The harmonic content of an electric guitar

Hello my name is Tom and i'm an Electronic Engineering student. I hope you'll enjoy this video :)

An introduction to this video for people who don't know too much about electronics :
I made this video while testing a piece of circuitry I had just put together. Basicly this circuit will serve as an input stage for a tube preamplifier I'm going to build in the future. Once I had verified the circuit worked I thought it would be a great experiment to hook it up with my guitar and observe through an oscilloscope. The result of my little experiment is actually quite interesting. It displays some remarkable differences between the neck (top) and bridge pickup. This experiment also demonstrated the difference between playing open strings and fretting them at the 12th fret.

For people who know a little bit more about electronics
The input stage is an active bandpass filter (2nd order), cancelling out any DC / low frequent components and limiting the total bandwidth of the system to the human auditory bandwith. I basicly do this to avoid bandwith gain problems and unnecessary power consumption. Another nice effect of this is noise reduction.

For this experiment I used my Squier Vintage Modified Thinline Telecaster and my RIGOL DS1000CD Mixed Signal Oscilloscope.

note : before using my Squier, I did the experiment with a cheaper guitar (Cruiser by Crafter Stratocaster model). The difference between this entry level-guitar and my Squier was quite remarkable, the Cruiser created more harmonics than the Squier guitar. This leads me to conclude that a lower amount of harmonics results in a cleaner tone (based on the difference I hear between the sound quality of both guitars).

note2: my apologies for the quality of the movie and the quality of my English. This was the first take I made, I didn't really feel like rehearsing it and doing it a second time.

Comments are welcome :)

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Guitar
• spectrum
• frequency
• electronics
• preamplifier
• input
• stage
• Squier
• Vintage
• Modified
• Thinline
• Telecaster
• RIGOL
• Oscilloscope
• DS1000CD
• Tom
• Verschooten

[HappyOrangeTheBand]

The neck pickup is located normally right where a 24th fret would be. This is a null point when you play open strings or 12th fret notes, thus the string stays stationary at that point. If you would have played any other fret, you would see more harmonics with the neck pickup.

[reygalindo]

Tom,

This is a very good systematic way to determine the tone and color of different pick ups. I guess looking at different spectrum from dieferent wire configuration can help you to characterize specific settings. Specially when you are adding different filters on the tone controls or braking the hambucking coil into a single coil.

[kharlos84]

Thank , exactly what i was looking for , thanks again

[steveg219]

thank you for posting this, it is very interesting and educational

[teflondon91]

The difference in the frequency response may not be the guitar brands themselves... pickup height and as you noticed pickup selection comes into play also; the bridge is often chosen for pinch harmonics because of this.