#2: Attack of the Guitar Pick!

---

Let's say you record the same guitar part two times. The first time you play the part very softly, gently plucking the strings with every note and chord. The second time you play as hard as you can, hitting all the notes accurately, but with all of your might. Our intuition says that both recordings would sound different, even if the volumes were matched. Louder sounds louder even if isn't... OK, but how? That's what we're going to look at today: how does "playing harder" affect guitar tone?

---

THE PLAN
We'll pluck the same string over and over again; sometimes we'll pick harder, other times softer. Then we'll look for differences in the sound. First, we'll look at our classic sound characteristics—brightness and sustain—for the full duration of each pluck (see first blog). Then, we'll separate each pluck into two parts: the attack and the decay. For each part, we'll determine the brightness and sustain separately.

As usual, the guitar is a Fender Telecaster (American Standard) with D'Addario regular light strings (0.010–0.046). The 3rd string (G) was used for this experiment.

---

RESULTS!
> The whole signal. Brightness goes down (a little) with harder picking, and sustain drops significantly. There may be a relationship between these two trends: higher harmonics ring longer than lower harmonics ("On the sensations of tone," Part I, Chapter IV, H. Helmholtz), and if louder sounds aren't as bright, as we see here, then it would make sense that they don't ring for as long. (It may be a good time to note that these sustain values are based on a drop of -20 dB from the signal maximum. If we were just looking for the point where the signal got silent, then louder sounds would certainly ring for longer, as our intuition would suggest.)

> Attack! The brightness trend here is similar to that for the entire signal: a slight decrease in brightness for louder sounds. Because the attack region is so short (one second), an alternate method for expressing sustain was used: the volume drop across the region. There may be greater sustain (i.e., less volume drop) over the attack region for louder sounds—opposite to the effect for the entire signal—but the data in the plot below are too messy to say for sure.

> Decay... The results here are similar to those for the whole signal: louder sounds are less bright and drop faster in volume.

---

CONCLUSIONS
Playing harder or softer leads to differences in sound beyond just a change in volume. A softer sound has greater sustain and is a little brighter, whereas a harder sound has a stronger fundamental frequency and decreases in volume more quickly.

#1.2: The Life of Strings

---

It's now been a week since the first post and about 11 hours of playing. Let's start with an investigation into last week's unexpectedly bright E strings, and then look at the sustain and brightness values for this week.

---

BRIGHT "E" STRINGS & PICKING LOCATION
Was the brightness of E strings last week natural, or was something weird happening during the recording? Take a look at the plots below: these graphs show the brightness when the string is plucked in different locations: over the bridge pickup, the neck pickup, and halfway between the two pickups. The small dots represent different plucks and the bar is the average.

The first thing we notice is that location makes a huge (and quite audible) difference to brightness. The closer to the bridge, the brighter the tone. So, we’re going to need to pluck the strings in the exact same place each week to keep things consistent.

---

A NEW APPROACH: NO MORE PICKS!
Using a finger instead of a pick, we may be able to reduce the effect of plucking location on brightness. The graphs below show brightness when a finger (the fleshy bit) is used instead of a pick.

Now there's much more consistency between positions! This is good, as it'll make our week-to-week comparisons more accurate—they won't be thrown off by small differences in where the strings are plucked.

---

RESULTS
Because of what we saw above, our methods this week have been revised: 1) strings will be plucked roughly halfway between pickups, and 2) we’ll use a finger instead of a pick (the fleshy part, not the nail). Here are this week's results:

Sustain values are similar to last week's: thicker strings ring longer. We won't do a proper week-to-week comparison just yet, as any differences we'd see would likely be due to the new methods, not string aging.

Now let's look at the brightness. Switching from a pick to a finger is likely the biggest contributor to the changes this week. We can see from these plots, and from those above, that picks give brighter tone than fingers. The E string brightness isn't as wild as last week, so our investigation paid off!

---

What's on tap for next week? First, we'll have two weeks of sustain and brightness values recorded with a finger—that'll let us start comparing results over time. Also, inspired by the pick vs. finger comparison above, we'll aim to answer the question: "besides the volume, how does hard and soft playing sound different?"