Dry vs. Wet sound, reverb, sustain

[Craig Bumgarner]

One of my favorite parts of the Design book are the definitions of tonal qualities in section 3-30 and how construction affects these qualities.

Can anyone elaborate on the qualities players call "dry" and "wet"? Some times the wet sound is said to have reverb and or sustain.

To me, dry is a lack of overtones, mostly just the fundamental, quick attack and quick decay of the plucked note, Wet has more overtones and a slower decay. Reverb is an echo like quality and Sustain is simply slow decay. Reverb and sustain are not really the same thing as wet, but they are all in the same general catagory, certainly not dry. Anybody want to comment on these definitions?

What I'm most interested in, however, is what are the construction elements that affect each of these. And, even more complex, how do they interact with other tonal elements. For instance, how does one build a dry guitar that is still responsive and loud? My guitars are getting more responsive, but wetter at the same time. Personally, I like that, but customers sometimes want a drier sound and I'm somewhat at a loss as to accomplish that.

[Trevor Gore]

Until the terms get officially defined (who's going to do that? ) they're obviously subject to individual interpretation; so I'll give you mine:

The terms are context dependant, depending on whether or not some signal processing is being applied. In the recording/sound reinforcement context, "dry" means no added reverb, wet means added "reverb". Pretty straight forward.

In the pure acoustic context, there is dry and not dry. Dry is like crispy; so plenty of high highs and a relative lack of mids, specifically. Not dry has more mids, hence more volume. To get "dry" you end up suppressing mids, which effectively suppresses monopole mobility. Dry is what you get from many dreads; stiff X-bracing limits monopole mobility, so you get left with lows due to the large box and highs off the sound board (and a "scooped" response). Loose some bass (think 000) and you're left with dry.

So dry and loud is a bit of an oxymoron to me, because there's only so much you can get by way of highs, so to get the dry balance you have to cut mids and bass, where most of the power is. There's enough in the book for you to be able to figure out how to get that type of sound if you want to go that way, but I'm interested in hearing other people's views.

As ever, as the terms moved from the jargonistic environment of the recording studio to general use, they have been conflated, resulting in a loss of definition. Think about "stress"!

[Craig Bumgarner]

Thanks Trevor, every bit of that makes sense and rings true.

Craig

[Craig Bumgarner]

Are there commonly excepted frequency range definitions lows, mids, and highs as relates to an acoustic guitar?

[Trevor Gore]

Simple answer is no!

It might be easier to look at it from the point of view of what's missing when the lows/mids/highs are not there.

For a fairly arbitrary start with respect to an acoustic guitar I'd say:

< 250 Hz = lows

250 Hz < x < 1000 Hz = mids

1000 Hz < x < 10,000 Hz = highs. There's not much else above that.

If pressed, I could likely be persuaded to lift the mid cut-off to 2kHz, but I'd start with 1kHz.

[Craig Bumgarner]

Okay, I get it, thanks.