Sustain on a solidbody electric guitar is largely a byproduct of a lot of things - the string gauge, intertia, how well cut the nut is, how well adjusted the bridge saddles are, intonation really helps a lot (harmonic resonance), hold much mass/density the bridge has, the breakover over the nut and bridge to the tuners/tailpiece, how high output the pickups are, all that affects it to some degree, but all of it does, in a limited degree. And honestly, it's little secret a properly setup guitar will sound better than a poorly setup one.

I've found, in my personal experience, you get longer sustain out of LIGHTER strings. While heavier strings have Intertia due to their heavier mass, they also have to be tuned up to a higher tension to reach the same pitch as a lighter string. That's why I laugh when people tell me I need .011's and give "sustain" as the reason. I used to use .011s a lot in my early days, and TBH, they don't really sustain as well as the .009s I have, where i've had so much sustain from a friggin OFFSET - the most maligned lot of guitars from a sustain standpoint, it's almost annoying waiting for that Low E to die off, or finding my high E on fret 22 bent up to F# is holding on halfway into the last verse of the song if I let it. Nobody's givving Billy Gibbons or gave B.B. King any crap about this, and those guys use SEVENS. Heck, I've heard of Billy using sevens tuned down two whole steps.....few of us (I can) play on a set of wet angel hair noodles like that. Most guys would yell "GET FRIGGIN 12's MAN!".

But what surprises the heck out of me is how much people make a huge deal out of sustain - is there really ap oint. in the whole realm of rock guitar, the most difficult note sustain-wise you could be holding is a 22nd fret D bent up 2 steps to F# - and I've done that and held the note halfway into the second verse - on an old school Fender Jaguar, strung up with .009s no less! Live i've gotten that note to bloom into a friggin really high "D" harmonic, lol - on the same guitar with the same setup. So here I am on one of the guitars the fuddy duddy guys say has the "Worst sustain on the planet" and it *needs* "Havey strings because it's a short scale" - yet I'm playing on super-light strings, under tension, bent up to F# and I got a Jaguar screamin' like a Fretless wonder - here's why.

Sustain is a old trope that needs to die in the guitar community. We already have it, any GSO can pretty much achive that "Les Paul-like" sustain now, regardless of the neck attachment, regardless of the pickups, regardless of anything but the amplifier involved really. There once WAS a time when it was valid, just not now.

That time would have been 1964-1984 - if we need to pick a 20 year stretch that's even. At the beginning of that, you had Dave Davies slashing his speakers for "You Really Got Me" to get that sound. Pete Townshend of The Who was turning every amp under the sun full up until he was helping Jim Marshall develop what would become the "Marshall STack". The Ventures were using Fuzzrite boxes for the "500 Pound Bee", Keith Richards used an old Dallas Rangemaster for fuzz on "Satisfaction", meanwhile, Toni Iommi was getting blistering tones from a Sun Beta Lead head using P-90 SGs and a Strat copy! By the time Iommi came about, sustain was no longer an issue. This was right when the boomers were of age to play rock music, and the Gen Xers started to grow up. At the time, the off the shelf amplifiers and guitars most of us could buy were moderate in output, getting more efficient by the day - meaning higher "head room" meaning they'd stay clean the higher up the dial we turned them.

Thing though is - most people don't need sustain for clean, and most people are using distortion when they discuss sustain. Back then, what they considered Overdrive, Fuzz, and Distortion, was not anywhere near as high gain or compressed as it is now. Toni Iommi had the closest thing to a "modern" guitar tone until about 1978 when Eddie Van-Halen came along, and then everyone copied him, and that era started to kind-of nullify the need for a set-neck block of wood with high output humbuckers as newer products introduced more distortion. Where we are now, I can take a 5.5K Fender Mustang, put it into a modern high gain tube amp like an Engl POwerball or a Mesa Triple Rectifier, and have more than enough distortion to play a good round of "Seek and Destroy" on it without sounding hilariously weird. We were already there by 2001.

The real, uncomfortable, reason sustain is an issue? Being out of touch. And that's it. Once you get past a certain age in life, the things you are interested in, you are only inte4rested in them in the time when you were really into them, and not the present day. For example, I couldn't give a rats ass about current indie music production methods for the most part - granted I also fit right into them as/is, but that's beside the point. It's just schoolyard talk for old people. Basically, let's all argue why we are suffering to get sustain out of our 50 year old Les Pauls run through 50 year old Tubescreamer pedals run into 50 year old Marshall amplifiers that have 4 clean channels, no disotriton channel, and you have to tie two channels together with all the knobs on at least 7 to get enough gain to play something resembling "Kiss Alive" while summoning up the local police as a result. There are more important things in music to worry about today, and sustain ain't one of em'.