Originally Posted by anathematized_one

Well it depends. Ignoring models and brands, there are many factors to look at. Realistically, any guitar can be, and has been, used for metal.

Speed
This is where you look into neck profiles. You can get a more u shape or a more v shape, both of which can have thicker or thinner curvatures. Typically thinner = faster, but go with what is comfortable. Thinner also can reduce sustain.

No, thinner means that if you have small hands you have less to grab around and can reach all notes more easily. Neck thickness has very little to do with speed. Yes at the absolute extremes you might find some necks are too thick to play comfortably and those are going to hamper your speed, but I can play just as fast on my Epiphone Swingster as I can on my RG550, because if the necks are comfortable, their thickness simply doesn't MATTTER. Neck shape should be all about comfort. Thin necks support smaller hands by making it easier to stretch to low strings further up the neck. Thick necks provide more support lower down the neck or for people with larger hands.

You are correct that a neck that is too thin can have less sustain. You didn't mention that they're also more susceptible to temperature change and humidity, and that thicker necks will usually (not always, this is wood we're dealing with), be more stable and need less adjustment over time.

Tone
Nearly every aspect affects the tone. If you want a darker/warmer tone, you will want to go with a mahogany body, but it is going to significantly increase the weight. Other woods have brighter tones. You can also get a "top wood" to alter the tone, say getting a mahogany body with a 1/8" maple top wood would give you a warm and dark tone but also will brighten up some of the highs.


READ THIS: Warmoth Custom Guitar Parts - Wood Descriptions

This is waaaaay more complicated than you make it sound. Also at the kind of price ranges he's likely looking at for a second guitar (Unless he's really pushing the boat out), he can't afford a 1/8" maple top - if he gets a guitar with a maple top its going to be a veneer or a photoflame, more would be way out of his budget, and veneers and/or photoflames aren't going to change the tone of the body at all.

Sustain
This is heavily influenced by what type of fretboard you have. Rosewood is your typical fretboard, bit ebony provides much more sustain, but also costs quite a bit.

Other factors are down-tuning. I typically tune to D standard. Even in E standard though, I use relatively thick strings (easier and more comfortable to me). Thicker strings are easier tto use in lower tunings, but in higher tunings, they can be more difficult to tune. Many people also don't like thicker strings. This can affect the neck width you decide on, though more than likely it will not.

No, no no no no.

Sustain is a function of string vibration, and how much of it is transferred to the guitar at the nut and bridge. The more is transferred to the body, the better the sustain. The fretboard wood has a very, very minimal effect on this, and should be one of the last things you look at if you look at it at all. Fretboard material is a tone consideration - maple is very bright and snappy, rosewood more rounded and has "bark", and ebony very percussive and punchy without being as bright as maple.

Down tuning and string guage are all personal preference, but you're wrong about them being more difficult to tune. The only difference in how easy they are to tune, should be that the tuning machine will be a little more stiff.

I have absolutely no clue why you'd relate neck width and string gauge. The only reason I can think of is if you were trying to put 13 or something super heavy on an Ibanez wizard, which would probably warp it over time.

You also have options of a tremolo or whammy bar. I personally don't like them. To have one, you must have a floating bridge. For me, I like the feel of a fixed bridge and the trem bar just gets in my way. Another option is a locking nut, which helps to hold tuning, but is almost a waste on a fixed bridge.

Again, nonono.
1 - Tremolos are whammy bars. They are the same thing.
2 - You do NOT need a floating bridge to have a tremolo. Look at a strat - you can set them up to float, but you can have the bridge rest on the body with no issues whatsoever.
3 - You telling him about your preference for not having a tremolo, doesn't help him find a metal guitar. Why not tell him why that makes a guitar better for metal? (Answer: It doesn't matter. Plenty of metal bands use tremolos and plenty don't, if he wants to play songs by all those bands, he should buy a guitar with a trem. If not, then he shouldn't.)
4 - What you say about locking nuts isn't true. They don't help hold tuning on a fixed bridge in the slightest. The job of a locking nut is to prevent a tremolo from sending a guitar out of tune, by ensuring that the movement of the string is stopped at the nut. On a fixed bridge, you have no tremolo to CAUSE movement there, so its a useless addition. The only thing adding a locking nut to a fixed bridge guitar will do, is prevent you from being able to tune it until you unlock it.


If you are shopping in a guitar store, try to find an amp that has a similar sound and type to the one you use and test the guitars through there. Some guitars sound better on certain amps/setups than others do.

Another factor are pickups. Active require a batter so there is that which you have to replace when it dies but you get additional power, so you have to weigh that out. You alo have to decide on the type, single or double coil, humbucker, etc for each pickup (neck and bridge). If you customise a guitar, you may even mix brands/types of pickups.

I'm sure he knows this, but why not explain to him that for metal music he probably wants a humbucker in the bridge because of the thicker and more growly sound, with more bass and less harsh treble? That'd be a damn sight better than rambling on about the fact a bunch of different stuff exists. Also why did you seperate out double coil and humbucker? They're the same thing.

As for "additional power" - Active pickups are louder than passive pickups, but the reason they're active isn't power. The reason active pickups need power is they use very weak pickup magnets and not many windings - this means you have to have an active preamp, to boost the very, very weak output signal of the main coils, but it also means less capacitance in the pickup, which means more treble response. It also means less magnet pull on the strings which means more sustain and you can adjust the pickups closer to the strings.

Of course, this isn't without its drawbacks, and those are the you need batteries, you can't leave the guitar plugged in when you're not playing it because it will kill the batteries, and also some designs of active pickup don't have much headroom, and end up compressing the signal if you play hard, making them less dynamic. Which is best is up to the style of music he wants to play, which is why way up there in the first reply I asked him a bunch of stuff so I could recommend more wisely rather than just spouting off a bunch of gibberish he might not understand or even need to know.

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

As for me, my inbox is as of yet testicle-free, and hopefully remains that way. Don't the rest of you get any ideas.

Originally Posted by Trollheart

I'll have you know, my ancestors were Kings of Wicklow! We're as Irish as losing a three-nil lead in a must-win fixture!

Originally Posted by GuitarBizarre

There.

Originally Posted by anathematized_one

When I said "tremolo or whammy bar", I wasn't saying that they are different, however posting from a phone is a bitch and I forgot to put quotes around "whammy". It should have read as "a tremolo or *scare quotes*whammy bar*scare quotes*. It is not my fault English lacks specificity and that posting on a forum kills all context clues like tone of voice.

Your problem not mine.

Also, I did say that locking nuts help hold tuning and that it is pointless on a fixed bridge (which would imply that they're only good for floating bridges).

Locking nuts don't help hold tuning. What they do is they change where the string is anchored, to prevent snags and fouling when using a tremolo. That's not helping it to hold tuning, that's preventing a mode of movement which only *exists* when using a tremolo, so that it can't cause problem. Your statement implies that locking nuts help hold tuning, just not to the same degree on a fixed bridge as on a tremolo. They do no such thing.

And yes, you do need a floating bridge for a tremolo bar, that's how it moves. Putting one on the guitar you mentioned takes the bridge from fixed to floating.

The problem here is you have no idea what floating bridge means. A floating bridge can be moved in BOTH directions. A recessed floyd rose, for example, can do this. You can RAISE pitch with it, because it floats.

But take, for example, an EVH Wolfgang - The tremolo is NOT RECESSED. It sits on the top of the guitar and the only direction it can move in, is down, to lower pitch. That means the bridge on the EVH Wolfgang doesn't float. In fact, it RELIES on this fact, since the EVH D-Tuna the guitar comes with, doesn't WORK on floating bridges, as it sends the balance between string and spring tension out of whack unless the trem is dive-only, like the wolfgangs, and many, many other bridge setups, including most stratocasters bridges, are. They are still TREMOLOS, but they are NOT floating bridges, unless you specifically set them up to be.

Also as a generality, thinner necks are considered faster and I did say to go for comfort over speed.

Also, my Jackson Warrior has a standard neck and it barely is able to take the 10-52's I use. I also did say that neck width probably won't matter unless he goes to the extreme.

Learn to read. Comfort IS speed. The thickness of a neck does NOT affect how fast someone can play on it. How comfortable they are with it will. People who talk about "fast" necks, are talking ****. No such thing exists. There is comfortable, and there is uncomfortable. Speed is not the necks issue. Its the player's issue, and the neck only has an effect if the player finds it uncomfortable. Again, I can play just as fast on my thickest necked guitars, as I can on my thinnest.

Also yes, thicker strings are easier to tune in down-tuning. You have more precision as the thinner the string, the more sensitive it is to minute changes in adjustment. Thinner strings will not take nearly as much of a turn of the tuning peg at lower tunings to go out of tune.

Again, bollocks. I string my guitars with anything between 9s and 12s and none of them is "difficult" to tune. If you're having trouble keeping a guitar in tune, then it is not a good guitar, or it is set up wrong. Period. Having to make smaller adjustments based on string thickness isn't difficult.

Furthermore, I don't know his budget or goals and gave general information about woods and did state that they would significantly increase the price.

Then ASK, rather than recommending a bunch of expensive **** and talking about woods and tech well, well outside of his likely reach. It doesn't take a genius to think "Someone probably isn't going to move from a Squier Stratocaster to a £1400 guitar with a Floyd Rose, Ebony Fretboard, and a Flame Maple top, all at once", does it? You'll note that the first thing I asked was "budget".

Also, fretboard does affect sustain far more than you realise as harder woods (such as ebony) absorb less string vibration, which means more gets transferred to the neck and body where the reverberations increase sustain.

It really doesn't make that much difference, if any. The string never touches the fretboard wood. It vibrates on the fret, or the nut, and is afficed to the guitar at the bridge and the tuners, every last one of which is metal. The mass of the guitar, the transmission of string energy to the body and wood, and the tightness of the build, have infinitely, infinitely more effect on sustain than the 3mm slab of whatever hard, dense wood you choose to put the frets into. I have plenty of guitars with rosewood fretboards. None of them sustains the same. Most of the difference in sustain comes down to weight, thickness of neck, bridge, and whether the action on that guitar is higher than on my other guitars. I've played plenty of maple and Ebony boarded guitars too, and owned a couple, and, again, there is NO consistency in whether those guitars sustain better or longer. It comes down to the build and design, of which the fretboard wood is one of the most minor pieces.

There is no "metal guitar". Metal guitars and companies who primarily market to metal players essentially make their guitars metal by givinf them "metal" body styles, such as the King V or the Dinky. The only difference is cosmetic.

I am aware that there is no one metal guitar. But that's what the OP is *asking* for recommendations on. I say that in my first post, when I ask him to name some bands and guitar sounds he likes, so that I can point him towards a guitar that sounds like that. In fact, I specifically said "Metal comes in lots of forms, and Metallica and Megadeth's guitar sounds are very different, to say nothing of Lizzy and Moore!" You on the other hand went off guns blazing and told him about your preferences, with no idea whatsoever about how he wants to sound or what he wants to do. You started rambling about tremolos without knowing if he even wanted one. You went nuts on downtuning and string guage without asking him if he wanted to downtune.

You didn't ask him a single question, but the OP doesn't provide anywhere NEAR enough information to recommend anything to him properly given the "breadth" of metal guitars.

I am also positive that my post wasn't gibberish and didn't go to extremes in detail, and that everything I said goes into any guitar purchase, custom or not. I gave generalities about what affects the sound, which is the true important aspect as ANY guitar can be used for metam depending on what sound you're going for.

If you know that it all comes down to what kind of sound you're going for (And you're right, it does), why didn't you ask him what kind of sound he was going for? Surely it would have saved you the time and effort of writing out a long post to recommend about something where you have no information whatsoever, and it would have saved me the bother of correcting your bull****, when you rambled on at length about a bunch of irrelevant and/or factually wrong things.

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Originally Posted by Pedestrian

As for me, my inbox is as of yet testicle-free, and hopefully remains that way. Don't the rest of you get any ideas.

Originally Posted by Trollheart

I'll have you know, my ancestors were Kings of Wicklow! We're as Irish as losing a three-nil lead in a must-win fixture!

Originally Posted by GuitarBizarre

.

Originally Posted by GuitarBizarre

The hell?

LTD esp are a metal oriented company. So are Ibanez, Schecter, and tons of others. Don't just recommend a brand, the specs and build are what matters.

Originally Posted by drh1589

Sir, have you heard of Pat Metheny, George Benson, or John Scofield? All Ibanez endorsers with signature models.

I'll give you Schecter, though. I entirely agree there.

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

As for me, my inbox is as of yet testicle-free, and hopefully remains that way. Don't the rest of you get any ideas.

Originally Posted by Trollheart

I'll have you know, my ancestors were Kings of Wicklow! We're as Irish as losing a three-nil lead in a must-win fixture!