"With an electric guitar, the cleaner the tone, the more we can hear what the various components are adding to the sound. The more distortion we add, the less apparent these differences become."
Having had the opportunity to play a variety of vintage guitars, especially Gibsons, I'd like to gently push back on your assessment.
What I've found is that when a guitar is super clean, the sound is something like rubber bands. Uninteresting and flat. This is true of new and vintage guitars. But... there is a range between "clean but almost dirty" and "overdriven but not very distorted" that hits the sweet spot for vintage guitars. This is where they really shine. As you increase the gain, especially entering metal territory, they all start to sound the same again.
I would claim that the "sweet spot" is real, and that theoretical arguments are just that. It's an experiential thing. Play a vintage Gibson guitar with some gain dialed in and LISTEN. Until you do that, you are making a theoretical instead of an experiental argument.
Is the specialness of vintage Gibsons due to the wood, the pickups, or the metal hardware on those guitars? That I don't know.
I take no issue with edge-of-breakup tone bringing the best out of well made guitars. I'm with you on that.
"As you increase the gain, especially entering metal territory, they all start to sound the same again." is what Glen Fricker's experiments demonstrate amply. That is all I'm saying when I say the "more distrtion".
He has a serties of irritating videos where he shows you on scopes exactly how little changing woods or pickups affects the heavy metal guitar sound. It's totally contrary to how we might feel about the tone of an instrument but his caveat is that he makes the claim for Heavy Metal. In his worldview, woodtone is not a thing for Heavy Metal guitar.
I'm okay to accept that finding.
Part of the dfficulty in talking about this topic is that there are so many components that do impact the sound and people have a different 'operating range' in their playing which colours their perception.
If one consdrers string gauge or material, plectrum gauge and material, fretboard material, fretwire material and size, pickup winds, pickup magents pickup orientation, posiiton, type, - all impact the sound, then it is not that hard to accept the actual wood might make a difference. I'm happy to sit along Paul Reed Smith on that assessment.
If others have A/B'd vintage and new guitars and come up with theories, I would love to hear them. It's an interesting subject, but unfortunately still within the realm of voodoo at the point.
The potted history of mahogany in the New World itself is informative about wood.
When the Europeans arrived in the Western Hemisphere, there weere native wild forests of mahogany across Central America. The first to be spotted and felled were in Cuba. It got shipped to Europe to become furniture. The land got turned into cane fields for sugar and now nobody in Cuba remembers the mahogany forests.
As the centuries went on, the native growth mahogany was harvested out of Central America for European furntiure until the 1950s when all that remained was a forest in Honduras. And this became the mahogany that went into vintage Gibson guitars.
It's kind of tragic from an ecology point of view, but that's kind of what the substance is when people varry on about the vintage wood. The stuff that came out of the last native forests of Central America. It's been plantation wood ever since the early 1970s when those Honduran forests too were gone.
We're just going to have to live with the reality that materials that go into our instruments change over time - and this will subtly change the sounds we get. For the last 2 decades the global supply of Rosewood has been in crisis. This has led to interesting woods being used for fretboards. Gibson even got into trouble for importing rosewood at a time of import restrictoins. This issue is going to grow, not diminish. There are all kinds of ethical considerations today that didn't exist back in say 1970. Does this affect tone? Yes, proabbly. Is it negative as tonewood enthusiasts proclaim? I doubt it. We crossed a line long ago with mahogany. A lot of good music has come since. My own view is Tonewood is important for sound, but Music itself is much more important.
