What is difference between the sound of Semi-hollow guitar and Solid-body guitar?

Answer 1

The answer is actually in the question. A semi-hollow has a deeper hollow sound while a solid body has a crisp solid tone. I own a 1979 Gibson ES-347TD. It's a semi-hollow, of course. I also own a few other solid-bodies, from Strat to LP. I find that the tone has far more to do with the pickups and amp. There is very little tonal quality that I can ascribe to the fact my 347 is a semi-hollow-body. If you close you eyes, it's little different than many solid-body Guitars I own. I also own an older Gibson L5. Now, THAT's a whole different kettle of fish. It's a big, hollow-body jazz box, and I think a lot of the tone is a product of that huge resonant sound chamber. Acoustically, they would sound very different. When you strike a string, the energy travels back and forth and any material connected to it resonates sympathetically, ie at the same frequency. Since u can hear the note, the air around the instrument is resonating too and your eardrum is in synch with these vibrations. Eventually, the energy is dissipated in the atmosphere, the guitar body, as heat as soundwaves, as the buzzing on a bad fret or loose tuning knob... A solid body guitar will have more sustain as it bleeds out this energy into the atmosphere more slowly, as less surface area is in contact with it. An acoustic guitar is the opposite, it's designed for maximum surface area air contact, and the body is designed to match the amplitude of the string's vibration (volume!). The acoustic will have inherently less sustain but more acoustic volume. A semi-hollow will be somewhere between the two in terms of sustain and volume.

How about plugged in? Then we're talking about TONE or timbre because volume is achieved by a speaker cone. It's well agknowledged that even the best magnetic pickup won't capture all the frequencies a vibrating string produces, but the guitar's materials and construction will influence how the string resonates with it's connected material, mostly through frequency damping - the idea that a portion of the string's energy is lost or dampened by turning into heat instead of sound waves.