[steveyam]

Ok, I'm talking vintage FGs now, late 60s early/mid 70s Nippon Gakki era. The FGs have a tone all of there own. They're mostly laminated guitars (obviously), so the sound will always be different - not necessarily better or worse - than a solid one. Saying that, you can still detect the difference between the rosewood ones and the mahogany ones. I suggest you try out an FG-140 that has a laminated mahogany back and sides, it's a kinda D-18 copy in effect. My FG-140 came to me with a high action and a bellied top so I did work on the bridge/saddle to lower them, fitted a JLD bridge doctor, and refretted with large frets, plus bone saddle and nut. The action is now fine and the taughtness in the belly has gone allowing the top to make large excursions when asked to do so with a heavy, bassy chord. The bass from that guitar rattles your chest. These 140s are cheap as chips on Ebay. Need I say any more in that respect. My 300 and 360 models (which frankly are the same model with a few different fittings) sound much more like a rosewood guitar, and I love the sound of both of them as much as my Martin D-35. I really do. Actually, the sound is not that different to the D-35 in character, 'big' and mellow, and again, not particularly better or worse, just different.

I don't think it is so easy to tell the difference between laminated mahogany and laminated rosewood as it is with solid wood as obviously the laminated construction shifts the tonal pallet, diluting those woods' characteristic 'tone signatures'. But in the case of good laminate - and Yamaha seem to have nailed the process all those years ago - personally, in general, wrt to early FGs, I have not found the sound to be lacking compared to solid, just different, but not so easy to distinguish between mahogany and rosewood types for the reasons mentioned.