Does body style make a difference to a guitar’s tone? Well, yeah. But let’s take a look anyway.
In this video, Darrell Braun tests a pair of solidbody and semihollowbody guitars to let you compare their sound. The guitars include an Epiphone Les Paul Standard which features a mahogany body with maple top and a mahogany neck with rosewood fingerboard. Darrell is comparing it with an Epiphone B.B. King Lucille, a semihollowbody guitar with a maple body and neck and a rosewood fingerboard. Both guitars have two Alnico Classic humbuckers with dual volume and tone controls. The Lucille guitar also has a six-position Varitone switch that Darrell leaves in the off setting.
Darrell switches between the two guitars using the neck and bridge pickups, and he compares their sustain and puts them through their paces with solos, so you can hear them in a melodic context.
Christopher Scapelliti is editor-in-chief of Guitar Player magazine, the world’s longest-running guitar magazine, founded in 1967. In his extensive career, he has authored in-depth interviews with such guitarists as Pete Townshend, Slash, Billy Corgan, Jack White, Elvis Costello and Todd Rundgren, and audio professionals including Beatles engineers Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott. He is the co-author of Guitar Aficionado: The Collections: The Most Famous, Rare, and Valuable Guitars in the World, a founding editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine, and a former editor with Guitar World, Guitar for the Practicing Musician and Maximum Guitar. Apart from guitars, he maintains a collection of more than 30 vintage analog synthesizers.
