This was gifted to me by a friend yesterday. A late 30's Orpheum Style C. I've coveted it for years, and he's been willing to sell it to me, but it was always the wrong timing. Finally was at a point where I had the money and no other priorities. So we played together at church this weekend and he brought it for me to use. Sounded amazing. Knocked my son out. Even knocked my wife out, and she has NEVER been impressed by the sound of a guitar. We agreed on Saturday night he'd sell it to me for what he had in it ($1045), and I borrowed it for the night to really work it out and make up my mind. After the service yesterday, I agreed to buy, just needed his PayPal account to transfer the money. He told me my money was no good, and that if I wanted the guitar it was a gift. He said he'd just been waiting for me to finally decide I really wanted it. I protested, but he was unmoving. Whattya gonna do with people like that?
I can fully understand acoustic guitars having their voice shaped by the wood, the craftsmanship, like any string instrument. I don't quite understand the differences in electric guitars however. If it's electric, can't the voice of any guitar be modified to anything you want electronically regardless of the guitar?
Well, this is an acoustic guitar, though it has a piezoelectric transducer installed.
But to more broadly answer your question - it's true that the sound of an electric guitar comes from strings vibrating in front of magnetic pickups. But the materials of which an electric guitar is made influence how the strings move. If you watch extreme slo-mo video of a guitar string that has been plucked, you'll see that it doesn't move with any apparent order. It flops like spaghetti, and generates various frequencies and cancellations depending on how it flops. But it will flop differently with different combinations of materials, which alters what the pickups pick up, and changes the sound. So while you can control a huge amount of what a guitar sounds like by changing the pickups, the same pickups installed in a guitar body made of mahogany will sound different if you pull them out and put them in a guitar body made of Swamp Ash.
