Do Heavier Guitars *REALLY* Sustain Longer?

Interesting, it is!

 

No they just hurt my back more

 

i like what he said at end.."the neck body..all vibrates into your body and that is the guitar for me"..i agree, i just prefer a Lp or SG..you feel the tone resonate..i play them acoustically and all the ones i have have been bought because of the above average tone before the guitar is even plugged in..sounds good acoustically=sounds great electric..especially into a non squashed amp,,

 

Bridge and fitness of the guitar in general makes more difference. If you put a heavy bridge on a radiata pine guitar, it's still going to sustain for a long time.

An easier way to see that is to clip something heavy and metallic onto an archtop. It "ruins it" by itself no matter how resonant the hollow body is.

 

If guitars needed to be heavy to sustain acoustic guitars wouldn’t work as well as they do.

 

yeah, honestly, I just don't like hanging a brick around my neck sustain or no sustain.

 

Hey, Johan Segeborn did this video first...

 

My tele is 10 lbs. i have a gretsch hollowbody that’s about 7 lbs. the gretsch rings out for days and days. Almost too much.
I’m a believer that the right bridge is the key, regardless of weight. That’s just me.

 

I don't think so.
What’s the sustain obsession about anyway?
Music is a fleeting expression, no?
Whats the charm of sustaining notes incessantly?

 

Yeah, right? I always wonder why anyone would want a note to ring out at all. Staccato or gtfo.

 

Who needs sustain from a guitar?
You want sustain?
Play violin.

 

Totally agree. The funny thing is, the folks that seem to obsess most about sustain are the shredders who play a bajillion notes per second anyway - as long as their guitar will sustain for more than 0.005 seconds they should be fine. Yes, I am talking to you Nigel Tufnel!

 

Strat. Jig saw. That hurt to watch.

 

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I've found sustain follows string length beyond the nut and saddles. Headless guitar vs a plinky mandolin. Gibson E and e vs D and G, Fender E vs e.
all about spring rate of the string and friction dampening as it stretches over nut and saddle. Like a car bounding through a pot hole with good or bad shocks will sustain the bounce or not.

Sometimes I do wonder about those wizard-thin shredder necks and how they bend around so easily allowing a similar robbing of string energy. Maybe magic truss-rods and carbon fiber rods will save them?

.

 

Do both women and men obsess over sustain?

 

”Do Heavier Guitars *REALLY* Sustain Longer?”

Judging by Keef’s actions..."ABJECTION SUSTAINED!"



The man yield’s a heavy axe

 

So where does a pedal steel guitar fit in with this whole branch of "science" ? Quite a bit of sustain, if'n I'm not mistaken... yet...
not real lightweight.... not real "resonant" ... kinda like all neck and/or a very odd/heavy/rigid body....
I really do think electricity has a whole bunch to do with it all...

 

The one on the left is solid, the one on the right is chambered. The chambered one is one and a half pounds lighter. They are both mahogany bodies and necks, the one on the left has a maple top, right is Spanish cedar (which has similar properties to maple). Other than that they are identical - scale, hardware, fretboard, and most importantly, pups and electronics.



At the end of my build thread on the one on the right I included some sound clips - basically just noodling thru an A/B cable into the same amp - same settings, pick, yadda yadda. There are no tests of "sustain" (the usual way to do that is using a piece of magnet wire to pluck the string and looking at the decay of an individual note) but you can form your own opinion on whether there is a difference or not.

My conclusion is that I will continue to chamber my "solid body" guitars.

 

Anecdotal but I had a 12lb G&L w/ a maple neck and 'soft' maple body. It definitely had a brighter attack and longer sustain compared to a 6.5 G&L w/ a maple neck and light mahogany body @ 6.5lbs, unplugged. The bridge is the same. The scale length is the same. The pickups have the same magnetic pull. Pretty much the same guitar with different bodies.

I don't think heavier guitar inherently sustain better, but some of them do...