Sustain

Here’s the spreadsheet full of numbers from different types of strums.

XLS:

PDF:

If you’re curious about how I did the tests:

I used my Tele (1999 Tom Anderson Hollow T Classic), SG (2004 Gibson SG ’61 RI), Gretsch (1997 Gretsch 6120), and Strat ($70 cheapo).

All tests were done direct to the instrument input on my Apollo interface.

The bridge pickup was used on each guitar (Seymour Duncan Vintage Stack on the Tele, stock Classic 57 for the SG, stock Filtertron for the Gretsch, stock cheapo for the Strat).

Volume and tone knobs on all guitars were all the way up.

Each guitar had D’Addario XL 10-46 uncoated nickel wound strings.

Each guitar was tuned standard.

The pick was a Clayton Acetal Teardrop 0.50mm.

I recorded all of the different types of strums, cut them up and put them on grid so I had seconds 1-4 of each strum as a clip and second 5 as a clip. I used the Avid Gain plugin in the AudioSuite menu to measure peak level of each of the clips. Clicking a clip with seconds 1-4 of a strum would tell me the peak level of the strum at the start and clicking a clip with second 5 would tell me the peak level of the strum at 4 seconds (since the note generally keeps decaying, finding the peak between seconds 5.000 and 5.999 would probably just tell me what it was at 5.000, which means “after 4 seconds”).

Then I put the Waves GTR amp sim plugin on each guitar’s track on “Drive” mode, all knobs and buttons at their stock positions, and printed the re-amped signal to a separate track. Then I did the same thing again but with the “Shredder” mode on the plugin. These gave me my low and high gain settings using the same exact strums and picked notes as the clean tests. And I did the same Avid Gain plugin peak level analysis for all of the reamped clips.

Some individual readings from the Gain plugin seemed wonky, but overall it seems like there’s enough quantity of data to paint a good general picture. But I don’t know anything about statistics.