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The Wood in My Guitar Used to Be a Plate at My Wedding

  • vor 4 Tagen
  • 8 Min. Lesezeit

The Human Frequency — Notes on making music by hand in the age of AI

By Roger Ricks


On 13 August, Suno released version 2.0 of its studio. It imports and records MIDI, it has a built-in wavetable synthesiser, it has real effects including sidechain compression and convolution reverb, and it has a chat bar that will generate you "new and totally unique plugins and synth presets" on request. Since March you can also train a model on your own catalogue by uploading six of your tracks, and sing on your songs with a recording of your own voice.

Read that again, because it's a bigger shift than another song generator. The machines have stopped making only music. They have started making the instruments.

So I want to tell you about a piece of wood.


Guitar Roger Ricks Nr. 6

  • Roger Ricks Nr. 6
  • Roger Ricks Nr. 6
  • Roger Ricks Nr. 6

I build my own guitars in a workshop in Zurich. Roger Ricks Nr. 6 one took about a year and a half, it is the most personal object I own, and it exists exactly once.

The board it's made with was the apéro plate from the buffet at our wedding. People stood around it and ate off it and talked over it, on the one day everyone we cared about was in the same room. Afterwards it was just a board, and it lay around for years doing nothing. I had no plan for it. The idea only arrived in the middle of building the guitar, which is the part I like best about it, because it means the meaning wasn't the concept. It was something I noticed halfway through. Now it's the inlay. The most visible thing on the instrument.


The mistake...

I also got something wrong on that guitar, and I got it wrong in a way you can't easily take back. The truss rod, the steel bar that runs inside the neck and lets you dial in the relief, went in incorrectly. Which means I can barely adjust the curvature of the neck at all. Thats why the strings sit higher off the fretboard than any guitarist would choose.

There is no easy fix, because I had to remove the fretboard again to change it... and I don't wanna do that.


Now the part where I argue against myself

There's a version of this post that would be very easy to write and would also be false. That version says the wood makes the sound. That the guitar carries something of that day because the material does.


It doesn't work like that, and I'd rather tell you than have you find out from someone else.

In a listening experiment run by the German guitar-acoustics group GITEC, twenty-six guitarists compared recordings of four Stratocaster-type guitars that were identical in every part except body and neck wood. The conclusion was that there were no significant audible differences you could attribute to the wood. And there's a detail in that study I think about more than I'd like to. When they played people the same file twice, listeners rated the difference between it and itself as high as four out of ten. People hear differences that are not there. That includes me, standing in my own workshop, comparing my own guitars.


It gets worse for my side. The best physics we have on why an electric guitar sustains, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America in 2014, predicts decay time from the damping of the string itself and the mechanical behaviour at the neck joint. There is no body term in the equation.


And in 1995 Bob Taylor built an acoustic guitar out of a discarded shipping pallet, inlaid aluminium into the original nail holes and put a forklift on the fretboard, specifically to prove the magic wasn't in the expensive timber. It was a good guitar. He made his point on purpose.


While we're here, I should also tell you how I actually record, because I'm not the analogue purist in this story. I work at night, in a flat, so depending on the song it's a Kemper, or a Line 6 Helix Stadium XL, or my real Marshall and Fender amps run through a Universal Audio OX so the neighbours can sleep. Two of those three are digital reconstructions of amplifiers somebody else recorded. In a blind test published this June with over a thousand participants and more than a hundred thousand ratings, the best of those capture systems scored a median of 100 out of 100 for similarity to the real amp. Listeners could not rank the copy below the original.

So: modelled amps, and a body wood that almost certainly doesn't do what people say it does. Not a great start for a man about to defend handmade instruments.


  • Roger Ricks in his workshop
  • clamping of a guitar body
  • assembeling the guitar
  • carving the top of roger ricks nr. 6
  • carved top from roger ricks Nr. 6 guitar
  • first layer of laquer roger ricks nr. 6

What actually makes the sound


Here's the honest hierarchy, and the wood is nowhere near the top of it.

The signal chain is where a guitar sound is decided, and there are more links in it than people think. The strings and what state they're in. The pickups. The pots and caps and the wiring inside the guitar. The hardware. The cable. The amp. Even the plectrum, which sounds like a joke until you switch material mid-session and hear the attack change. Every one of those has more effect on what comes out of the speaker than which tree the body came from.

And then there's the one that dwarfs all of them, which is how the musician plays.

Not their skill in the abstract. How they play that instrument, on that night. Where they hit the string, how hard, how much of the pick, how the left hand releases a note, whether they're pushing or sitting back. Two guitarists on the same guitar through the same rig don't sound similar. They sound like two different records.


The mistake plays too

Which brings me back to the truss rod.

That high action means fast runs are a bad idea on Nr. 6. The guitar simply won't let me. So I don't play fast on it, and something happened that I did not expect and did not design.

I play more deliberately on that instrument. More defined. Every note has to be worth the effort of getting to it, so I choose differently, and what comes out is more melodic than what I play on a guitar that lets me get away with anything. The mistake didn't limit the music. It moved it somewhere.

I'd never have chosen that. I'd have set the action low, played the fast thing, and never found out. A guitar that does everything you ask lets you stay exactly who you already were.


The part that isn't science

That's also why I don't think the other half of this is mystical. I play better on a guitar I love, and I think that's mechanical rather than magical.

When you have a relationship with an instrument, you play it differently. You're not fighting it, you're not thinking about it, you're not treating it as equipment. You take more risks on it. You dig in harder on the take where digging in is the right idea. You stop hedging. And since the player is the biggest single variable in that whole chain, a thing that changes how I play is a thing that changes how the record sounds. Just not by the route everyone argues about.

So the wood doesn't change the tone. It changes me. And I change the tone.

That's a claim I can actually stand behind, and it's the only one I need.

There's a piece of research about handmade objects that made me rewrite this section twice. Marketing researchers ran four studies and found people will pay meaningfully more for something handmade, and that the mechanism is a perception of love in the making. Then they found the trapdoor. When the maker is seen as mainly in it for the money, the effect disappears. And when the seller says "made with love" out loud, it disappears too, because people hear the claim and stop believing the object.

I'm not selling you a guitar, so I'll risk it. But it's worth knowing that the love in the room and the love in the marketing copy are not the same substance, and only one of them survives contact with a listener.


Where I land

I don't think handmade is better. A well-built factory guitar will hold tune, play in tune and outlast me. In a blind test of my instrument against a good production model I would probably fail, and after reading the GITEC study I'd have to assume I was fooling myself if I said otherwise.

What I think is that the world is filling up very fast with things that come from nowhere. Around ninety thousand fully generated tracks a day on one streaming service alone, and now the instruments too. In that world the scarce thing isn't quality. Quality gets cheaper every month.

The scarce thing is a thing you can point at and say where it came from.

The board was going to be firewood. It's now a guitar that took a year and a half, with a neck I can't adjust and strings that sit too high, and I'll be playing it for the rest of my life. It made me a more melodic player by refusing to let me be a fast one. Make of that what you like.


So tell me one: do you own an object where you know exactly where the material came from? Not something expensive. Something meaningful


I'd like to know what it is. And if you want to hear what one stubborn human still does by hand, my music lives here.


Sources & further reading

 
 
 

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