Question: Which solid body guitar has better sustain, the Fender Stratocaster or the Gibson Les Paul? If you were like me, you’d probably pick the Les Paul. I’ve taken it as plain truth that there’s no competition: Gibson Les Paul = incredible sustain. Boy, was I so wrong!
An article by Mottola, R.M. “Sustain and Electric Guitar Neck Joint Type”, piqued my interest. Mottola, in his experiments performed power analysis, spectral analysis, and listening evaluation on three types of solid body electric guitars with 1) Bolt-on neck construction 2) Neck-thru construction and 3) Set-neck (glued-in) construction.
Conventional wisdom has it that Neck-thru construction offers the best sustain followed by Set-neck construction and then Bolt-on neck construction coming in last. His results suggest that this order may be backwards. Yeah, backwards! Bolt-on neck construction gives the best sustain. Neck-thru construction comes in last.
Hmmm…
So, when in doubt, test! It’s easy enough to verify Mottola’s results. I collected some high quality un-looped Strat and Les Paul samples, one for each guitar’s E2 (Low E open), E4 (High-E open) and E5 (High-E 12th fret) strings. These are raw unprocessed samples (no compression, no overdrive, no effects). The first set of samples comes from a stock American Standard Stratocaster while the second set comes from a Gibson Les Paul Custom.
The world of guitar building is so full of myths and it’s about time we start questioning preconceptions that’s been handed down the generations.
Defining Sustain
The envelope of a waveform produced by a mechanical (e.g. piano) or electronic device (e.g. synthesizer) is the general shape that follows the contours of the peak amplitudes of the sound over time. A somewhat crude but illustrative representation is the ADSR envelope found in analog synthesizers. ADSR stands for A: attack; D: decay; S: sustain; R: release.
With the guitar, the attack and decay sections constitute the part when the string is plucked and set in motion. These sections are relatively short but very rich in harmonic content. While the spectral color remains dynamic throughout the duration of the sound, the sustain section is that section for which the characteristics of the sound are relatively constant, while the amplitude is constantly decreasing. The release section is the point when the player finally releases or damps the string’s movement.
The kinetic energy in the form of string vibration is set in motion once the string is plucked. Over time, this energy will slowly dissipate due to various factors such as internal damping of the string itself, the magnetic pull of the pickups, the body and neck material absorbing the energy and converting it to sound, etc. We quantify sustain as the inverse of the rate of decay of the audio. The faster the decay, the lower the sustain.
Passive vs. Active Sustain
Keep in mind that in this article, we are only concerned with passive sustain. Many confuse passive sustain with sustain from feedback or active sustain. I hear people say the Les Paul will sustain for days. That is simply not possible with natural sustain alone. You need a sufficiently cranked up amplifier to force the strings into oscillation (infinite sustain). The amplifier boosts the weak guitar signal from the pickups and its output stages move the speaker. This sound emanating from the speakers, in turn, vibrates the instrument and the strings, which once more gets sensed by the pickups, sending the signal again to the amplifier, creating a feedback loop. Very resonant guitars, especially those with internal chambers, are easily driven into feedback and oscillation.
Strat vs. Les Paul E2 (6th string open)
The graphs below show the waveforms of the 6th string open-E plucked hard. The top waveform is from the Strat while the one below is from the Les Paul. The waveforms are normalized such that the maximum absolute sample value of both waveforms is at 0db. This step is intended to level out any variations in pickup output. The absolute maximum power is irrelevant anyway: we are interested in the rate of decay.
The side-by-side visual comparison of these raw waveforms already shows the slower rate of decay of the Strat vs. the Les Paul. Yet, is this good enough to do a comparative analysis? Not quite. The Strat’s single coil pickups give it a stronger attack transient. The Les Paul, on the other hand, uses humbuckers with a wider pickup window (the distance from both coils). The double coil configuration somehow evens out the attack transient —energetic higher frequency transients tend to cancel out.
Compared to the Les Paul, the Strat is perceived to have inferior sustain primarily because its bright attack transient masks the ensuing sustain. What you hear is the fast rate of decay from the attack transient and not the subtler rate of decay once the waveform settles down into a stable state.
We want to remove the attack transients from both waveforms by fading-in at 4 seconds. At 4 seconds, the initial attack has more or less settled. After removing the attack transients, we do another normalization. Here are the same waveforms faded-in at 4 seconds and normalized:
Now we can clearly see that the Strat has better sustain. The point where the waveform decays to -30db on the Strat is at 24 seconds while on the Les Paul, the -30db is at 14 seconds. That’s 10 seconds more!
Strat vs. Les Paul E4 (1st string open)
Here are the waveforms for 1st string open-E plucked hard. As before, the top waveform is from the Strat while the one below is from the Les Paul. Again, both raw waveforms are normalized.
The attack transient on both waveforms is very short. We fade-in at 1 second to zoom in on the relevant details, disregarding the attack spike.
Again, we can see that the Strat sustains better than the Les Paul. For the open E4 string, the point where the waveform decays to -30db on the Strat is at 7.2 seconds while on the Les Paul, the -30db is at 4.5 seconds.
Strat vs. Les Paul E5 (1st string 12th fret)
Finally, here are the normalized waveforms for 1st E string at the 12th fret, plucked hard. Again, the top waveform is from the Strat while the one below is from the Les Paul.
Fade-in at 1 second:
Here now, the tide has turned in the Les Paul’s favor. For the 1st E string at the 12th fret, the point where the waveform decays to -30db on the Strat is at 4.0 seconds while on the Les Paul, the -30db is at 4.6 seconds. Now that’s interesting. A good guess is that this accounts for the Les Paul’s singing quality at the upper registers.
While for the most part, the Strat sustains better than the Les Paul, the Les Paul sustains more where it is needed most. The Les Paul wails there at the top!
Here’s the tally for our short experiment:
| Decay at -30db point | ||
| Fender Stratocaster | Gibson Les Paul | |
| E2 (6th string open) | 24 seconds | 14 seconds |
| E4 (1st string open) | 7.2 seconds | 4.5 seconds |
| E5 (6th string 12th fret) | 4.0 seconds | 4.6 seconds |
Further Down the Road
I have to admit that more experiments and research needs to be done. There is not enough research into the actual science behind the guitar and guitar building. The deeper I search for answers, the more questions emerge. With the surprising results obtained from this simple experiment, I am really starting to question long held beliefs. At the very least these following conclusions are now in question:
- Les Paul style guitars have more break angle at the nut (due to the angled head) and at the bridge, and tend to sustain open strings longer as a result.
- A guitar with a fixed bridge (Les Paul) will sustain longer.
- A guitar with heavy and dense wood will sustain longer.
While there may still be some truth in the statements above, these observations are at best sweeping generalizations that may or may not be true depending on application and circumstances. It’s not unlike saying that American food is unhealthy when all you can see are Big Macs and deep-fried potatoes.
I haven’t tested traditional thru-neck guitars like the Gibson Firebird. It is known that neck-thru guitars have the best sustain because there is no neck-body joint at all (the wood grain runs uninterrupted from head to body) that will interrupt or impede the flow of sound. Well, at least that’s what I believed, until now. The Cycfi Alpha guitar is a neck-thru design because of this belief. Now that I am starting to question that belief, it might be good to try and test other designs.
Further Reading
Great work, Joel. Wonderful questions to be asking and working towards answers.
HI joel, Great work!!! i have a question, i have 3 guitars at home one is a cheap strat the other 2 are 2 cheap copy of a les paul and i have to say that the 2 les paul have more volume and sustain acoustically. would be a good idea to do a test of a strat and les paul but only his acoustic disregarding pickups? because the pickups can be changed at any time. Another thing to consider is the type of metal using in the bridges, steel, nickel, aluminium, because this can change a lot the volume and the sustain of the guitar.
Regards
Juan Motta
Here is an example:
Thank you, Brian. I like asking questions and not taking handed-down preconceptions as-is. My other article on "Tuning the Wood: On Tonewoods and Other Myths" (https://www.cycfi.com/2009/10/tuning-the-wood-on-tonewoods-and-other-myths/) got a lot of attention recently.
Hello Juan, It's not about the overall volume. It's about the rate of decay to silence. yes, a lot of factors come into play and the more variables you have, the more unpredictable the results become.
Oh, yes, mass matters at the end-points! (i.e. the bridge and the headstock). I've confirmed that before. I now always put heavy blocks at the bridge and *also* at the headstock!
Also rigidity of connection and transmission vectors for passing string vibrations through saddle to bridge to body, through nut to neck, etc.
A floating tailpiece will not transmit as rigidly as a fixed bridge, nor adjustable saddles in the same fashion as a fixed saddle.
I also wonder about phase coherence between these 2 points and if any cancellation occurs on the neck and if this can, in fact, be the reason for “dead spots” on through-body necks, that are often the case in poorly implemented neck-through designs.
Do you have any comprehensive evidence that shows transmission of vibrations to the body affects the sustain of a note? The purpose of designing a solid bodied guitar was that it vibrate as little as possible, in order to reduce feedback.
It’s just physics. It is true that solid-guitar bodies vibrate as little as possible compared to acoustics, but they still do. There’s no such thing as a perfectly rigid body. All bodies have their own resonances, which are frequency-dependent. The body reacts to vibrations, and its resonance can reinforce or attenuate certain frequencies.
I DO NOT HAVE COMPREHENSIVE EVIDENCE OF ANY KIND to present to Randy, fortunately.
Guitars with flexible flimsy bodies universally have low sustain. Has anyone even a single counter-example? Loosen the neck bolts too.
Make a guitar from kitchen sponge. It will not sustain.
Here is a thought experiment: connect a guitar string at tension between two floating anchor points with no “body” or additional mass to resonate. How on earth we can achieve such a system is difficult for me to propose right now as even cable suspension systems will transmit at tension. Perhaps some magnetic levitation would work? Acoustic decoupling.
I will propose that your plucked string will resonate in the way that such entities are known to resonate with a rather short envelope, as compared to the same string mounted on any resonant structure.
I will propose that “sustain” involves stimulating body resonance (not being a tuned box, solid or laminated materials ranging from wood to corian to stone, etc) and that pure string envelopes are short. It’s a bit like an impulse response stimulating a system.
Here is something anyone with a solid-body guitar can try:
put your teeth on the guitar and pluck a string and move your mouth around and sound like a human talkbox.
“The purpose of designing a solid bodied guitar was that it vibrate as little as possible, in order to reduce feedback”
not really, it’s deliberately omitting a tuned resonant chamber that happens to be tuned to frequencies it is intended to amplify, which are the same frequencies it will feedback at.
It’s a system (guitar box) designed for resonant feedback.
This is really interesting stuff! On the other hand, does it really matter what the science says if, as the quote says, "the Strat is perceived to have inferior sustain?" I mean, the output of the axe is for apes, not ascillyscopes.
That's a very good point, Dave. But, that's because of the single coil pickup, not the construction. IOTW, the Strat's perceived inferior sustain is not because of body/neck construction, but the choice of pickups.
More than anything else, this post is about questioning long held beliefs, especially for instrument makers. Before, I took it as truth that to get superb sustain, I need to build a set-neck or thru-neck guitar. The world of guitar building is so full of myths handed down over the generations.
A very important variable is the mass of the string and the tension of the string. the longer scale of the strat 25.5 in. vs 24.75 in. creates higher tension and should sustain longer withe the same picking technique. Again the mass of the string is increased due to longer length of metal vibrating, and should provide more sustain. If we equal the playing field and put 10’s on the les paul and 9’s on the strat the physics would be more similar because of similar mass.
http://www.daddario.com/DAstringtensionguide.Page?sid=eddc81e0-9a2d-49cb-a7ce-08ed2455937f
Very good point, Blaine! I’d really like to repeat this test. Maybe next time, I’ll take that into consideration.
There was nothing to Mottola’s article (did you actually read his article, or just the synposis you linked to?). He built two single string bench fixtures that he claimed replicated, more or less, a general bolt neck design and a set neck design. NO guitars were used in the test. He recorded some test plucks and played those back to a few of his friends, who guesstimated which ones sounded as if they were sustaining longer. As unscientific as all of this was, there was no consensus by those friends — just a rough majority. Never quote an article you haven’t read, and never believe the conclusions of an article until you’ve had a chance to evaluate the scientific methodology involved.
By that test, I’m afraid that your tests are less than scientific as well. A single random selection of one strat and one Les Paul proves less than nothing, and everything derived from that point forward reduces the scientific methodology performed. Your entire article was about as valuable an anecdote as the clip from Spinal Tap. I’m not intending to be mean, here — it’s just that when you put feldercarb on the Internet, people with even fewer IQ points will confer validity upon it and we’ll be debunking both Mottola’s AND your “test” well into infinity on every guitar forum (and in every Guitar Denter) in existence.
This article NEVER came to the conclusion that ALL bolt-ons have better sustain than ALL set-necks and neck-thrus. The only conclusion drawn here is that set-necks and neck-thrus do not necessarily have better sustain than bolt-ons, contrary to long held beliefs.
Anything else is a faulty generalization.
One other thing — based on the other articles you’ve linked to, there’s a suggestion that you really want a “myth” to be busted. If you go into anything with a preconceived notion or a desire for a specific result, you’re far more likely to get that result.
Go find an ’80’s Yamaha SG2000 (no, not one of the other models — the SG2000), with neck-through construction, a very heavy mahogany/maple body, a 10.5 ounce brass sustain block under a pretty heavy bridge, put the same strings on both guitars, measure the magnetic flux from the pickups and equalize it between that guitar and your random LP, then put the guitars on an automated plucking machine that will put exactly the same force behind each pluck, and make your measurements with an external microphone placed exactly the same distance from the strings at the same point in the length of those strings. You’re still not up to any kind of scientific-level testing here, nor should you declare myths busted or proven, but it might still be interesting.
Then do the same with a good Travis Bean1000, then do the same with an ORIGINAL DanArmstrong lucite guitar.
I have a science background and would love to study these things systematically. Two things come to mind immediately. First, you’ve determined that a scientific definition of sustain does not match widely held beliefs about sustain. So my immediate question is “what do people really hear when they think “sustain?” In other words, rather than dismiss the “widely held belief,” it might be interesting to investigate it more. I’m getting at the subject of psycho-acoustics. In other words, our _perception_ of sound doesn’t necessarily match what instruments can measure. Maybe the human ear and human auditory cortex _perceives_ more sustain in the Les Paul because of those initial attack tones, and the “true” sustain, the long decay portion, is something our ear disregards or otherwise does not perceive.
The second observation I have is, as others have hinted at here, this is a very, very difficult issue to really study in a rigorous, scientific way. Yes, you showed a difference in sustain between two guitars. But they vary so much, in so many ways other than the neck joint (mass of the guitar, type of bridge, neck angle, headstock angle, strings (!!!), nut material, pickups, how hard you plucked the string, the angle you plucked it at, the wood in the guitar, etc.), you really haven’t established that the difference has anything to do with the neck joint at all. The Luthier’s experiment that you referenced is better, in that he used the _same_ experimental guitar for his studies (beginning with a neck through instrument, then cutting/bolting the neck, then gluing it), but I still think there are many variables here which can be studied.
Your company looks great and the work seems very interesting. JP
Yes, it will be very difficult to do a really rigorous study. Yet, even with the simple test, I can at the very least draw one conclusion: Set necks do not necessarily have longer sustain than bolt-ons. I think that’s the very least we can agree on.
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Try neck-through designs with reinforcement strips of either ultra-dense woods or carbon fiber or fiberglass or whatever. I’m going to guess that wood fiber orientation length and rigidity make a HUGE difference. For example, long rigid fibered woods like chestnut are known to have a massive sheer strength relative to cross-section, vs density, as we are talking about transmission lines.
If you model wood, I will guess that fiber transmission is longitudinal.
I will also be skeptical of equating a comparison of “a strat” and “a les paul” with a specific test of neck-joint techniques, all other factors (wood etc) being the same.
Glue joints are also known to vary in strength based upon 1) grain orientation of either piece 2) clamping pressure during curing.
Wood: is it quarter-sawn? what is the fiber orientation relative to the design/shape etc.
Many factors exist, many luthiers exist, much water has passed under many bridges, etc.
But yes, much mythology exists.
Thanks for the GUI library.
It’s just the scale length that matters more than anything else. Open bass strings on a fanned fret bass where the lowest strings have longer scale length sustain way longer than if every string has the same scale length.Just look at listen to any grand piano. strat has 25,5″ scale Les Paul 24.75″ which makes sense in tension and sustain. if you could make a strat at 24.75″ scale, everything else equal, and a LP at 25.5 scale, but everything else equal it should show different results
Absolutely!