How rare are one piece bodies?

[boris bubbanov]

Originally Posted by jjpish68

[/IMG]

I think we're talking 2 piece, center join. Look at the area between the pickup routs.

On an AV body, normally the 3 piece examples have no center join, but rather two "wings". The MIMs can be just about anything.

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The real irony about 1 piece bodies is, a good number look superficially like they too might be 2 piecers when in fact they're not. Here's another shot of that one piecer I showed above. Looks like a 2 piece, doesn't it (but we know from the other image it cannot be).

[Telemarkman]

Originally Posted by boris bubbanov

I think we're talking 2 piece, center join. Look at the area between the pickup routs.

Most likely you're right.

Mine has a 2-piece, center-seamed body, and there's no way you can see the join on the front or back. Gotta look at the end grain.

Sometimes the finish around the edges is so opaque it's impossible to determine the number of pieces ... But you can bet it's not a 1-piece if it's a production Fender.

[Ron Garson]

Sometimes the seams are diagonal too, which makes them even more difficult to spot.

[fender4life]

What i find odd is that i have seen a lot of AM fenders with horribly mismatched body pieces, yet most of the MIM reissues with usually 3 piece bodies are match well, often to the point it's hard to tell. I don't care about multiple as long as they are matched well. Not sure i like the idea of say 7 piece like MIM standards, but on the other hand consider this...if say one out of 8 or 10 pieces of wood are lousy tonally, with a 7 piece your chances of getting a dog should be much reduced because even if one of the pieces is bad it's influence on the overall sound will be minimal instead of influencing 1/2 or 1/3 of the overall tone. But tone aside, i have never bought and never will buy a guitar with a badly matched body. Looks sooo cheap it just bothers me to no end. Of course if i bough a solid color t wouldn't matter, but i've rarely owned solids. Usually natural of burst.

[KP Will]

Originally Posted by brookdalebill

I suffer from "one piece body" fetishism.
My 57 Tele and 55 Esquire both had em'.
Bill Giebitz made my ol' #1 Bender Tele with a one piece light swamp ash body.
Looks great.
I don't think it matters a hill o beans to it's sound, though.

You are absolutely correct. It does not matter what kind of wood either, it is all cosmetics and/or weight.

[Telemarkman]

Originally Posted by KP Will

You are absolutely correct. It does not matter what kind of wood either, it is all cosmetics and/or weight.

Well, let's just say that everything and nothing matters.

[boris bubbanov]

Originally Posted by KP Will

You are absolutely correct. It does not matter what kind of wood either, it is all cosmetics and/or weight.

Whoa, whoa.

I try to look at it this way: You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make 'im drink.

Certain types of woods ARE a little more prone to sound a certain way than are others. A one piece body MAY have characteristics a 2 piece body will not have. And in the same way heavy bodies can sound different than light ones. But they won't do it on demand, not when the pot is up for grabs.

The slight propensity does occur. Where the boutique guys IMO get trapped is when they get a customer and the customer says: "Will my Guitar sound like XYZ". The true answer is: "We don't know"; but there's so many customers who will say thanks and hang up and call the next vendor or builder UNTIL THEY FIND ONE WHO WILL SAY YES. Pardon my caps.

The disconnect is between types of woods and weights of woods and types on construction having an impossible to modulate inclination to be a little this way as opposed to a little that way. Players, customers don't like this crawfish position but this is the ugly truth. Necks ARE different. Bodies ARE different. There's just no known human way we can forecast how much this body will follow that trend, or how much neck X will sound like neck Y.

The only absolute truth we can say is, just pay your money and take your chances. No promises, no guarantees, no predictions.

This is the subtle difference between my telling a guy "don't ask" and saying "absolutely never matters"

[xtrajerry]

I actually think that a 2pc body that is perfectly matched is a sign that the guitar or at least the body was prepared by a craftsman not a guy working for an hourly wage waiting for quitting time.. With that said I've come to the conclusion that no matter what I play it'll sound better if I spend my time practicing rather than searching for the Holy Grail of Tone..

[Mur]

Speaking from personal experience, yes ..one-piece bodies do exist today. And they also did in the fifties. To get one today, you need to specify it. As for sound and tone, every single thing effects the outcome of the instrument, especially whats goin' on with the wood.

[Brooks A Hood]

One piece bodies from Fender are as rare as virgins on the set with Ron Jeremy.(this is of course sarcasm - but there are not that many of these out there )

I have to take issue with the sentiment that it doesn´t matter if your body is one or two piece - or - five or seven piece. Since we know that any substance has a resonant frequency, then it only follows that one piece will have only one frequency vs. two or more for multiple pieces. This is my fundamental issue with laminate construction - especially as it happens in a factory setting. In a factory, lots of wood is laying around - and it gets thrown together to keep production going. Two pieces of radically different density from two different sections of the tree end up glued together and voila - a totally acoustically dead plank is made. This is why I feel that a one piece neck and a one piece body can make an outstanding guitar. It is also the same reason a neck-through or deep set-neck will never sound like a bolt on. And at the end of the day - how else can you explain that one particular guitar that many of us have owned that no matter what pickups are in it - it sounds great - OR - it always sounds the same (bad, bright, bassy whatever) - pickups can´t save it ?? Once you have eliminated hardware and pickups - the only thing left is the wood. YMMV

[KP Will]

Originally Posted by Mur

Speaking from personal experience, yes ..one-piece bodies do exist today. And they also did in the fifties. To get one today, you need to specify it. As for sound and tone, every single thing effects the outcome of the instrument, especially whats goin' on with the wood.

Please explain to me how wood sends a signal through the pickup. Scientific research will show it makes no difference. But everyone has an opinion, right or wrong.

[tpaul]

Originally Posted by KP Will

Please explain to me how wood sends a signal through the pickup. Scientific research will show it makes no difference. But everyone has an opinion, right or wrong.

The pickups are connected to the wood. Either directly, or through their connection with another piece of hardware (such as the bridge, on a tele). When the strings vibrate, that vibration is transfered to the wood, and to everything connected to the wood, including the pickups.

Now you have the strings, the wood, and the pickups all vibrating. The pickups, by definition, "pick up" the vibration of the steel string relative to the magnets - and if those magnets are also vibrating, that's going to affect the relative relationship between string and magnets, right? So a scientific view would be, yes, the way the wood resonates will have some impact on the sound you get through the pickups. Maybe not as big an impact as, say, turning the treble or bass up or down on the amp, but some impact for sure.

If there were no impact, there would be no difference between a hollow body (without sound holes) and a solid body... but there is.

[jonal335]

The wood affects how the string vibrates. I have a five year old MIM Classic '50s Esquire that I always thought was veneer, but after reading this thread I took a good close look with the magnifier and it is three incredibly well matched pieces. I agree withxtrajerry - anyone who can match wood grain this well is a real craftsman...

[KP Will]

Try reading this and then get back to me. (Applies equally to Teles)

How Guitar Pickups Work

by Tom Watson

No matter how visually attractive a particular Stratocaster may be, the heart of the instrument will always be the nature and the quality of sound it produces. We don't admire the guitar greats for the beauty of the guitars they played. We admire them for the timeless textures of sound they were able to produce.

The Stratocaster is a superb marriage of art and science. The visual art of the Strat appeals to the eye while invisible science helps account for the tones which please the ear. But we can only say "helps" because the ability of the individual player contributes to the production of tone in significant and unquantifiable ways.

A number of scientific fields are called upon in the creation of a Fender Stratocaster, but probably none so central to the production of potentially artistic tone than the sciences involved in the construction of a Stratocaster's pickups. Here's a brief look at the science behind the magic.

The basics

All guitars produce sound when a string is plucked because the string vibrates and the vibrations create sound waves. However, in order for us to hear the sound waves produced they need to be made louder. Amplified. An acoustic guitar is its own amplifier. The acoustic's hollow body serves as a sound chamber enlarging (amplifying) the sound waves produced by the plucked string.

The drawback to acoustic amplification is the limitation on how much amplification can be naturally produced. Although the amount of amplification can be affected by such factors as the size of the acoustic's hollow body and the force by which the strings are plucked, the instrument has a natural upper limit that creates a handicap for musicians in situations where greater volume is needed.

This proved to be the dilema of many guitarists in the big band era of the 40s and early 50s. Even the large acoustic jazz boxes were unable to produce sufficient amplification to let the guitar to be heard at the right volume when competing with rhythm and horn sections.

Electronic amplification provided the solution.

Electronic amplification

The electronic amplification of a vibrating string requires two basic components, some sort of "microphone" or pickup to capture the string's vibration and translate it into an electric signal and a second component that can take that signal and amplify it into audible sound (the guitar amplifier). Our concern is with the mechanics of the pickup.

In one sentence

A vibrating steel (or other ferro-magnetic metal) string causes a flux in the magnetic field created by a pickup's coil, a flux that produces an altnernating (AC) voltage (a signal) that is transmitted to the electronic amplifier where it is enlarged then sent to the amplifier's speaker.

Second look

Electric current passing through wire wrapped around a magnetically conducive pole piece or block turns the pole piece into an electromagnet (a magnet created by the presence of electric current). The electromagnet generates a magentic field around itself. When a string vibrates inside the magnetic field of an electromagnet, a form of electrical energy is created, a vibrating (oscillating) electric current that can be transmitted to the other critical device, the electronic amplifier. The amplifier increases the strength of the current received from the pickup thereby enlarging or amplifying it.

A closeup

Let's take a slightly closer look at the basic elements of a pickup. It must have an electromagnet to produce a magnetic field to interact with the motion of the vibrating string. The electromagnet used can be either a single bar of metal lying under all of the instrument's strings, or, it can consist of separate magnetically conducive pieces of metal lying beneath each string.

The pickups commonly used on the Fender Stratocaster are of the one-electromagnet-per-string variety, each electromagnet being what we call a "polepiece". The advantage of using one electromagnetic polepiece per string is that the distance between the electromagnet and the string can affect the strength of the resulting electric current, thus allowing the guitar player to adjust the strength of the signal created by each string by adjusting the height of the individual polepiece.

The individual polepieces are made electromagnetic by running an electric current through wire (called the "coil") wrapped around them. That's why pickups are "wound" with as many as 7,000 turns of fine wire. It is the electric current running through this wire that transforms the polepiece into an electromagnet.

The third basic component of the pickup is the permanent magnet, located at the base of the pickup. This magnetic element is not dependent upon an electric current for its magnetic properties. The permanent magnet serves as a sort of information center, taking the electronic signal received from the electromagnet and transmitting that signal through wires to what are called "resistors", the two most common of which are the guitar's volume and tone control. The volume control adjusts the strength of the signal sent to the amplifier and the tone control filters out the higher frequencies of the signal. After passing through the resistors, the signal then goes to the output jack that through contact with the guitar-to-amplifer cable sends the signal to the amplifer.

Here is a crude illustration of the components of a single coil pickup.



Single coil tone versus single coil hum

A simple guitar pickup with one bobbin of wrapped wire is called a single coil pickup, the "coil" being the wrapped wire. Look at any original Stratocaster built between 1954 and 1979, and you will see three single coil pickups.

Single coil pickups are a good news, bad news proposition. The good news is that they produce a certain tone that many guitarists appreciate and enjoy, a tone that's impossible to describe in a few words but often refered to as "twangy". The single coil tone is a sound that has become closely identified with the Stratocaster. The bad news is that single coil pickups are subject to outside signal interference, resulting in what is commonly referred to as "hum", though technically, it's more accurate to say "noise" because the single coil will pick up a variety of signal interferences in addition to what's commonly referred to as 60 cycle hum caused by electromagnetic radiation from nearby transformers.

Most Gibson guitars, by way of comparison, employ a dual coil pickup, which are essentially two bobbins wired in opposite directions that "cancel", or in Gibson terminology, "buck" the single coil signal intereference propensity. The classic "humbucker".

Unfortunately, while the dual coil system prevents the single coil hum, it results in the loss of the single coil tone.



Actually, the classic Fender Stratocaster also employs its own variation of dual coil humbucking. When you place a five-way Stratocaster pickup selector in position 1,3, or 5, thereby selecting the bridge (position 1), middle (position 3) or neck (position 5) pickup alone, you hear hum. That's because each of the pickups is a simple single coil. However, when you move the selector to position 2 (a combination of the bridge and middle pickup) or position 4 (a combination of the middle and neck pickup) the hum disappears. That's because the middle pickup was wound in a direction that's the reverse of the neck and bridge pickups, so when combined with either the neck or bridge pickup the two act as a single humbucker, cancelling out the unwanted hum.

For years, Fender players wished they could have the best of both worlds, the single coil tone produced by the bridge, middle and neck pickups used alone without the singel coil hum. Several after-market pickup manufacturers, such as Bill Lawrence and Seymour Duncan, addressed this desire by producing pickups that promised single coil tone without the hum, and Fender itself offered two solutions on some of its factory made guitars: the Lace Sensor pickups introduced in 1987 and the Vintage Noiseless pickups introduced in 1998.

2004 saw the arrival of Fender's third single coil "noiseless" pickup solution, the Samarium Cobalt Noiseless (SCN) pickup, which promises to carry the classic Fender Stratocaster tones into the future.

[nickd]

I have a 2 piece FSR, I can't tell the difference between any guitar. What I will say is keep an eye out for 1 piece necks, they are much more stronger. I've never seen a two, three, four or even 5 piece body break, nor any sign of sustain or tone loss.

[stewtel]

Originally Posted by tpaul

The pickups are connected to the wood. Either directly, or through their connection with another piece of hardware (such as the bridge, on a tele). When the strings vibrate, that vibration is transfered to the wood, and to everything connected to the wood, including the pickups.

Now you have the strings, the wood, and the pickups all vibrating. The pickups, by definition, "pick up" the vibration of the steel string relative to the magnets - and if those magnets are also vibrating, that's going to affect the relative relationship between string and magnets, right? So a scientific view would be, yes, the way the wood resonates will have some impact on the sound you get through the pickups. Maybe not as big an impact as, say, turning the treble or bass up or down on the amp, but some impact for sure.

If there were no impact, there would be no difference between a hollow body (without sound holes) and a solid body... but there is.

Explained perfectly, this should be a Sticky

[nickd]

^ thats why a guitar like a les paul wins, its heavy mahogany (or any dense heavy stiff wood) transmits most of its energy to the strings. The stiffer the distance between the nut and the bridge, the more sustain and 'tone'. Various nuances are created when the mechanical efficiently between these points is hampered or improved.

[notdave]

Before we get all sticky. Any real physicists on board?

Or acoustic engineers?

It's a long shot...xylophone makers?

[Ronkirn]

Electric current passing through wire wrapped around a magnetically conducive pole piece or block turns the pole piece into an electromagnet (a magnet created by the presence of electric current).

.... once I got to the above comment.. I just stopped... no sense to read any further... If ya don't know the fundamentals....

Before we get all sticky. Any real physicists on board?

ahh... I've gone over it all so many times before... it's like whispering at an NFL championship game...

Ron Kirn

[VfromtheD]

Lucky me. I get to post right after, Mr. Kirn. Okay ,I do not disagree with any of these posts! An experiment will consist of this: Make 2 identical guitars. 1 piece 2 piece ,this part only matters in the one vs. two comparison. Now. take one gutar and drill or route two rectangular holes completely thru the body/. Plug em in., Get out all the gizmos to measure sound waves, db's, pitch intensity, whatever else that matters. The results will be the results. You then be your own judge. Ok, [I] got to sit back, relax, and light my Pall Mall, LOL Mr. V. broadcasting ....<><>