From a point of view of the physics of how the electric guitar works, you'd think there wouldn't be any difference with the sound produced by using different woods or shapes. But the companies that market guitars argue it does make a difference and they charge more for guitars made of rare woods. Is it all about materials or is it the brand factor? A few things can make one guitar better than another. For instance, you can get varying qualities of the hardware that holds the strings. The brand is important to some people, mostly because their idols may play certain brands. But aside from that, electric guitar companies tend to have come from acoustic guitar companies. So what did you test? The signal in electric guitars is generated by the string vibrating above a magnetic ''pickup''. To see how the wood or shape of the guitars might affect this signal I placed identical strings and pickups in each of the guitars and compared the signals.

Where did you get the guitars? From a local music shop in Bendigo, J's Music City, which was happy enough to support my research. They were kind enough to lend me seven guitars and some pickups. I recorded every note individually on each guitar with the pickups placed in exactly the same spot, the same distance beneath the strings. Then I listened to recordings, but more importantly I looked at the harmonic content of each note. What do you mean? Loading When you hear a note, we don't just hear one frequency. So when you hear a singer sing a C, or a violin play a C, or a flute play a C, even though they're the same note they sound different. That's what we call the different timbre in music - a different ''tone colour''. We get different tone colours from all the other, higher frequencies also there with that note. So … I look at, first, fundamental frequency of the note, and also how loud all of the other frequencies are compared to it

What have you found? I've only been looking at the results for two weeks and it really looks like all of them are pretty much identical. I was surprised at just how identical they were because the guitars were very different in shape. As I was listening to them, I showed other guitar players and they were surprised as well, they were convinced they all came from the same guitar … I'm beginning to think we should be making guitars out of something more rigid than wood, such as carbon fibre.