The Matter Myth Pdf

[Giancarlo Stewart]

The Dark Matter Myth Podcast, is a triple entendre, play on words. We raise issues that are thought to be of circumstance, but are usually a subconscious, dark afterthought to most people. It also draws inspiration from a concept of the astrophysics field called, Dark Matter.

The Dark Matter phenomenon is only observable by it's pull on nearby objects. While it isn't observable on the visible light spectrum, it's presence is calculated to consist of a significant majority of the entire universe.

In short, the majority of the universe is filled with experiences and circumstances that you will never see. And it all remains a myth until the majority of people believe it to be true. And the only way to do that is to give them the information while they're still.... Receptive.

It's the musical equivalent of Flat Earth Theory, but the notion that an electric guitar's wood type has no effect on the tone, has exploded into a widely-accepted trope. The trope states that in an electric guitar, only the pickups and strings define the output sound, because the pickups sense the string movement directly, and therefore, how could the body material possibly make any difference?

We'll see the technical reason why the body does make a difference later in the post, and I'll explain how to make a solid guitar body reproduce tonal differences through the amp. But there's a lot to pack in before that, and from here on, for easy recognition, I'll be referring to the "wood doesn't matter" trope as Flat Guitar Theory. A twist on Flat Earth Theory, in which the word "flat" is repurposed to allude to frequency response.

After the sound has been recorded, digitised for online streaming and then played back through equipment on which audio is typically an afterthought, you have at least three stages of frequency loss in the chain. And this applies even if you assume nothing has been manipulated in the making of the video. It's widely acknowledged that with most content intended for viral spread, the narrative comes first, and the content is twisted to fit the narrative. If it won't fit, it's manipulated until it will.

But the greater dynamic behind online persuasion is simply the audience's desire to believe. Broadly, if someone has enough motivation to believe something, they'll believe it, whatever the evidence for or against...

Flat Guitar Theory is a product of the Internet age. I specifically cover the "pre-Internet" era on this blog, and apart from recalling the 1980s and 1990s as an eye-witness musician, the number of period printed references I've gathered runs to many hundreds. I have not read a single interview or advisory, in a single pre-Internet book, magazine or paper, that advocates Flat Guitar Theory. Not one.

Even the irreverent punks - desperate to debase every last gram of "dinosaur lore" - admitted that identically-built guitars differed in sound from one example to the next. The so-called "Frankenstein" guitar concept, in which '60s and '70s "dinosaurs" like Eric Clapton had bought multiple Fenders and then assembled one "cherry" from the parts with the best tone, would have been a sitting-duck for punk ridicule had all wood sounded the same. But no one questioned the idea. It was plain logic.

But the overarching problem we have is that capitalists have invaded and destroyed what was once a musicians' market, turning guitars into an investment commodity and hoarding the stock to drive up demand. So the access is now broadly only afforded to people with investor profiles. The deals are besuited handshakes - not sweaty, T-shirt clad string-bendathons in poky music shops, as they were when I was a teenager. Flat Guitar Theory is, more than anything, just a symptom of that.

Ironically, however - if you believe that Flat Guitar Theory did set out as a bid to de-stabilise the premium/vintage guitar market - the investment value itself is irrevocably tied to the sonic superiority and increasing scarcity of the highest quality wood.

You can say that artist association is the biggest factor in collectability, and I wouldn't dispute that - although the prices of higher end new guitars have also risen well above the rate of inflation. So the artist influence extends a long way beyond the individual guitar they personally owned. But the wider point is that if famous guitars hadn't produced the best sounds, the artists would not have become associated with them in the first place.

Then you reach the question of why those old guitars had the best sounds. Let the artists answer that themselves. Read their interviews. To quote one of the most sonically aware and influential guitarists of the modern music age, and someone whose career has spanned all of the generations - Buddy Guy (as interviewed for Guitar Player, April 1990)...

Find me someone of that calibre and experience who said: "Well, I could have put two pickups and a set of strings on a bicycle frame and it would have sounded identical, but it would have been a bit too difficult to fit that into my guitar case". You won't. You know what you'll find. They all knew it was the wood.

And from the earliest days of the commercial solid guitar, the manufacturers knew it too. One of the best pieces of evidence for this is the story of the Gibson Les Paul 'gold top'. Theodore 'Ted' McCarty - Gibson President during the years when the company's most revered guitars were built - was queried about the company's rather odd decision to spray only the front face of the guitar body gold. His answer was detailed, but to condense it a little...

Before taking the Les Paul to market in 1952, Gibson spent a couple of years honing its tone. Fender had launched the Broadcaster/Telecaster and rivals Gibson were desperate to compete with it. A major chunk of the brands' customer-base in those days comprised pro musicians. The top manufacturers were not really selling to casual please-easies in bedrooms. The clients were critical people with robust needs and high expecations. The battleground was tone.

No way! They want to keep it a secret. So what they're actually going to do is try to trick rival manufacturers into thinking the body is all mahogany. In Ted McCarty's own words, source Vintage Gallery, circa 1994...

"We were using mahogany and maple to make the Les Paul bodies. We thought that nobody would know we were using a maple top if we covered it with gold paint. They'd only see the mahogany on the back. So from then on we made them with the gold top."

That decision - using a more expensive construction technique and then hiding it - only makes sense if the manufacturers truly believed that wood impacts tone. Try and explain it in another way. You can't! They flat out knew that wood selection was the key to premium tone. Ted McCarty continued...

So the first-gen solid guitar manufacturers were not just relying on their ears. Their assessment process had advanced technological backup. And indeed the tone mattered so much that the manufacturers of the day didn't just use the right type of wood - they used the very, very best available cuts of the type. In fact, they didn't just use top cut - they used top vintage cut.

That's right, in the electric solid's formative years, the manufacturers were not making guitars from new wood. They knew old timber would sound better, so that's what they used. In the February 1995 issue of Guitarist magazine, seasoned vintage guitar expert Chris Trigg explained...

Of course, it can be alleged by Flat Guitar theorists that the quotes surrounding early Gibson and Fender manufacture came retrospectively, years after the event, and are thus prone to inaccuracy. Putting a maple top on a guitar and then hiding it still wouldn't make sense, and there are surviving factory records relating to the purchase of materials, but yeah, I get that people can forget or embellish...

Which is why my next source is someone whose monstrously successful guitar-building brand had its entire ascent played out publicly, in the guitar press. Paul Reed Smith set out to build brand new "vintage" guitars, slap-bang in the middle of the 1980s when virtually the whole market wanted the space age. Or at least thought it did.

For casual onlookers, it seemed there could not have been a worse time to start shipping traditional instruments built to recapture vintage tones, than the era of FM synthesis, warp-siren gadetry, and megasat digital distortion which rendered the guitar's natural tone irrelevant. Especially given the relatively high prices of PRS guitars.

But PRS realised that in fact, there could not be a better time. As other manufacturers ceased caring about tone and commenced making LED-clad guitars out of carbon-fibre or graphite, the way was clear for someone to come in with a guitar that really did recapture the musical properties of the vintage classics. Initially, because of where the trends had taken popular ideology, Smith had very little, if any competition outside of the boutique scene.

He had been obsessed with vintage guitars since acquiring a 1952 Les Paul, and he understood wood and its resonant properties like few other people of his generation. He was advocating super-thin finishes and the use of hide glue as active ingredients in increasing the wood's natural resonance. And he was pathological about sourcing the best available materials, as well as proactively "ageing" the wood. In a 1980s interview for Guitarist magazine, PRS stated...

"We have a special deal with this mahogany supplier - we can take a plane to every board in his entire yard, and we take like one in every twenty boards in the whole place, and then [during production at the factory] we throw a third of those away! Then the rest of them are dried for a month and a half, in different stages..."

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