that there was a financial barrier between me and the kinds of sounds I want to be able to make. It would be an enormous bummer if I spent all of this time honing my craft and still couldn’t get that sound to come out of my fingertips because I didn’t have the right equipment.
Initially, the same as most kids, I was a sponge. I knew nothing, so I could absorb everything. I voraciously read anything that had to do with guitar, and collected tidbits like talismans that I superstitiously thought would help ward off bad guitar tone. I figured if I could just collect all of the individual bits of gear knowledge from the magazines and Internet forums, then like puzzle pieces it would all eventually fit together, forming a complete picture, and I could finally make my guitar playing sound like I wanted it to, wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. But that isn’t what happened.
Instead the next step of this journey was dissonance. I still sounded terrible about half the time and couldn’t do anything about it. The temptation was to blame the venue, or the recording engineer, but I had a feeling my beliefs about guitar tone were off the mark. So I kept diving in and learning more, but I wasn’t an empty sponge anymore. Some of the new things I was learning conflicted with the old ones I had already accepted. I tried to figure out which sources to trust, and which to take with a grain of salt, but no matter how I tried to sort the “facts,” it wasn't making sense and I wasn't sounding any better.
The last leg of this journey was hard work. Instead of relying on outside information I started from scratch and collected the data myself. I set the goal of figuring out why my favorite guitar player sounded like he did when he recorded my favorite music. His name is J.T. Corenflos, and he was an under-the-radar session musician in Nashville, known by his peers for his exceptional guitar tone and responsible for a lot of the guitar you heard on the radio from the 1990s until his death in 2020. He had a legendary custom-made baby blue guitar that he used on countless hit singles, and the last thing I asked him a couple weeks before he died was “What’s that blue body made out of?” and he replied “Alder.”
Alder is a medium-density hardwood that Leo Fender started making into guitar bodies around 1956. My main guitar is ash, not alder. I needed to know if this body wood difference could partly explain why I still couldn’t get J.T.’s sound. The traditional belief is that all of these things make a difference. Alder sounds different from ash, and they both sound different from mahogany (what Gibson guitars are often made from), and maple fretboards sound different than rosewood fretboards, and the way the neck is joined to the body changes the sound, and even the type and thickness of lacquer finish will alter the tone of the guitar. Therefore, if you took a professionally built guitar with an ash body and a maple neck and compared it to a set of guitar strings strung up across the gap between a bench and a shelf, they would have to sound different, even if they had the same electronics. So I did exactly that, and this is what that actually sounds like:
But what about guitar amplifiers? I always learned that vacuum tubes, tube biases, rectifiers and component quality were the main reasons an amp sounds like it does (even if I didn't understand what those things were), and that if you took expensive flagship model tube amps of the major legendary brands like Fender and Marshall and compared them to an amplifier made of out an old tackle box, built by an amateur with solid state electronics on breadboards, they would have to sound different, even if some of the points in the circuit were kept the same. So I did exactly that, and this is what that actually sounds like:
But what about speaker cabinets? I've read about solid pine resonating differently from birch ply, and different joinery methods producing different tones, and certainly if you had a professionally built heavy duty speaker cabinet and compared it to something made of styrofoam and caulk, they would have to sound different, even if they had mostly the same geometry. So I did exactly that, and this is what that actually sounds like:
But what about microphones? My favorite music was recorded at Ocean Way Nashville with expensive vintage mics, and I’ve been told that the types of tubes and quality of the components and the iron in the output transformers all contribute to the sound of the mic. So if you compared one of Ocean Way’s vintage Telefunken ELA M 251 tube microphones with an amateur microphone built out of a pop can and a cheap circuit found on Craigslist, they would have to sound different, even if the capsules (the part that turns moving air into electricity) had a similar frequency response. So I did exactly that, and this is what that actually sounds like:
This journey has gotten traction on the Internet, and some people have told me they're still torn between my tests and years of accepted tradition. Why should they believe me when people with more experience say something different?
Here’s the thing: I never asked you to believe me. I don't need to. The tests speak for themselves. If you read “It sounds like X when you do this,” and then someone actually does it and it sounds like Y, then it sounds like Y. Hopefully you get as much out of this as I have.
But like I said up top, this journey isn’t about convincing anyone else of anything. It's about making music, and answering questions about making music that couldn't be answered any other way.
Last time I took my car to the mechanic, he said he wasn't going to fix it for me anymore. It was all rusted underneath, and he told me I shouldn't put another dollar into it. So I knew what I needed to do. I needed to string it up across the windshield and play some music on it. People say that a car shouldn’t be able to sound like a guitar. It's not ash, alder or mahogany. But I did that. And this is what that actually sounds like:
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.