In the end, the best way to figure out which guitar is best for you is not by its weight, but by which one best suits your needs, whether that means how it feels in your hands or sounds to your ears. Trust me, when you find your perfect axe, it will be love at first sight, or rather, first strum
Guitar Picks And Their Effect On Tone
Getting into the debate between lighter and heavier guitars and which players prefer them, it’s not always the actual weight that is the determining factor, but rather the wood that is used. Take mahogany and maple for example; both are heavy woods that when added together make for a very heavy guitar that most users will find uncomfortable. But even with its crippling weight, the bottom-heavy tone switzerland email list of mahogany married to the high-end energetic complement of maple creates a tone so vibrant and lush that regardless of weight, it has become an industry standard, otherwise known as the Gibson Les Paul. Gibson was well aware of its popular heavy weight and actually tried to mitigate the problem without affecting its inherent tone. From 1982 to 2007, all Gibson Les Pauls made in the United States were redesigned to reduce their weight by removing 2 or 3 pounds of mahogany from the interior before the maple top was attached to the body. Since 2007, the company has gone even further by introducing a lighter weight chambered body that can be up to 5 pounds lighter. Although not everyone was happy with the change, arguing that it had an adverse effect on tone, many welcomed the difference and embraced the new, articulate sound of the lighter Les Pauls.
Moving on to other tonewoods, alder, ash, and basswood tend to be lighter. Furthermore, each also reinforces, reflects, and conducts a different signature pattern of frequencies which in turn significantly influences the sound of any guitar built from them. So, with that being said, it is the tonal characteristic of the wood and not the weight that conveys the tone. For example, Fender’s popular Stratocasters and Telecasters unabashedly rely on the clean transparency of ash and the balanced spectrum of alder for their tone as much as they do on their signature single-coil pickups or even the body design itself for that matter. You’ll still be able to find a Strat or Tele that weighs a couple of pounds more than average, but even then, it’s still going to sound very much like a Strat or Tele.