The difference between solid, weight-relieved and chambered Les Pauls

ActionArnie

Was wondering if my 03 LP Classic is weight-relieved at all and stumbled upon this post, some interesting reading and pics:

http://www.mylespaul.com/forums/gibson-les-pauls/50210-gibson-les-paul-101-a.html

Tokai-SA

Here are cat scans of a solid body Les Paul with a deep neck tenon?
These consistently weigh around 8,7 lbs.

singemonkey

Solid, and weight-relieved LPs vary hugely in weight - only the chambered models are consistently light.

I don't think that weight-relief necessarily affects the tone that much, but you have to imagine what you're starting with - a very heavy chunk of mahogany. And I've found that it's the actual weight of the wood that has the most effect on tone. Rule of thumb - the lighter the slab, the more resonant it is acoustically, which can be heard through the amp (with the right pickups, see below).

My Tokai LS160 is completely solid. The jury's out on my '83 LP Deluxe, because '83 is the year they began weight relief. But it sure doesn't feel like there's any relief there. It's astonishingly heavy. The Tokai is definitely louder and more resonant acoustically.

I played Reinhard's R9 the other day which is also solid and considerably lighter still than the Tokai. Even louder and more resonant still. Under 4kgs, I'm guessing.

So I think for solid and weight relief it's the weight of the timber that's most important to tone. But here we're not even getting into whether the back is a continuous piece of wood or a composite of say, two or more pieces, held together by glue - which presumably has it's own acoustic properties.

Chambered is different. Those guitars are fundamentally different acoustically to either solid or weight-relieved LPs. They sound different, although it's BS in my opinion to say that they sound like semi-acoustics.

Ultimately though, any kind of LP back can sound great, and most do. A lot of classic rock was cut on boat-anchor Norlin Les Pauls that weighed a ton and yet produced fantastic tone. The very light all-solid LPs have a characteristic "woody" kind of tone. It's very subtle, but it's there. The Clapton Bluesbreakers Album, Zeppelin, early Fleetwood Mac, you can hear this.

But from that we come to the point that what translates the acoustic tone into what we listen to comes down to the pickups which are probably more important ultimately than the body wood. All of these details just add 1% at a time to the tone, with the amp contributing the majority, the basic guitar design contributing a lot, not to mention to cry of "it's all in the fingers."

So I think these things all produce very subtle differences - all things being equal - that mostly come down to the preference of each player. And I certainly think there's far less difference between a boat-anchor solid LP and a chambered LP than there is between the former and say, an SG, or a 335.

slyd

hey, ... very cool!

I will now be that much more informed, when I do get up enough deniros to purchase my Gibbo Les Paul Custom 8)

Maybe when my ship comes in . . . . . . . . *sigh*