Can you hear the difference between a Fender Telecaster and a Gibson Les Paul if both guitars have the exact same Pickups, setup, strings and wiring?
A fun little experiment in the great debate over where the tone comes from.
Having multiple guitars, I’ll still go by what Jim Lill and SMG say: it’s mostly up to the speakers. I have a knockoff tele, Epi Wildkat and some others. They sound exactly the same with my setup using an fx chain in reaper going out to my shit Line6 amp. Personally I don’t care as much about sound as I do does it make me want to play?.
does it make me want to play?
Amen to that!
I loved the Jim Lil series, and it was nice to hear Ryan give a nod to it in this video. I’m not familiar with SMG, are you referring to smg-guitars.com?
No SMG is Spectre Media Group. This place He does all metal music production stuff.
Oh, yeah, I’ve seen his stuff. He’s real big on Neural Amp Modeler and why everyone is an idiot! 😅
LOL yep that’s him. TBF, NAM is pretty amazing. Only way I can play an Engl.
The “different scale length” comment is spot on… also affects probably relative position of the pickups, string tension. I do think they sound very similar, but there is a small difference and it’s likely due to those factors.
From scale length you’d expexr the longer scale guitar to sound brighter, which I think is what I can also hear.
yeah, it’s a refreshing exercise in that it shows there’s a distinct impact on the sound from the physical design of the guitar without invoking tone wood discussions.
I think there was a clear difference in at least the bridge pickup sounds between the two.
@baronvonj 60-cycle hum did this with CuNiFe wide-range humbuckers. [edit: this is that video]
My concern then was that the pickups were not proportional distances from the bridge. They look pretty close in the thumbnail, tho.
I used to have a coil split and a switch that would let me choose which coil was active, on a split neck humbucker, and there was a noticeable difference in the sound.
Yeah that seems to be the whole point, to me, along with the scale length so many are bringing up. The things you want from a Tele or a Les Paul are still present even with the same pickups and electronics, without even invoking the tone wood debate. I think this is the first time I’ve seen someone approach it from this angle.
