jazzyvee -
I don't think you need to go cutting up a Series bass to do this experiment!
You can think of the instrument as a sort of mechanical filter for the sound of the strings vibration. It has a frequency response - there are going to be resonant frequencies where the string's vibration is absorbed by the body and neck and what you hear is softer and areas where the instrument isn't eating up the energy. The peaks and valleys are complex and give the instrument it's character. Unlike your stereo where you ideally want the response to be even (flat), there's no right answer - it's just how the instrument sounds. You may have heard the term formant which is how you refer to the characteristic physical frequency response of an instrument. The body of a violin has a particular response because of the materials and construction - if you're lucky it will be right and you'll have a Stradavarius. It's exactly the same with your Alembic too.
The response of the instrument is fixed and each different note you play interacts with that response differently. If you sample a piano and transpose it up an interval, a critical ear can hear that this isn't right because a digital sampler transposed the frequency response of the piano body as well as the note, where a real piano would have had a different relationship at each key. Better synths deal with this by having 88 samples and some of the really good ones try to model the physical behavior of the piano's physicality.
The response of the instrument isn't just steady state either. It may change with volume and may react really differently with as transients are struck and die down. So, it's really complex.
When you use different woods in a guitar neck, the effect is that you're changing the frequency response. A dark wood like mahogany is absorbing more of the highs; maple absorbs the lows instead. Each piece of wood is different, too.
The construction makes a big difference too. On a Fender, there's a really big effect not only because there's two different pieces of wood, but there's usually two different types of wood as well - maple in the neck, and alder or ash in the body. Between the effect of the mechanical joint and the different woods, the general effect is that there's less sustain and the high frequencies die out pretty quick. This is generally why bolt-ons seem more punchy. You get a big blast of transient when you hit the note, and then it dies out and becomes less trebly pretty quick - that's punch.
A through-body has both ends of the string on the same piece (or pieces) of wood, so the sustain will probably be longer and there's also consistency of the wood type from end to end. You get more sustain throughout the frequency range. Because the note and it's harmonics aren't dying out so quickly, this is why people think that through-bodies are less punchy.
Set-necks are in between. They have a tigher mechanical joint but the two ends of the strings are on different pieces of wood and maybe even different types of wood, so there will be an intermediate loss of sustain.
The neck joint is interesting. If you're talking about a Fender, the density and physical characteristics of the body and neck are quite different. This is a physical impedance match (similar to the electrical impedance between your amp and speakers). When the sound moves from the higher density maple into alder, this actually causes a reflection at the joint - some of the vibration from the neck is reflected back into the neck. You don't have this sort of mismatch with a through-body instrument.
The lamination in the Alembic neck have a couple of effects too. First of all, the slices of wood can be flipped when they're assembled which means that warp in the original piece can be counterbalanced. And the different types of laminations blend their effects in the overall sound of the neck.
After all this babbling, I might also point out that there are instruments that model what the difference in sound might be. An MTD bass has similar exotic woods and laminated neck contruction but is bolt-on instead of through-body so that's probably a pretty good hint of how the physical change will sound.
David Fung
