Warning: Long post about sustain imo
Quote:
Originally Posted by Heya
But this is not a strat, it's the Jerry Cantrell Rampage, it has a 13.75" radius. Pretty good for some sweet sustain.
Don't think he was talking about the fretboard radius, that's not really a sustain factor at all. It's primarily the angle of the strings after the bridge and after the nut. If you compare say an LP with a tilted-back headstock and a tune-o-matic bridge, you can see the angle of the strings is more extreme than on say a Strat or Tele.
Also there are other factors like string gauge, tension, woods involved and then [more artificial] ways to get it through your signal chain, like with compressors and amplification, Fernandes sustainers and ebows also.
For a good while there has been a lot of debates about whether a set neck joint sustains better than a bolt-on, though more recent hard studies dispute that. There was one I came across a few years back where a guy went so far as to build a set neck guitar and measure it with a spectrometer and all, then removed the neck and made it into a bolt on. Then there's the difference in mass between these types of guitars also that is an important factor, and some woods have more dampening effect than others.
With Strats and Teles that have single-coils with more powerful magnets, there's more string pull, and that can work against sustain too. Hard for me to say how much given there are other things working against sustain, but I back them off a little.
There's a lot more that I never looked too hard at which people discuss and argue about, like how much difference a big heavy trem block makes or doesn't make (sounds reasonable to me), I've even seen people clamp a weight to their headstock trying to increase sustain and suggest heavy tuners too. I seemed to get a little help locking down my trem but I made other changes to the guitar in question also.
Other things equal I've found thicker mahogany types with TOM-type bridges and a decent angle behind the nuts are just consistently better-sustaining guitars. I have 5 that fit that description at the moment (two bolt-on, one of which is semi-hollow, which appears to sustain less) and have had others before them. My two ash teles have humbuckers, 3 strats are alder, two having passives and one active EMGs - the two heavy ones sustain a little better than the rest but still not in LP range.