“One of the main goals with these parts is to not subtract from the beautiful sound the strings are trying to make”: Paul Reed Smith explains how hardware impacts guitar tone
Continuing its popular Rules Of Tone YouTube series, PRS Guitars has released a new video on how the hardware materials on your instrument affect its sound.
Founder Paul Reed Smith – whose knowledge on all things tone has come from years of experimentation and building, from crafting the right necks to taking razor blades to pickups – says that the materials used on your guitar are all “subtractive”, and have an impact on the way its strings ring out.
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With that in mind, PRS opts for hardware material that ensures the guitar doesn’t “shut down” its natural harmonic sound. Teaming up with Rob Carhartt, PRS’ Director of New Products Engineering, Reed Smith walks through some examples of the brand’s choice for nut material, bridge material, tuning pegs, and more.
“In a lot of the past videos, I’ve stated that whatever the guitar string touches is God,” begins Reed Smith. “To exaggerate that, if the bridge is made of rubber, the nut is made of rubber, and the tuning peg is made of rubber, the guitar is not going to have the kind of high-end that it would have if these things were made out of metal.
“We’ve done a tremendous amount of research about how each of these [parts] operate on a mechanical engineering basis, but also what [they] sounds like. I can tell you just in these tremolo bridges alone, the amount of time spent on the geometry of the curve of the saddle where the string leaves has gone through three or four iterations, and it makes a difference [to] how much high-end the string has, how it works with the tremolo, and how it gets out of the way so the string can vibrate without sounding like a sitar.”
He continues, “The theory with these parts is that the string is trying to do its job. It’s really, really trying to ring for a really long time. The guitar in general is subtractive. If you make the bridge and the nut and the tuning pegs out of rubber, it’s going to shut that vibration down really fast…
“One of the main goals with these parts is to not subtract from the this beautiful sound the string’s trying to make. If you take a string and put it between two big steel vices and hit it, it rings [beautifully]. It’s got a nice, beautiful musical high-end. It’s full of harmonic content, which I want the guitar to not shut down.”
You can watch the full video below:
PRS celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. You can find out more about the brand and view its product lineup via the PRS Guitars website.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
