Last week I posted a blog entry in which I compared video recordings of me playing my National Reso-rocket WB with the new Revolution Biscuit/Bridge, with and without the addition of a wooden gasket that sits between the biscuit and the resonator cone. The posting can be found here…
As I usually do, I shared my blog posting on my Facebook page, as well as a few other FB guitar enthusiast pages, including one dedicated to National Guitars users/fans. Sharing on Facebook gets my entries better exposure… in fact, people from all over the world have checked in to what I have to say and I am grateful for the time people take to read my articles and to comment on them.
My previous two articles about the Revolution biscuit received quite a bit of attention, but none more so than the most recent one. In fact there was quite a bit of consternation and dissatisfaction about how the guitar sounded with the Revolution biscuit, either with or without the wooden gasket. Someone suggested that the guitar strings may to too light… in fact, they’re quite heavy. There was even a bit of mysticism, one commenter suggesting that the installation of a Revolution Biscuit in a friend’s guitar removed its ghost, thus diminishing its sound quality. Another implied that perhaps my playing was at fault, which may be true, but I think the dominant variable was the Revolution Biscuit itself.
I decided then that it might be useful to explore more closely a before and after comparison of the traditional wooden biscuit versus the Revolution biscuit. I had not done this before. The only other comparison that I am aware of that is publicly available is the one created by Steve James in his workshop, which you can find in this posting. It was hard for me to tell much difference between set-ups in James’s posting.
So, to respond to the sound critics I decided to do my own A/B comparison on the same exact guitar. I recorded myself playing first with the Revolution Biscuit (with wooden gasket deployed), then I disemboweled the guitar and reinstalled the original wooden biscuit and recorded the same tune again. The transition of one to the other was made easier because each biscuit was equipped with its own cone. If you’re interested in my recording technique you can find that information here. I recorded myself playing Muddy Waters’ tune I Feel Like Going Home, which I learned from Tom Feldmann’s excellent Guitar Workshop DVD. The guitar is tuned to Open G and I am using a heavy, solid brass Tone Dome slide.
Well… here are the two recordings:
First, the recording with the Revolution Biscuit installed:
Second, the recording with the tradition wooden biscuit re-installed on the guitar:
After completing the recordings and editing them a bit on my MacBook Pro with iMovie, I did some intense comparisons… I listened, comparing section by section of the tune, on my MacBook speakers, then through some nice Grado headphones, and finally piped it through my very nice Marantz/Paradigm sound system using Apple AirPlay. I also had my wife Annette and my Iowa-all-time-best-friend Grant listen to the recordings too and share their impressions with me.
In sum, everyone, including me liked the traditional wooden biscuit sound far more than the Revolution biscuit. The sonic and tonal differences were quite obvious. I am not particularly articulate when it comes down to discussing guitar tones, but I will try. The traditional wooden biscuit tones were more present, more naturally acoustic sounding, perhaps more resonator twangy sounding. The Revolution biscuit tones sounded more truncated, lacking tonal subtleties, and were flatter and more compressed sounding, with the compression increasing as the strings got heavier.
I’ve decided to climb out of the Revolution Biscuit rabbit hole and leave the wooden biscuit installed on my WB for the time being…
In conclusion:
- I was persuaded to try the Revolution Biscuit because it would allow me to improve my set-up in terms of playing action. My strings were a bit too high for comfortable finger-style playing. One of the key selling points of the Revolution Biscuit is the easy raising and lowering of the saddle using set screws to adjust the guitar’s action. Plus it was cool looking… I like the high-tech machined aluminum appearance of the new biscuit… To state the obvious, how a guitar looks is very important, but not near as important as it sounds…
- I did not expect a noticeable or negative tonal difference when replacing the wood biscuit, based largely on Steve James’s recording, but detected some immediate difference. Not doing an A/B comparison initially, I was not sure how much difference there really was and at that point I was too lazy to switch back and forth… it was a lot of somewhat stressful work setting up the Revolution biscuit the first time…
- Later, I accepted Steve James’s offer to try out the wooden gasket that sits between the Revolution Bridge and the cone mostly because I wanted to see if it would alter the tonal qualities in a positive way. There was some change in tone (positive I think) which I reported on earlier.
- In response to “sound critics” on Facebook, I finally did an A/B comparison of the two biscuits and as I perceive the results, the wooden biscuit is more natural sounding.
- Caveat: in another lifetime, I was a statistician (having minored in the subject) during my doctoral studies. My conclusions about the Revolution Biscuit are probably best applied for the National Reso-rocket WB… this was not an extensive factorial analysis… there may be other important variables at play such as saddle-type (i.e. wood) and guitar type (i.e. metal vs wood body or size) that may interact and cause noticeably different results!
Please let me know what you think…
