GIBSON LES PAUL VS FENDER STRAT | A CLOSER LOOK

hey everybody I'm Rick Beato retro today we're going to talk about Les Paul versus the strat I was originally a Les Paul guy my first electric guitar was a black Les Paul they called it a fretless wonder and then I bought a white Les Paul after that but I've always been a Les Paul guy I love the way they play I own this one and I own the strat - but Rhett is kind of a strat guy even though he plays a lot of different Attar's yeah my first guitar was a strat it was a cheap little $99 department store strat knockoff but they kind of hold a special place in my heart because of that so I've owned Les Paul which I no longer own I sold it for something else which tells you how I feel about Les Paul's one of the reasons I like a Les Paul is because of the pickup configuration typically less balls have humbuckers on em or mini hamburgers or p90s but they're all large pickups as opposed to the smaller pickups that you find the single coil pickups on a strap yeah single coil is a strat the thing I like about the strap pickup configuration is the three single coils I personally find it to be a little bit more versatile than a double humbucker design like a Les Paul and it has a incredibly unique tone that you can get with a 5-way switch here on the two and four positions the quacky strapped up out of phase and out of phase strat tone that everybody loves now one of the things about the strat is that it's very common actually to have a humbucker in the bridge position it became more common in the 80s to see guitars and I've owned many guitars and there are many types of strat Qatar's that have humbuckers in the bridge but really the traditional strat sound is with the three single coils right so I guess the point of today's video is maybe you're new to guitar and you're thinking about getting your first electric guitar and you can't decide between the strap or the Les Paul or the strat style right strat style s style or Les Paul style so today we're going to take you through a couple of the differences and similarities between them to help you decide okay let's talk about the pickups rep so stratocasters traditionally come with a three single coil design you're switched with a five-way blade switch I like this pickup configuration because I find it to be pretty versatile and the strat has been used on a ton of iconic guitar recordings [Music] so you want that strat tone it helps to have the three single coil design like this Les Paul's typically come with two PAF pickups and I'm talking about Les Paul Custom Les Paul standards but you can also get a Les Paul deluxe that comes with mini humbuckers or you can find older Les Paul's that have p90s the difference in the pickup configuration will actually change the sound quite a bit but not as much as going from a Les Paul to a single coil strat sound right in in terms of electric guitar tonal spectrum these two instruments are about as far apart as you can get from one another on the strat side these tend to be brighter they tend to cut through a mix a little bit better they have lower output meaning they're not as loud as humbuckers are which makes them really useful in genres like traditional country or funk or you know some modern pop rock players like ie John Mayer is a huge strat guy so Les Paul's when you think of that you think [Music] [Music] I mean that is really the sound the Les Paul is the sound of rock they have a lot of mid-range because of the pickup configuration because the body style you get a lot of system they're really the standard rock guitar okay next we're going to talk about body now one thing to think about when you're playing a Les Paul ER strat is the cutaway a Les Paul is a single cutaway you can also get a Les Paul jr. that will have a double cutaway but the traditionalist Paul is a single cutaway it's a little bit difficult to reach up here into the higher frets than a strat I will admit that right because on the back of the neck where the neck joins the body on Les Paul traditionally that is a really thick piece of wood that for people with smaller hands it can be tough to physically wrap your entire hand around the body and net together the body shape of the strap is it your traditional double cutaway design and you do have much easier access to the higher frets here the thing I don't like about playing your strat high up is the shape of the neck pocket back here this joint being a hard 90 degree angle it really just that corner pokes you right in the palm of the hand when you're playing whereas a Les Paul has a more contour joint where the neck meets the body other differences are in body construction and other differences in body and other differences in body construction are what cover you do this all the time every day other differences in body construction are in terms of would traditionally Les Paul's are mahogany body mahogany neck with a maple cap sort of brightens up the tone traditionally strats or fenders Telecaster Stratocasters are made of either alder wood or swamp ash early examples are made of pine early Telecaster as much of David didn t pine strats but traditionally an off-the-wall Fender modern fender like this strat today is made from alder which is a you know pretty easy to find wood kind of sits somewhere in the middle of the tonal spectrum it's not too bright it's not too dark and they are lighter than Les Paul's that is really true this Les Paul here is probably about nine and a half pounds or so I would say whereas the fender is how much this is probably seven mid sevens that may not seem like a lot to you but when you wear a Les Paul for a 3-hour gig you're back a certain when I typically play Les Paul I sit down nowadays yeah in fact I was one of the main reasons I sold my Les Paul was on gigs you're playing for two hours three hours at a time it literally was causing me some serious neck and shoulder and back pain and I'm not nearly as old as he is but even though I own both guitars I look much cooler when I'm playing a Les Paul I guess that's true I guess certain people have like you know sir guitars look better on some people know theirs next let's talk about the neck okay so neck construction we touched on it earlier but the fender is what you call a bolt neck design whereas the Les Paul is a set neck no bolts no bolts these are two fundamentally different ways of building a guitar there's advantages and disadvantages to both these are cheaper to manufacture which means traditionally strats are less expensive than Les Paul's these are much more difficult to swap the neck out right with this literally if you didn't like the way the neck felt on your Les Paul you could order a neck from company like warmoth or all parts that's a different shape maybe a different wood a different fretboard wood and literally just bolt it right on yourself and probably the next time you see me playing the strat in a video I've ordered a new neck so you will see it on there right next shape really varies between each guitar different generations of strats and Les Paul's have different neck shapes you know late 50s early 60s Les Paul's tend to have really beefy baseball bat next where as Gibson went through the 60s those necks started to slim out well this is actually a 1960 style neck which is thin it's the 58 59 those those heirs had the baseball bat necks that Rhett likes to play I like the very thin next year it's it fits my hand better I think it's just more of a comfortable to play another thing to think about is fretboard wood there's kind of a debate on line as to whether or not fretboard wood has a difference in tone I think it does it definitely feels stiff yes it has a huge difference in the field both of these guitars have rosewood fretboards a lot of times you'll see strats though with maple necks with maple boards maple fingerboards tend to be brighter and tone they tend to be more snappy sounding I'm not a huge fan of them though because they actually spray the lacquer that you get usually on the back of the neck they spray the fingerboard as well and it feels different under your fingers I like rosewood fingerboard 'z that's one of the things I like about Les Paul's but if you buy a Les Paul Custom and it's an old one you're gonna get an ebony fingerboard which I actually like even more than the rosewood yeah Evon ease a little harder it's a little denser wood then rosewood so it feels a little bit smoother you know with rosewood you can you can feel the grain of the wood under your fingers these are all minor details but they do make a difference in how the guitar feels which makes a difference in how you play the guitar next up we should talk about neck radius yeah so when you're talking about radius if you've been looking for a guitar and you've been reading specs and you see oh 12 inch radius nine and a half inch radius you might be confused as to what that is essentially what that's referring to is the radius of fretboard if you look closely at guitar frets they're not totally flat there's a curve to them and the measurement of that curve is referred to as a radius so if you think about a 12-inch wide circle and I took a chunk out of that circle that's about as wide as this neck that's the amount of curve that's in the fretboard so whereas if you had a 20 inch radius like people like allan holdsworth liked to play it's a very flat almost like a class with guitar fingerboard right there's almost no curve to them early fenders early you know late 50s Stratocasters and Telecasters have a very rounded fretboard radius and so so the difference there is going to be in playability and feel generally rounder radiuses are better for playing chords especially lower down on the neck but if you're gonna be playing a lot of lead lines where you're bending a rounder radius might not be what you're looking for you want a flatter radius so that the note doesn't fret out as you bend up people that play with really fast legato like Holdsworth or any players that play with with where they're not picking every note and they're doing a lot of slurring usually prefer to have these higher radiuses so remember the higher radius is actually flatter and easier to play on right so a way to think about it if you want to play super fast go for a slim neck with a flat radius next we have frets are they important Rhett frets are super important in multiple ways first of all as frets sighs so physically how big the fret wire is and how far it sticks off and how far it sticks up from the fingerboard I prefer jumbo frets I do too you like the same fret wire in more modern guitars you can actually get stainless steel frets which I love because they don't wear out at all and they feel incredibly smooth when you're bending when you're bending yeah or with your vibrato and lastly we have uses Les Paul's like we talked about earlier have a lot more mid-range especially with this pickup configuration with the PAF and are really great for rock guitar for really heavier rock guitar sounds right that mid-range boost and the hotter output of the humbucking pickup and the fact that the pickups are actually hum cancelling hence the name of the humbucker they don't hum like a strat does which makes them better for playing through over driven distorted amps whereas a strap is going to buzz pretty loudly when you're playing one of the pickups individually that's probably the worst part of owning a strat there are modern workarounds with that you can get noiseless pickups but stylistically a strat I think would be more versatile than a Les Paul II you can play rock on a strap you can play funk on a strap you can play modern pop stuff on a strap so my recommendation if you want one guitar to do a little bit of everything I think a strap with a humbucker in the bridge would be a great option another thing to think about is the scale length of the guitar which is the distance from the bridge to the nut a Les Paul has a shorter scale length which is 24 and 3/4 inches which means that you can't really get it perfectly in tune especially yeah G and B string yeah it's kind of it's just traditional Les Paul you just deal with they're just never really in tune don't worry about fenders have a longer scale length they have 25 and a half inch scale length which makes them more reliable they stay in tune better I think they feel a little bit better there is a difference in feel between the shorter and longer scale length also another big difference between these two guitars the fender has a tremolo bridge where the Gibson has as a stopped tail piece meaning no whammy bar here much easier to stay in tune but you can't do dive-bombs so if you have any questions leave them in the comments below you can find Reds channel as well there please subscribe here to my everything music YouTube channel you get the Beato book on my website orecchiette calm and follow me on instagram and also you can support my channel through the Beato club which you can find through flat 5 calm you'll see the link in the description below thanks for watching

Channel: Rick Beato

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Keywords: Rick Beato, Everything music, Rhett Shull, fender vs gibson, stratocaster vs les paul, fender stratocaster (guitar), electric guitar, gibson les paul (guitar), fender strat, les paul or strat, strat vs les paul, gibson guitar, fender stratocaster, guitar, les paul vs strat, gibson vs fender, fender or gibson, les paul better than strat, jimi hendrix, jimmy page, david gilmore, jeff beck, eric clapton, stevie ray vaughn, neal schon, peter frampton, slash

Id: V7TUaHlkp4M

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 27 2018