I'm assuming if a double-blind was done, and really put the ear to the test it becomes like fine-wine, where there is some differentiation but a lot less than it would seem.
I started tinkering with DIY guitar amps as a kid in the 60's and have been messing with them ever since. I think someone with a good ear and critical listening skills could find some difference in the "tone" between any two different guitar amps, even two of the same kind. Often this can come down to the placement of the two amps and the room acoustics.
I remember meeting a Yamaha guitar amp that had a Styrofoam coned rectangular speaker in a warehouse that was being transformed into a recording studio. That amp really screamed in the empty building with concrete block walls. Once all of the sound deadening went in, that amp sounded like crap. This was in the early 70's and I haven't seen an amp like that again.
Google found it:
https://surfguitar101.com/forums/topic/36880/
The real issue is the definition of the word "tone." It means different things to different people. A person listening to HiFi equipment does not need to be able to discern the differences in harmonic profile of two amps operating at 5% THD, but a guitar player does. Hint, 2H and 3H as well as the higher order odd harmonics are the key players here, as is IMD.
A screaming lead player who plays one note at a time, with a random power chord or two can appreciate a lot of THD. A rhythm player playing full 6 note chords cannot, since the IMD that comes along with that high THD turns all of the "tone" into mud, as the IMD products are not in key (musically related) notes.
Power chords are two or three musically related notes chosen so that their IMD products fall on or close to a musical interval, thus not sounding overly muddy.
Ever watch a good player work a pedal board containing a lot of pedals. Each one creates a new "tone" which often "makes" the song or style being played. Want to play 60's surf music, it's not going to sound right without a spring reverb setup. That same setup sounds terible on music that first hit the radio (or Youtube) being played through a Strymon Big Sky (too expensive for me). Our expectations were set by the original version of the music that we heard first. Cover versions will always be compared to the original.
I remember meeting a Yamaha guitar amp that had a Styrofoam coned rectangular speaker in a warehouse that was being transformed into a recording studio. That amp really screamed in the empty building with concrete block walls. Once all of the sound deadening went in, that amp sounded like crap. This was in the early 70's and I haven't seen an amp like that again.
Google found it:
https://surfguitar101.com/forums/topic/36880/
The real issue is the definition of the word "tone." It means different things to different people. A person listening to HiFi equipment does not need to be able to discern the differences in harmonic profile of two amps operating at 5% THD, but a guitar player does. Hint, 2H and 3H as well as the higher order odd harmonics are the key players here, as is IMD.
A screaming lead player who plays one note at a time, with a random power chord or two can appreciate a lot of THD. A rhythm player playing full 6 note chords cannot, since the IMD that comes along with that high THD turns all of the "tone" into mud, as the IMD products are not in key (musically related) notes.
Power chords are two or three musically related notes chosen so that their IMD products fall on or close to a musical interval, thus not sounding overly muddy.
Ever watch a good player work a pedal board containing a lot of pedals. Each one creates a new "tone" which often "makes" the song or style being played. Want to play 60's surf music, it's not going to sound right without a spring reverb setup. That same setup sounds terible on music that first hit the radio (or Youtube) being played through a Strymon Big Sky (too expensive for me). Our expectations were set by the original version of the music that we heard first. Cover versions will always be compared to the original.
Well and that's the thing during a study all the terms would be defined I imagine it would be something like the perceived difference of quality between sources of amplification and characterization of an electric guitar
I mean if tone is completely solipsistic then there is no reason to even discuss it right? It's an absolute truth because it is whatever it means to us. And I can't argue what is internally true to you
Per forum policy this thread has been moved to Instruments and Amps.
I once asked the question as to why "Hexaphonic" pickups never became in vogue. There you could have individual distortion or even amps / corresponding speakers per string. Nothing being too outrageous these days... I believe the answer came back that the IMD was somehow a necessary part of overall distortion / sound. It somehow didnt sound right after mixing individually generated distortions per string; they had to be mixed onto one signal prior to the distorting element.
I think the ARP Avatar, an early guitar synth had what they called a "Hex Fuzz", which I understand as their first stage "Oscillator" part of an analog synth VCO->VCF->VCA patch, X 6 I assume. Not seeing a lot of folks since then falling all over themselves to get that "Hex Fuzz" sound. Aware hex pickups were available in the late 70's, I was always too cheap to buy one and try it.
Lately, I'm convinced that the old Fender 5e3 6V6 p-p circuit - ID'd briefly as the one with the 4 High / Low inputs in this thread, is about the best you're going to do when building a replica. The same circuit could be enhanced with spring reverb (an effect mix) and / or a Tremolo (an effect). I heard Neil Young uses one, with a servo controlled knob rotator attached to it, custom built by his guitar tech. He can make changes to the tone of that one amp to stored presets with the tap of a footswitch.
I guess if I were setting out to build or design a guitar amp, that's the dimension I'd want to work in. Put new tech on top of the old, to do thing you couldnt do, say, in the 50s / 60s. Not should this 68k resistor be 22k in this stage kinda stuff. Wring out all the tonal versatility some old circuit design can do in all the dimensions, make it usable in a musical way to the player. Like turn your volume knob 1/4 turn and the tone changes, loudness remains the same.
I'v read that what people love about the old tube tone is the old and failing components, the burnt in caps, the patina that is near damn impossible to reproduce since there are so many variables .
I have toyed with Hex pickups off and on for 30 years or more. I bought a used Roland GI-10 Guitar to MIDI interface on Ebay back in the late 90's. It used the Roland GK-2 hex pickup which I stuck to my Univox Mosrite clone with double stick tape. It took quite a bit of learning and practice to get useful sound out of it, and I eventually lost interest. It's still in a box around here somewhere, and I will play with it some more once I find it. The pickup was still on the guitar (now separated) but the funky 13 pin cable is MIA.
I have experimented with commercial and DIY hex pickups and DIY PLL based tracking systems with limited success. Despite all of the DSP magic available today accurate tracking of a musical note based on a single electrical audio tone is limited by physics. Assuming accurate ability to time and measure the zero crossings, the period of a low "E" note (82.4 Hz) is about 12 mS grabbing a reliable time measurement from a non sinusoidal guitar note in a single cycle is tricky, and the note needs to be clean. There will be at least a 12 mS delay on the low E if you can calculate the not frequency in a single cycle.
Looking back at my early experiments, fret buzz and lousy technique is what killed those experiments. The GK-2 pickup has a rather low output with limited harmonic content, which required much experimentation with placement, which was obviously a bit too close to the strings. The GI-10 had a noticeable delay and a propensity for random octave jumps as the note died out. It did do some neat FX with a DIY fade pedal that morphed between a guitar controlled JV-880 and the clean tone from the regular guitar pickups.
My last DIY hex pickup experiments were centered on a video I found on YouTube while still living in Florida. I can't find the video now, but some of my old experiments still exist. The video showed a guy who used tiny speakers like those used for the "beep" on a computer motherboard. These come in two kinds, piezo and electromagnetic. Both function as microphones, and can be placed on a guitar body for use as a pickup. You can however rip the thin steel diaphragm off the electromagnetic kind and have a self contained single string guitar pickup. They come in various diameters, with the larger versions having more output due to a fatter coil of wire inside. All are larger than the string spacing so a zig zag staggered placement is needed.
Experiments with these were promising, but the limitation imposed by physics still remains. This requires some cheating. There have been several optical and electrical systems to determine the position of the fretting hand, and thus give a PLL based system a "head start." I chose to go with a wired neck. This requires each string to be electrically isolated from each other, which creates a 6 X 24 matrix keyboard. All went into a box when my EE career ended, and I moved out of Florida.
I also remember a crude experiment where I used 6 amps, each fed by a single string, that fed 6 different speakers. All of the amps were simple quickies that used a single opamp to drove a cheap chip amp that made a few watts each. The combination proved that you could produce a distorted chord that did not descend into muddy noise, but I did not have enough gain for serious overdriven distortion. It is a path that I may explore further, hopefully with tubes. Six 5 watt amps with six car stereo speakers of different sizes was plenty loud, even outside.
I bought a box full of DIY pickup parts and that big roll of #42 wire from AES (tubesandmore.com) when I still lived in Florida. I quickly learned that shaky hands and #42 wire are not compatible. I have several DIY guitar bodies in various stages of completion that I was working on when I had to leave Florida rather quickly. All are still in a big box.
I have recently wandered down a different path toward revisiting the DIY hex pickup, again due to a YouTube video. Parts in house, no construction yet. I ned to put some kind of playable guitar together, even if it's a chunk of wood with a neck on it.....AKA Stringlab.
The "Pickup Coils" are 67 cents each at Digikey.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/murata-power-solutions-inc/22R686MC/3178901
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As I've read in the past here, you've done a lot more experimenting than me. Recently I built a "hex" pickup using electret microphones. The reason for doing so is I play mostly nylon string guitars. I've got sick and tired of the same 'ol, same 'ol "piezo" bridge sound and my experiments using an electromagnetic pickup on the guitar's sound board is "sometimes, depends on the guitar" at best. Turns out the sound you can pickup from some location on the back of the soundboard hardly represents what the whole soundboard makes acoustically.
The six electret mics are wired sequentially out of phase. For far fields sounds, they cancel each other. For nearfield sounds - like a string vibrating right over the top of one, they pick up. Apparently these things have the dynamic range to handle the physical situation I put them in. Too lazy to do an op-amp based preamp, I simply used a 10k:10k center tapped transformer to do the inversion and mixing, with a current limiting resistor on the center tap to power the six mics. The transformer is small, doesnt have great low end - but when you load it at 50K or 100k, that aspects gets better and to my ears, good enough.
It's been tried at maybe 6-8 performances now, never feeds back and makes a sound that literally no one else has. I've got it on an instrument with the "silk / steel" setup, where the three high strings are steel, the three low are from a nylon set. It's not perfect and if the sound guy puts too much treble on the channel, it can make an "ultrasonic" feedback. I doubt it would work at "lead" gains, like a solidbody electric. But what acoustic guitar does? I just bring my own mixer / board for EQ and compression, and hand the sound guy the XLR receiving end of a wireless.
Ideally I'd build an op-amp board with six levels, six passbands for each string and 3 channels inverted before mixing into the output. I got a pair of Chinese electret mic preamp boards, with compressor chips following the mic preamp. Next step will probably be putting those in front of the transformer; no way am I going to re-arrange the tiny SMD components to make one invert the signal. Guess whoever designed it didnt figure anyone would want to do that. Its also intuitive that the two compression parts may be better assigned low strings / high strings than every other string. That's a new pickup build, to wire it like that. Fantasy is 6 of these boards; one compressor per string. By the time I get around to that, tariffs will be 350%...
My mom tried to get her three sons into some "positive activities." She tried everything from sports (zero success) to tap dancing (rejected by all involved except her) to music. Myself (oldest) and the youngest got guitar lessons while the middle child got to beat the drums. Nobody would get an instrument for Christmas until they could play the rental from the music store. My father worked rotating shifts and nobody could make noise when he was home. The rental guitar I has was a POS acoustic that had a mile high action, but I did manage to pass the "play the rental" test. Unbeknownst to me the guy at the music store convinced my mom to buy me an electric guitar because it could be played quietly without an amp, so I got a new electric guitar for Christmas when I was maybe 9 or 10 years old. I could indeed take the electric down by the lake in the back yard and play it without disturbing my father.
Different guitars and mostly DIY amps came and went in the 60+ years since then, but most of my "pickup the guitar and play" time is "unplugged." There are 7 standard electric guitars, one electric bass, and one acoustic guitar here in the basement at the present moment. I gave my best bass guitar and a small amp to my oldest grandkid a few months ago. I told him that I would repossess it if he doesn't use it, but it was his to keep if he plays it. For some reason, I have never really liked playing an acoustic guitar even if I just want to tinker. I bought the "Lyon by Washburn" acoustic for $25 at a flea market a few years ago. I have played it maybe 20 times. I bought one of those new Squire Debut Series Stratocasters when Amazon first brought them out thinking the first few would probably be the best quality and it has indeed become my favorite....I have three Strats, the Debut, a generic Chinacaster, and the self disassembling red 1985 vintage Squire that I bought at Ace Music in Miami when my Japanese made Univox guitar was stolen. I rebuilt the 85 Strat after it flew apart while I was playing it in Florida leaving me quite bloody. Despite everyone around cheering, it was not intended or expected. I did find another 70's vintage Univox to replace the stolen one. Not sure if it's Japanese or Korean, bit it plays like the old one did.
I have some more parts for DIY guitar pickup experiments on their way from DigiKey. Somewhere in a box near me should be some old optical pickup experiments. I didn't get to far down that road before I had to pack up and leave. Not sure where everything went or if it went. Lots of stuff has not been found since the move.
Maybe we should take these experiments to a new thread if there is more interest?
Different guitars and mostly DIY amps came and went in the 60+ years since then, but most of my "pickup the guitar and play" time is "unplugged." There are 7 standard electric guitars, one electric bass, and one acoustic guitar here in the basement at the present moment. I gave my best bass guitar and a small amp to my oldest grandkid a few months ago. I told him that I would repossess it if he doesn't use it, but it was his to keep if he plays it. For some reason, I have never really liked playing an acoustic guitar even if I just want to tinker. I bought the "Lyon by Washburn" acoustic for $25 at a flea market a few years ago. I have played it maybe 20 times. I bought one of those new Squire Debut Series Stratocasters when Amazon first brought them out thinking the first few would probably be the best quality and it has indeed become my favorite....I have three Strats, the Debut, a generic Chinacaster, and the self disassembling red 1985 vintage Squire that I bought at Ace Music in Miami when my Japanese made Univox guitar was stolen. I rebuilt the 85 Strat after it flew apart while I was playing it in Florida leaving me quite bloody. Despite everyone around cheering, it was not intended or expected. I did find another 70's vintage Univox to replace the stolen one. Not sure if it's Japanese or Korean, bit it plays like the old one did.
I have some more parts for DIY guitar pickup experiments on their way from DigiKey. Somewhere in a box near me should be some old optical pickup experiments. I didn't get to far down that road before I had to pack up and leave. Not sure where everything went or if it went. Lots of stuff has not been found since the move.
Maybe we should take these experiments to a new thread if there is more interest?