The Heretics Guide to Alternative Lutherie Woods

charlyg · Post by **charlyg** » Tue Sep 18, 2007 3:46 pm

I don't know if you have seen this, and I am not all the way through yet, but looks worth a read.

http://www.guitarnation.com/articles/calkin.htm

jingle_jangle · Post by **jingle_jangle** » Tue Sep 18, 2007 4:30 pm

The packing crate guitar that Bob Taylor built is so legendary that Taylor ended up issuing it in limited edition.

Yes, a guitar could be made from pine, and many have. Solid-bodied electric guitars are oblivious to materials, provided that they can maintain their integrity in normal use. (Jello would not be a good material...)

Acoustic guitars do show variations in sonic character, but as the author says, "there's no mistaking the sound of an acoustic guitar...it sounds like no other instrument..."

johnallg · Post by **johnallg** » Tue Sep 18, 2007 5:05 pm

Mmmmmm, oak....

kenposurf · Post by **kenposurf** » Tue Sep 18, 2007 5:23 pm

no wood like old wood.....

charlyg · Post by **charlyg** » Tue Sep 18, 2007 5:28 pm

My lead guitarist has an oak Ibanez strat copy with a maple neck/fretboard. It does kinda look like furniture. I would want a lighter stain than the dark look his has.

dale_fortune · Post by **dale_fortune** » Tue Sep 18, 2007 9:13 pm

The 1st 5 Fender Electrics were made from clear pine, no truss rod in the neck either.

wayang · Post by **wayang** » Wed Sep 19, 2007 12:58 am

They were also used as baseball bats until the idea of electric guitars actually caught on.

(Except for one: a lefty model that some guy in Britain ordered...it was used for playing cricket...)

beatlefreak · Post by **beatlefreak** » Wed Sep 19, 2007 7:33 am

I've always wondered why more guitars aren't made out of hardwoods like oak and hickory.

johnallg · Post by **johnallg** » Wed Sep 19, 2007 11:47 am

Oak with a light honey-hued stain...

wayang · Post by **wayang** » Thu Sep 20, 2007 8:39 pm

I just saw a Cadillac ad on the teevee...they were boasting about (among other obscenities) the "Sapele wood accents"...

For one thing, they're calling it "Sapele wood" because otherwise people wouldn't know they were referring to wood at all...most people have never heard the word Sapele. (We don't say "oak wood", do we?)

I've heard the word Sapele, though...the wood shop I worked for in the late eighties did two full stores of custom fixtures made of it (spec'd by name by the architect), and when the client expressed some interest in building a lot more of them, we discovered there was no more available. We had to make do with Honduran mahogany...

I subsequently discovered that Sapele is an endangered subspecies of mahogany found in equatorial Africa...mahogany trees take 500 years to mature enough to drop seeds.

So crank up the Led Zep and mash down on that gas pedal...the world's yer oyster, baby!

paologregorio · Post by **paologregorio** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 11:29 am

I don't know that I believe that one wood is as good as another, or that the wood doesn't make a difference.

Related example: A local luthier friend of mine builds custom guitars. When selecting wood for the body and neck, he taps on the body piece to see what note it produces while holding an electronic tuner next to the wood, then tries to find a neck piece that produces the same note.

jingle_jangle · Post by **jingle_jangle** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 12:12 pm

I just completed the body for an archtop jazz guitar; hand-carved spruce top and handcarved maple back. Six pounds of wood reduced to less than a pound and a half of guitar front and back, and four and a half pounds of curly chisel-scraps.

The back was tap-tuned to be 1/2-step sharp of the front. No tuning planned for the neck, because adding the fretboard and fretting and finishing it will affect the final note anyway, and since the neck itself is not a major resonating member, the difference made will be negligible.

johnallg · Post by **johnallg** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 2:53 pm

Why a half-step sharp, Paul?

jingle_jangle · Post by **jingle_jangle** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 3:16 pm

For a lively sound. A friend who is an old-school luthier up in Sonoma County (and a great Rickenbacker fan and collector), recommends the half-step interval. Mind you, we're talking about arch-tops here, which receive only two longitudinal braces under the spruce to counter the string's pull productively.

The most complete book on this topic (if you're inclined to read up on it like I did) is by Roger Siminoff...He recommends tuning each part of an acoustic guitar to a different note of a chord. Best way of doing this, it turns out, is with a multi-disc "real-time" strobe tuner--the Peterson Strobe Center 5000.

At $3500.00, though, this is a lot of scratch to put out to support someone's wingnut theory of what makes a guitar sound best...although a lot of people think this "makes sense", which is dangerously close to an engineer's way of doing things for me.

Rick flat tops are not tuned top-to-bottom plate, because the bracing of the back, and the glued-in curvature, negates the benefit. I do "tap" the fronts during thickness-sanding, in order to ensure that the top plate is quite lively while also within thickness and grain specs.

Occasionally, a top spruce plate will be right at thickness spec and exhibit nice grain, but will sound flat and dead when tapped; this means too-soft wood and is cause for rejection.

paologregorio · Post by **paologregorio** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 5:27 pm

Interesting bits of 411!