Sustain and Electric Guitar Neck Joint Type

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to ascertain what effect the type of the neck joint of an electric guitar has on sustain. A test instrument was built using neck through construction. Audio recordings were made of this instrument using a uniform picking mechanism. The neck was sawed off and then attached with screws (bolt-on configuration) and audio recordings were again made in the same manner. The neck was then glued in place (set neck configuration) and allowed to dry, and audio recordings were again made. Spectrographic analysis was performed on these recordings and averaged sound clips were produced for listening evaluation. Sustain for each iteration of the instrument was measured. Listening evaluation did not indicate any difference in sustain among the three instrument iterations. Measured sustain values indicated that the bolt-on neck iteration produced the greatest sustain.

Citation

Mottola, R.M. "Sustain and Electric Guitar Neck Joint Type" American Lutherie #91, 2007, p. 52.

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