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Ricardo -> RE: Can you correct a too soft pulsacion? (Dec. 27 2022 17:33:11)
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quote:
It wouldn’t be too difficult to run an empirical experiment using a solid body electric guitar and some pedals. Mess around with changing attack, sustain, etc…and see if it affects your perception of the ‘pulsation’. Does a highly compressed or smoothly distorted signal ‘feel’ different under hand from a clean signal or a punchy signal? How about playing technique, how is it adjusted to deal with the various sonic characters? The results might be surprising to an exclusively non-electric player, but in my experience the feel of a guitar does change with changes to the sonic signature (if that’s the right word).
When I was a kid, I learned alternate picking from the Paul Gilbert instructional video (like countless others). At one point he reduces his volume and distortion using a clean tone and says “you might have to pick a little bit harder”… implying that playing with the effects means you should pick softer. Basically HE feels like the sound he wants, let’s call it rhythmically loud and aggressive, goes away with a clean tone and therefore he notices the strings responding dynamically to his pick attack. He claims that distortion “masks” the cleanliness of your playing…but what he really means there is the LEFT hand sound. When we play clean tone electric, like acoustic, the left hand involvement decreases and the right hand takes over sound characteristics. We necessarily feel that response of dynamic range and instinctively pick harder or softer depending on what our ear wants. But the distortion effects compress the dynamics, or rather, drive it all to the roof and limit it…so the normally quiet or imperceptible noise comes WAY up, and here is where “clean” playing involves muting with BOTH hands to high degrees to make a decent sound.
(EDIT: want to add we do dulce or ponticello by selection neck or bridge pickups respectively. Using a dulce neck pick up on fast picking does not affect picking attack, but might “mask” the harsh metallic noise the bridge pick up gives you when running fast treble lines. Just like in flamenco, picado on bass strings closer to bridge, on electric we clean up the sound on the basses by using the bridge pick up and palm muting etc.)
So what does all that mean? Because “action” has not changed in anyway with the above concept, then the perceived “dynamic range response” is what we should understand “pulsation” is. If you now go back and read what I described about the playing in a party situation, where I need the HIGH action guitar in order to get the dynamic range response required (low soft action frets out and can’t be heard loudly, unless doing rhythm), we can see how the issue is transferred to acoustic instruments. If on the contrary, there is a belief that action does NOT affect the dynamic range and response of a guitar, or is a minor factor and that it is “something else” such as top stiffness etc, then there is your “pulsation”.
So there lies the point of issue…what affects the dynamic range of a guitar the most? That is pulsation.
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