Freedom Custom Guitar / Tone Shift Plate SP-JP-04

Freedom Custom Guitar (Freedom Custom Guitar Research) tone shift plate. It is 3mm thick and gold in color.

■ Tone Shift Plate
■ Color: Gold
■ Thickness: 3mm
~From the manufacturer's website~
■ The highly musical resonance of brass is well-established, as evidenced by its widespread use on wind instruments, snares, and a variety of other instruments. Compared to a standard steel neck plate, this plate adds more overtones to the sound, resulting in a mellower, more expansive, and more mellow sound. Furthermore, by being twice as thick as a standard plate and providing greater mass, it fully absorbs the powerful picking energy of wound strings, resulting in a clearer, fuller low-end sound for wound strings 4-6. Furthermore, increased rigidity dramatically improves sustain.
""Sound"" is ""vibration."" The type of ""vibration"" is a key factor in determining the ""tone."" Striking a large bell produces a low, ""gong"" sound, while a small bell produces a high, clear, ""tinkling"" sound. The differences in pitch and timbre of these bells and chimes arise from differences in their characteristic vibration frequencies (natural frequencies of free vibration) and the amplitude distribution at each frequency (amplitude spectrum), which depend on their size, shape, and materials. In other words, ""timbre"" is a complex interaction of natural vibrations.

When a stringed instrument, whether electric or acoustic, produces sound, the following mechanism occurs:

① Picking (vibration input) → ② String vibration (primary vibrating body) → ③ Vibration of the neck, body, etc. (secondary vibrating body). This is not a one-way process from ① to ③; immediately after ①, ② to ③ cause ""resonance"" and ""phase phenomena"" and influence each other's vibrations.

In other words, immediately after picking, the string becomes a ""tertiary vibrating body,"" vibrating in a way that is influenced by ③ rather than the primary vibration from ① to ②. Electric guitars and bass instruments produce sound by disrupting the magnetic field of the pickup through the vibration of a magnetic material, generating induced currents. In other words, the final ""tone"" is determined by the way the strings (magnetic materials) vibrate, which is influenced by point ③. This is where the ""tone shift plate"" comes in.
The neck and body are the largest vibrating bodies. The joint plate that joins these two vibrating bodies has a major impact on the way the neck and body vibrate. In other words, by changing the material and mass of the neck joint plate, you can change the way the strings vibrate and actively alter the sound.