gringopig's guitars
Gringo's Guitar Identification Quiz:
Can you tell the difference?
Everyone knows that Jazzmasters are spiky post-punk alternative rockers choice. It's obvious that the Explorer is a heavy rock axe™. A Telecaster is a country guitar and a Jaguar is only fit for heavily reverberated plinky plonky surf music. A les Paul sounds like Slash even when unplugged - obviously.
Well. My assertion is that guitars are chosen and played largely because of preconceptions and from the way we expect them to sound. We hear with our eyes and imagination largely I think.
There are real differences though and I devised this test to see if players could pick out a guitar just by listening to the clean sound of the pickup combinations alone: the raw sound of the guitar, unadorned by the garb of amp and effects pedal.
I lined up 8 guitars and switched on the Twin Reverb. Vibrato channel input 1 and set it to 5. I placed an SM57 and a Rode NT1-A on the right speaker about 6" away and just off cone centre and recorded all of them with those same settings.
The contenders for the ensuing confusion are:
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Guitar 1: Gibson ES 335
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Guitar 2: Fender Jazzmaster
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Guitar 3: Gibson Les Paul
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Guitar 4: Gretsch
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Guitar 5: SC Relics T-Style
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Guitar 6: Gibson Les Paul Junior
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Guitar 7: Fender Stratocaster
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Guitar 8: Fender Jaguar
Watch the video below and select 1080p quality. The test subjects are played from mystery guitar A to H and for each guitar, I play a chord passage through the pickups from neck to bridge. Then I repeat for a single note phrase.
Listen to each and see if you can match up the guitars 1-8 as above with guitars A-H as recorded.
Remember. Each phrase is played on every pickup combination available from the neck to the bridge.
Stripped of the visual clues and relying on the inherent sound of the guitar played through a clean amp to determine basic differences in standard guitar forms is tricky. Mind you, there are clues. Some pickups are louder than others and some pickups are 'a pickup' (wee clue there)
My contention is that guitars do not sound radically different to each other when listened to objectively or recorded. They feel different to play for sure but sonically, it's surprising how hard it is to tell them apart.
However - have a go! I put this test to a guitar forum one time and they abjectly failed. Yet they went on about EL34s versus 6L6s like they knew what they were talking about and obsessed about trivial nonsense that makes no difference. The 'old wood' cork sniffing types couldn't even pick out a humbucker!
The video has chapters and you can select the candidate guitars from this option for a quick comparison.
Note that I messed up one phrase on Guitar F at 07:50 and included an overdriven version instead of clean. These things are hard to edit, sorry.
Have a go just for fun and I will publish the results in the future. No personal details required, just some random made up name if you like!
Enjoy :-)
No-one has got it correct yet. Surprising. One attempt had the Les Paul Junior as Guitar A. Mathematical error!
Clue: it's only got 1 pickup!
