Mostly, the guitar is supposed to be about sound. But that’s the hardest of all of these to pin down.
Strumming chords slowly will let you discover a guitar’s distinctive voice.
The guitar is about many things: craftsmanship, commerce, history, tradition, artistry in design and ornamentation, entertainment, physics, wood, gut, magic, and a few other things. Mostly, the guitar is supposed to be about sound. But that’s the hardest of all of these to pin down.
Sound results from air molecules hitting and exciting our eardrums, pure and simple. But there’s no magic at all in this objective description. The magic in musical sound all happens subjectively—in the brain and in how it processes the neural impulses arriving from the ear. Sound is very much like food and wine, in fact. The magic happens in your own mouth, your tongue, your palate, your nose, your eyes, as well as in your ears and brain. I point this out because it is equally true that many of us “like” this or that wine or food or sound, because we’ve been told it’s good and we believe that we should like it—without ever knowing whether we genuinely do or not.
As far as guitars go, sound is complex. Good sound is, by definition, sound that pleases listeners, whether they understand anything about the sound or not. However, a guitar can have any combination or quality of bass, treble, midrange, resonance, definition, sustain, projection, dynamic range, warmth, volume, percussiveness, tonal bloom, note shape, harmonics, sweetness, clarity (or lack of it), tonal rise and decay time, cutting power, spareness, evenness of response, brittleness, dryness of tone, and tonal darkness or lightness. So, unless you have a really sophisticated and practiced ear, it won’t work to evaluate a guitar by listening to someone play a piece on it. That amount of information overwhelms the average ear within the first eight or 10 bars of the song.
There is a way of coming to grips with sound that’s so simple, almost no one ever thinks of it: really listening. In a quiet place. It’s very much like eating food or sipping a wine slowly—without distractions—to get a sense of the flavors, textures, sweetness, spiciness, and overall pleasingness. Let me explain what I mean. It will help you next time you’re shopping for a guitar.
What I do (among other things) is sit down, tune the guitar, and just play a chord. I play it slowly, so I can hear each note separately. And then I listen. One chord can provide a lot of information, so I take my time. And it’s useful to also listen to another guitar and compare it to the one you’re evaluating. The voice of the guitar is the voice of the guitar. Playing a chord will give you all the sonic information a full song can provide—without your auditory senses being clouded by a player’s flashy technique.
Here’s a checklist for what you can usefully listen for in a six-note chord. If you can’t discriminate between some of these criteria, the solution is to learn how to listen. Like playing, this takes practice. A session includes listening for:
• Dynamics: Does the guitar have a wide dynamic range? Will it produce different sounds when you play very softly, softly, medium, and hard?
• Duration: Most chords will last six to 12 seconds. This gives you a sense of systemic sustain and also of the sound’s quality—whether it’s warm, sweet, tinny, rich, lively, fundamental, shallow, breathy, open, held back, or is rich in overtones. You’ll discover whether you have to push the guitar or if it speaks easily.
• Separation: Are you able to hear each note? Or is the sound fuzzy or cloudy and lacking focus?
• Velocity: Does the chord emerge from the guitar quickly or slowly?
• Timbral balance: Is the guitar bass heavy, treble heavy, or well balanced? And regardless of the balance, does the treble or bass die down first, leaving the other to carry on by itself?
• String-to-string response: Is the strength and presence of each note even?
• Projection: Does the guitar sound best when close up or from across the room? (You’ll need a playing/listening partner to explore this.) Also, does it sound different depending on whether you’re listening from in front or from the side?
• Intonation: Does the guitar really play in tune?
If you repeat this listening exercise while playing different chords up and down the neck, you’ll get a sense of how evenly (or not) the guitar plays along the whole fretboard. Remember, you get to decide whether and how much you like or dislike any of these qualities of a guitar’s tonal response. All the information is in the soundbox. You just need to know how to listen without overwhelming your ear.
A professional luthier since the early 1970s, Ervin Somogyi is one of the world’s most respected acoustic-guitar builders and rosette designers. To learn more about Somogyi, his instruments, or his rosette and inlay artwork, visit esomogyi.com.
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The country virtuoso closes out this season of Wong Notes with a fascinating, career-spanning interview.
We’ve saved one of the best for last: Brad Paisley.The celebrated shredder and seasoned fisherman joins host Cory Wong for one of this season’s most interesting episodes. Paisley talks his earliest guitar-playing influences, which came from his grandfather’s love of country music, and his first days in Nashville—as a student at Belmont University, studying the music industry.
The behind-the-curtain knowledge he picked up at Belmont made him a good match for industry suits trying to force bad contracts on him.
Wong and Paisley swap notes on fishing and a mutual love of Phish—Paisley envies the jam-band scene, which he thinks has more leeway in live contexts than country. And with a new signature Fender Telecaster hitting the market in a rare blue paisley finish, Paisley discusses his iconic namesake pattern—which some might describe as “hippie puke”—and its surprising origin with Elvis’ guitarist James Burton.
Plus, hear how Paisley assembled his rig over the years, the state of shredding on mainstream radio, when it might be good to hallucinogenic drugs in a set, and the only negative thing about country-music audiences.
Tom Bedell in the Relic Music acoustic room, holding a custom Seed to Song Parlor with a stunning ocean sinker redwood top and milagro Brazilian rosewood back and sides.
As head of Breedlove and Bedell Guitars, he’s championed sustainability and environmental causes—and he wants to tell you about it.
As the owner of the Breedlove and Bedell guitar companies, Tom Bedell has been a passionate advocate for sustainable practices in acoustic guitar manufacturing. Listening to him talk, it’s clear that the preservation of the Earth’s forests are just as important to Bedell as the sound of his guitars. You’ll know just how big of a statement that is if you’ve ever had the opportunity to spend time with one of his excellently crafted high-end acoustics, which are among the finest you’ll find. Over the course of his career, Bedell has championed the use of alternative tonewoods and traveled the world to get a firsthand look at his wood sources and their harvesting practices. When you buy a Bedell, you can rest assured that no clear-cut woods were used.
A born storyteller, Bedell doesn’t keep his passion to himself. On Friday, May 12, at New Jersey boutique guitar outpost Relic Music, Bedell shared some of the stories he’s collected during his life and travels as part of a three-city clinic trip. At Relic—and stops at Crossroads Guitar and Art in Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania, and Chuck Levin’s Washington Music Center in Wheaton, Maryland—he discussed his guitars and what makes them so special, why sustainability is such an important cause, and how he’s putting it into practice.
Before his talk, we sat in Relic’s cozy, plush acoustic room, surrounded by a host of high-end instruments. We took a look at a few of the store’s house-spec’d Bedell parlors while we chatted.
“The story of this guitar is the story of the world,” Bedell explained to me, holding a Seed to Song Parlor. He painted a picture of a milagro tree growing on a hillside in northeastern Brazil some 500 years ago, deprived of water and growing in stressful conditions during its early life. That tree was eventually harvested, and in the 1950s, it was shipped to Spain by a company that specialized in church ornaments. They recognized this unique specimen and set it aside until it was imported to the U.S. and reached Oregon. Now, it makes the back and sides of this unique guitar.
A Bedell Fireside Parlor with a buckskin redwood top and cocobolo back and sides.
As for the ocean sinker redwood top, “I’m gonna make up the story,” Bedell said, as he approximated the life cycle of the tree, which floated in the ocean, soaking up minerals for years and years, and washed ashore on northern Oregon’s Manzanita Beach. The two woods were paired and built into a small run of exquisitely outfitted guitars using the Bedell/Breedlove Sound Optimization process—in which the building team fine-tunes each instrument’s voice by hand-shaping individual braces to target resonant frequencies using acoustic analysis—and Bedell and his team fell in love.
Playing it while we spoke, I was smitten by this guitar’s warm, responsive tone and even articulation and attack across the fretboard; it strikes a perfect tonal balance between a tight low-end and bright top, with a wide dynamic range that made it sympathetic to anything I offered. And as I swapped guitars, whether picking up a Fireside Parlor with a buckskin redwood top and cocobolo back and sides or one with an Adirondack spruce top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides, the character and the elements of each instrument changed, but that perfect balance remained. Each of these acoustics—and of any Bedell I’ve had the pleasure to play—delivers their own experiential thumbprint.
Rosette and inlay detail on an Adirondack spruce top.
Ultimately, that’s what brought Bedell out to the East Coast on this short tour. “We have a totally different philosophy about how we approach guitar-building,” Bedell effused. “There are a lot of individuals who build maybe 12 guitars a year, who do some of the things that we do, but there’s nobody on a production level.” And he wants to spread that gospel.
“We want to reach people who really want something special,” he continued, pointing out that for the Bedell line, the company specifically wants to work with shops like Relic and the other stores he’s visited, “who have a clientele that says I want the best guitar I can possibly have, and they carry enough variety that we can give them that.”
A Fireside Parlor with a Western red cedar top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides.
A beautifully realized mashup of two iconic guitars.
Reader: Ward Powell
Hometown: Ontario, Canada
Guitar: ES-339 Junior
I’ve always liked unusual guitars. I think it started when I got my first guitar way back in 1976. I bought a '73 Telecaster Deluxe for $200 with money I saved from delivering newspapers.
I really got serious about playing in 1978, the same year the first Van Halen album was released. Eddie Van Halen was a huge influence on me, including how he built and modded guitars. Inspired by Eddie, I basically butchered that Tele. But keep in mind, there was once a time when every vintage guitar was just a used guitar—I still have that Tele, by the way.
I never lost that spirit of wanting guitars that were unique, and have built and modded a few dozen guitars since. When I started G.A.S.-ing simultaneously for a Les Paul Junior and a Casino, I came up with this concept. I found an Epiphone ES-339 locally at a great price. It already had upgraded CTS pots, Kluson tuners, and the frets had been PLEK’d. It even came with a hardshell case. It was cheap because it was a right-handed guitar that had been converted to left handed and all the controls had been moved to the opposite side, so it had five additional holes in the top.
Fortunately, I found a Duesenberg wraparound bridge that used the same post spacing as a Tune-o-matic. I used plug cutters to cut plugs out of baltic birch plywood to fill the 12 holes in the laminated top. I also reshaped the old-style Epiphone headstock. Then, I sanded off the original finish, taped the fretboard, and sprayed the finish using cans of nitro lacquer from Oxford Guitar Supply. Lots of wet sanding and buffing later, the finish was done.
I installed threaded insert bushings for the bridge, so it will never pull out. The pickup is a Mojotone Quiet Coil P-90 and I fabricated a shim from a DIY mold and tinted epoxy to raise the P-90 up closer to the strings. The shim also covers the original humbucker opening. I cut a pickguard out of a blank and heated it slightly to bend it to follow the curvature of the top.
All in all, I'm pretty happy how it turned out! It plays great and sounds even better. And I have something that is unique: an ES-339 Junior.
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