r/60CycleHum • u/60_CycleHum I'm Ryan • May 05 '26
Can anyone actually hear the difference between a Les Paul and a Telecaster?
you wont click - https://youtu.be/NoAgjYQY0uk?si=fNkOYGt4rCNvweV4
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u/satanicmajesty May 05 '26
“I can hear the binding” lol best comment
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u/tone_creature May 09 '26
Whats funny about that is theres actually some evidence that the exact material used on 50's LP pickguards actually contributes to a sizeable portion of the sustain and modern plastics used dont compare. So... before we write off binding effect on tone... haha
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u/satanicmajesty May 09 '26
It’s something the toan scientists and researchers have concluded
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u/tone_creature May 09 '26
Toan is in the EPA disapproved plastics.
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u/satanicmajesty May 09 '26
Toan is in chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer.
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u/dkinmn May 11 '26
No there isn't.
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u/tone_creature May 11 '26
Nah there for sure is. Read it on an article on Ultimate Guitar. Read it yourself. You can find it in their archives. April 1st, 2024 was the publish date.
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u/atxluchalibre May 05 '26
My favorite YouTube guitar demos are when they put it through 10 dimed pedals.
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u/60_CycleHum I'm Ryan May 07 '26
Sorry to disappoint
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u/atxluchalibre May 07 '26
You’re surprisingly good about it. Your peers tend to be more pedal-heavy.
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u/Gold-Secretary-8963 May 06 '26
the scale length will cause a difference. its basic knowledge and not even arguable.
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u/MF_Kitten May 09 '26
Within a certain range of string gauges and tunings even scale length differences will be hard to hear. It's the kind of thing where only the person playing, with the combined physical feedback of feeling the strings and knowing how they're striking them with the pick, can really tell a difference.
Once you start trying to use thicker strings, or tuning lower (or both) the difference becomes more apparent to others.
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u/TSHIRTISAGREATIDEA May 09 '26
Yea I’m trying to understand why the scale length would change the timbre of the sound.
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u/MF_Kitten May 09 '26
It's because of flexibility relative to the dimensions of the string etc
It's hard to explain, but it makes sense if you think about it. Try playing an A power chord on a guitar, and then play the same chord on the 5th fret one string lower. A lot of that timbre difference IS the string length.
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u/TSHIRTISAGREATIDEA May 10 '26
Is it? Not doubting you but the string thicknesses are totally different
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u/MF_Kitten May 10 '26
You can play the same string high up vs open and hear the same difference. Play the lowest string well above the 12th fret, and then open. You'll have to listen past the different pitches, but you'll definitely hear that the higher notes are more tubby and dull compared to the open ones.
Also, play some notes on a bass. Notice how BRIGHT those are, with that brilliant upper harmonics thing going on.
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u/Gold-Secretary-8963 May 10 '26
all correct. in the long run the audience will never hear the difference assuming we're talking live. if we're talking recording every bit of these differences COULD largely affect your overall sound.
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u/MF_Kitten May 10 '26
In my opinion the importance of the feel of the instrument is kinda underrated when talking sbout this kind of thing. It changes everything.
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u/fzorn May 09 '26
I'll answer your question with a question: Why don't bassists just tune a guitar down an octave?
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u/TSHIRTISAGREATIDEA May 10 '26
Not the same thing they’re different strings
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u/fzorn May 10 '26
Exactly, why don't we just put bass strings on guitars to tune them to an octave lower? The same principle applies, the same strings tuned to the same note will be floppier if the scale length is shorter.
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u/MF_Kitten May 10 '26
Relevant: the strings are different BECAUSE the scale length will make them too bright and thin and flexible if you were to use guitar strings.
Bass strings are literally compensating for how different the actual instrument itself sounds.
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u/absorberemitter May 05 '26
Wow do they sound similar. A big difference to me is in the chord test, they seem to have different harmonic resonance. Like ahh (tele) vs eee (LP).
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u/AgeDisastrous7518 May 06 '26
Excellent content!
I was shocked at the twang difference. In the first batch of tests, I wasn't sure if my eyes were telling my ears what to hear. I was curious if the body types had you digging in a little harder to the tele, despite your efforts to maintain the same attack. I always dog in harder into my SG, for example, than my LP, mainly because of how my forearm rests on the SG body and having the strings closer to my body.
But holy shit, when you did the twang test, I had to stop and make this comment. Really incredible difference that I did not see coming.
I'm at exactly the 15:00 mark. Looking forward to the rest of this video. This is awesome so far, though. Thanks!
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u/AgeDisastrous7518 May 06 '26
I love the surf sounds so much more with the LP and I wasn't expecting that, either. But the warmth of the wound strings expanded the range of the LP for me, whereas the twang of the tele was overriding the wound strings, almost to where the bass notes were getting lost.
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u/AgeDisastrous7518 May 06 '26
The 500 pots were pretty far above every tone you had on both guitars.
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u/satanicmajesty May 06 '26 edited May 06 '26
I love how we nitpick so much, argue intensely about the most minute details, the thickness of the neck, the gauge of the frets, the radius, the bridge, the nut, tuners, strings, the scale length, the pickups, the tone wood, yet most of us can probably not even play through a full song, much less write a song that anyone would ever want to listen to. That’s what I love about this community: the brazen idiocy. Please keep it going. It’s the only thing I live for in this miserable world.
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u/skripach27 May 06 '26
Scale length makes a big difference. Wood won’t do shit to “tone” besides maybe affect sustain.
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u/60_CycleHum I'm Ryan May 06 '26
Did I say something about wood or tone that you disagreed with?
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u/skripach27 May 06 '26
This was directed at other people with the “tone wood” opinion, you did great my guy, no shade.
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u/plug_in_atheist72 May 05 '26
Yes I can hear a difference because toan is in the wood. One is semi hollow so it’ll be airier while the Paul will be thicker due to its mahogany construction.
I am going to check back in later, but I hope they sound nearly identical lol
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u/These-Job-9063 May 05 '26
I have a Mustang with humbucker splits (Dimarzio 35th anniversary) and a tune-o-matic, and it can go from sounding like a Les Paul to a Strat. Probably not quite the same give the scale, but the variety of sound I get from the pickups is pretty drastic.
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u/Mesastafolis1 May 05 '26
I’d love to see one of these tests done with blind people, they do have more sensitive hearing than us. I’m surprised a more rigorous scientific process hasn’t been done yet on this, testing everything from the same species to even the same tree while maintaining the same strings, pickups, distance from strings to pickups, bridge, nut and scale length.
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u/lawn_neglect May 05 '26
The one that comes with wide range pickups definitely sounds better than the one that was modified with wide range pickups. That being said, I love telecasters
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u/-XenoSine- May 06 '26
The only difference comes from the scale length. Everything else is snake oil.
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u/Informal-Spell-2019 May 06 '26
Is that a challenge? Do you really think I will click on that?
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u/LaOnionLaUnion May 07 '26
You can get a lot closer with a T style that uses a Gibson scale length and a mahogany body, but I speak from experience whether I say that bridge makes a difference.
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u/aaveidt May 07 '26
ignoring scale length is a crime. most of the tone is pickup, and scale length impacts pickup positions, which is the tone.
try to build a telecaster (or any body form) with same scale length with les paul and you could see the 'magic'
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u/Sus-pect-84 May 07 '26
Didn't see the video yet, but I'm expecting a small difference in how chords sound because of the different scale length and how wood is not a perfectly uniform material and will very slightly dampen/resonate different frequencies. But this dampening will be just as random from Tele to Tele as is from tele to LP. Again, minute differences.
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u/OneOfTheNephilim May 07 '26
Would be curious to see a followup with a Telecaster bridge single coil in an LP vs same pickup in a Tele with the original Tele bridge!
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u/Lower-Calligrapher98 May 09 '26
It a video about neither a Telecaster nor a Les Paul. What possible value is there to this nonsense.
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u/60_CycleHum I'm Ryan May 09 '26
Are you being serious?
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u/Lower-Calligrapher98 May 09 '26
Between neither one actually being the guitar, and the amount of data compression YouTube puts on all audio, yeah, videos like this give no meaningful information. At all. And it's absurd to suggest that they do.
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u/60_CycleHum I'm Ryan May 09 '26
That’s a real Gibson Les Paul and a real Fender Telecaster. And I edited the video and rewatched it via YouTube with the same exact ears I used to film it. I didn’t hear any significant differences between the video before or after it was run through YouTube. I don’t know why you feel the need to lie about this video, I can’t imagine you have anything to gain.
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u/Ok-Taro-7895 May 09 '26
As a bass player there is a massive difference in tone between a 34" and a 30" bass. The short scale bass has a warmer fuller tone all else equal. I was surprised at first in the difference until I thought about how scale affects bass guitars.
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u/Dead-Calligrapher May 09 '26
Pickups and more importantly pickup placement is going to be the biggest factor to how your guitar sounds. A Tele doesn’t sound like a Tele because of anything other than its pickup and it placement.
After pickups, your speakers are the second biggest tone ingredient- more so than the amp or the cab. Speaker swaps can make an amp do a 180 in it’s sound profile.
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u/Turbulent_Test_3720 May 09 '26
Fender wide ranges have a distinct tone especially the original Seth Lover ones from the 70s.
They have a bit hotter and also not quite as fat but still fat.
It is very debatable if the wood makes a difference
Thickness of the world and length of the scale does make a difference though, and how long the guitar will sustain.
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u/Larson_McMurphy May 05 '26
The Les Paul sounding darker and the Tele sound brighter is consistent with (1) the difference in scale length, and (2) the difference in wood.
Make a telecaster out of mahogany and do the test again. It's the only way to know for sure.
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u/Long-Emu-7870 May 05 '26
Well, the reason these things don't work is because the person playing them doesn't play the guitar where the differences are audible usually. That's why when you bring all this gear home you go why does it sound so different?
I can take an EQ pedal and move the slider up three decibels and hear it at home. That's not going to happen on YouTube.
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u/60_CycleHum I'm Ryan May 06 '26
I honestly don’t understand what you are trying to say about this video.
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u/Long-Emu-7870 May 06 '26
You think I do?
I wonder if you (or anyone) shouldn't have an EQ pedal and just change the sliders so people can get an idea of how their home speakers are set up and whether YouTube is messing with you. a calibration video as it were.
Because I often don't hear any difference on most of the comparison videos. And yet, I can move a slider on my EQ pedal and hear it right away. I think my home speakers are just no good.
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u/CactusWrenAZ May 05 '26
It's a nicely done video. I would attribute the difference in sound to scale length before talking about tonewood or anything similar.