Different top woods; what's the difference?

[Wade Hampton]

Originally Posted by lowrider

Thanks Chas, I'm pretty sure I will be going with sitka over wenge. As I said to the builder, ''I want more''. I do have quite a while for finally decide though.

One advantage to going with the woods that your luthier chooses is that he's going to be especially motivated to make as fine a guitar as possible out of them. No custom guitar builder is going to deliberately make a mediocre guitar, of course, but it never hurts to have a bit of extra motivation like this working for you.


whm

[Alan Carruth]

Makers tend to develop a sound that is more or less characteristic of all of their work, so if you're looking for a particular sound the best way to get close is to find somebody who already makes that. It really reduces the 'gamble factor'. Tell then what you want, wind them up, and let them go.

Most of us want you to be happy, and will do what we can to see that you get what you want. Keep in mind that the language of tone is pretty nebulous, so there's always the chance that what you say is not what the maker hears. Once in a while it will happen that the final product is not what you thought you asked for. This is dissapointing for all concerned. The better the luthier, and the better the fit between their 'normal' guitar and what you want, the less likely this is. Find out in advance what the luthier's policy is in such cases; some will refund all or most of the price in these cases so long as it's not a highly customized instrument.

I should have mentioned that there is a third category, aside from spruce, and cedar/redwood: hardwood. Usually the hardwoods are denser foor a given stiffness, and tend to make a top that it less powerful with less treble. Usually....

[jessupe]

Originally Posted by Alan Carruth

Makers tend to develop a sound that is more or less characteristic of all of their work, so if you're looking for a particular sound the best way to get close is to find somebody who already makes that. It really reduces the 'gamble factor'. Tell then what you want, wind them up, and let them go.

Most of us want you to be happy, and will do what we can to see that you get what you want. Keep in mind that the language of tone is pretty nebulous, so there's always the chance that what you say is not what the maker hears. Once in a while it will happen that the final product is not what you thought you asked for. This is dissapointing for all concerned. The better the luthier, and the better the fit between their 'normal' guitar and what you want, the less likely this is. Find out in advance what the luthier's policy is in such cases; some will refund all or most of the price in these cases so long as it's not a highly customized instrument.

I should have mentioned that there is a third category, aside from spruce, and cedar/redwood: hardwood. Usually the hardwoods are denser foor a given stiffness, and tend to make a top that it less powerful with less treble. Usually....

Yes, and to make it more confusing there are very soft hardwoods such as Aspen and Willow that can be softer than some softwoods, even though they're hardwoods.

[Rbutton]

Originally Posted by Goodallboy

The main difference is the luthier who's making the guitar, not the wood.

And the hammer hits the nailhead...

[lowrider]

This morning I'm thinking that I want mahogany b/s. I sent Steve an email not to order anything until I get out and check some guitars. I'm thinking that mahogany will be more versatile and that I just love the look of the all hog and cedar guitar he built that's posted in the build forum. Is it normal for clients of custom builders to have indecision as the process gets started?

[varmonter]

i've owned a bunch and can usually hear the
difference between cedar and spruce.
and usually hear the difference between adi
and other spruce members. but i don't think
i could hear the difference between sitka and
engelmann and italian or lutz.

[JSDenvir]

Okay, first things first. Thank you lowrider for the vote of confidence.

It is a leap of faith to trust your hard-earned bucks to someone you don’t know, and especially to someone whose track record is, to be charitable, not terribly long.

Having said that, and to reiterate Alan’s points, perceptions of the sound produced by a particular species of top wood are tremendously arbitrary.

But in the interest of moving the argument forward, I refer you to “The Somogyi Incident”.

http://www.michaelchapdelaine.com/so...iIncident.html

Ervin Somogyi was commissioned to build 3 guitars that were as identical as possible. One with a Sitka top, one European, and one cedar.

Michael Chapdelaine, a really fine player, then recorded them in as identical a manner as possible.

Here’s Ervin, talking about the challenges involved.

http://www.esomogyi.com/blog.html#tonewoods

Now obviously, the project is in no way definitive. It’s _kinda_ scientific :-)

But it’s also illuminating.

See what you think.

Steve

[mercy]

They sound different, the Sitka is more bold, the Cedar is sweeter and the Euro is more or I should say less than the sitka.

[colins]

Originally Posted by lowrider

This morning I'm thinking that I want mahogany b/s. .... Is it normal for clients of custom builders to have indecision as the process gets started?

Totally normal, for me at least . Sometimes making a decision between two good alternatives can be really difficult.

I'm having a rosewood versus koa moment right now. I have played two guitars by the builder recently, one in each wood. I know I like his work as I have playing time on a number of his guitars, so the thing now is which wood/sound is the best fit to my playing and will complement the other guitars that I have.

[musicman1951]

I agree with all these learned posts. I would be hard pressed to select a specific spruce on sound alone.

But I've been listening to many Lowden videos and there definitely seems to be some consistency to some of the wood choices.

I recently took a trip to The Music Emporium and played a wonderful rosewood/spruce (as I remember) s50 that was just wonderful - but sounded very much like my Martin 000-42 (which made it kind of a silly choice for me). Then I played the same maker/model guitar in African Blackwood and sinker Redwood. For my ear and playing that was heaven. They most definitely both sounded like the same maker, but the difference in wood sounds was not at all difficult to discern. (I had two other guitar players with me before I paid $3,000 for the difference)

Which is to say, since you already have a luthier, your wood choices are not inconsequential. You also don't know what wonderful woods he has waiting in the shop. I would describe my playing style and sound preferences in as great a detail as I could muster and then trust the luthier to build me a guitar I could love.

[Alan Carruth]

jessupe wrote:
" ...and to make it more confusing there are very soft hardwoods such as Aspen and Willow that can be softer than some softwoods, even though they're hardwoods. "

I've been measuring the most relevant properties of the wood my students and I use for some years now. If you think about it, the most important structural quality of the top is that it be stiff enough along the grain to avoid folding up too soon. Acoustically, of course, you want to get that stiffness with as little weight as you need, so that the limited power of the strings can push it to produce sound. Thus one of the important measures for top wood is the relationship between Young's modulus along the grain, which predicts the stiffness at a given thickness, and the density. If you measure those two qualities for a bunch of different sorts of wood, and plot them out on a graph, what you'll see is interesting.

Looking just at the softwoods, what stands out is that the points on the chart tend to fall pretty close to the same line. As the wood becomes denser the Young's modulus rises. In the range of densities we see with softwoods the relationship is pretty much linear: it's a straight line. In my measurements about 60% of all the softwood samples fall within 10% plus or minus of that line.

This is pretty amazing when you think about it, but as you think more it's not hard to believe. Basically all softwoods have very similar structure on a microscopic scale, so it's actually not surprising that they tend to follow a similar rule. What this means is that it's pretty likely that two pieces of softwood that are similar in density will have the same stiffness along the grain at a given thickness. So, if you find a piece of Sitka spruce, and one of Engelmann spruce, that have the same density, you can probably make them the same thickness, and the stiffness will match, as will the weight.

It is true, as far as I can tell, that Engelmann spruce tends to be a bit less dense than Sitka, so if you do what the factories do and thickness every top of a given species as if it were 'average', the Engelmann tops will be thicker so that the 'average' one will be stiff enough. However, there is quite a wide range of variation in density within a species, so there will be a range of stiffness and weight in those tops. Some of the tops, of any species, will be stiffer and heavier than they need to be, and some will be too loose and lighter.

If you measure hardwoods in the same way, and plot out the results, you get a different chart. For one thing, there's more scatter in the results because hardwoods vary more in the way they're put together than softwoods. More importantly, though, it turns out that most hardwoods are denser than softwoods, but the Young's modulus along the grain is not all that much higher. What this means is that if you're going to use the hardwood top the same way you would a softwood, with the same sort of bracing and so on, you'll need to make the hardwood top about as thick as a softwood top, but since the hardwood is denser, the top will weigh more.

Of course, there are exceptions, and given the variability of hardwoods, they can be exceptional. Balsa is a hardwood that generally has lower density than most softwood samples you'll find. The Young's modulus also tends to be low, of course, but if you leave it thicker to get the stiffness up it can still make a lighter top than almost any softwood. That's because the stiffness of the top also depends on the thickness, but in a non-linear way: it goes roughly as the cube of the thickness. What that means is that making the top 25% thicker makes it about twice as stiff, but only adds 25% to the weight.

There are other considerations, of course. Willow can be low in density, but it also tends to 'cold creep' more than most woods. It moves much more over time under the string load, so even if a willow top was light enough and seemed stiff enough it would probably belly up too much. The only instrument I know of that normally had a willow soundboard was the old Celtic wire strung harp. Having made a few that didn't work out well, along with some that did, I would not want to chance a guitar with a willow soundboard.

As for Somogyi's experiment:

I recently completed a 'matched pair' of Red spruce/mahogany OMs. They were made as much alike as I could make them, using 'sister' cuts of wood and so on. They ended up sounding different. Not much different, mind you, but in blind tests nobody seemed to have any problem telling them apart. It may well be that some level of difference is unavoidable, no matter how carefully you try to control things, simply due to the fact that human hearing, for all it's deficiencies, is still pretty amazing. Based on this, and other 'pair' experiments I've done, I'm not putting too much stock in any such comparison unless I can find somebody who can actually make two that do sound identical off the bench. If you can't do that then the only way I can see to really tease out the differences between woods is to make a hundred or more of guitars that are 'size matched', the way Martin or Taylor does, using wood that has been measured for properties, and then running multivariate statistical analysis on a whole lot of blind listening and playing tests. Since it's not in the interest of Martin or Taylor to do this sort of thing, it's not gonna happen.

[lowrider]

Now you did it Steve, you've got me hooked on Somogi's blog. This is great!


For anyone who's still with us here; I'm back to wanting wenge with sitka, but maybe cedar, no sitka, cedar, sitka......................

[redir]

Somogyi would probably also tell you that if he built two identical guitars with the same tops and B/S all round they would sound different simply due to natural phenomenon. So you really need to take that experiment with a big grain of salt.

[Tommy_G]

I went shopping for an entry level parlor size guitar for my 12 year old niece. My budget was about 250 bucks.

I tried all the classic combinations and everything sounded unbalanced muted and small. Then I came upon an Art and Luthrie ... A CEDAR topped parlor. The thing was rich and warm woody with nice depth to the tone. I think the body was maple but may have been cherry. It was a very good sounding guitar, by an order of magnitude the best in its price range. Not a maybe or marginal effect. Thus I tend to give credence to the legitimacy of wood selection.

For a data point of direction, my sense is that the smaller bodied guitar you want the more one should tend toward warmer woods and the larger, possibly the more tendency toward brighter. The smaller is likely to give a tighter more focussed range of tones.

I am no expert in the subject but when you consider vibrational characteristics of smaller vs larger tops it makes sense thst smaller tops will shift a narrower range of frequencies up and larger ones a broader range of frequencies down, thus wood selection must compensate and be up to the task.

Also want to say that my sister has a Koa Ukelele that is sweet and beautiful but I have never heard a dreadnought with Koa that ever made me give a second thought to it, as much as that Koa Uke was addicting.

[justonwo]

My approach is to a play guitars with different top woods to get a general sense of how they differ and then to choose based on my experience. I think it’s hard to have a meaningful discussion with a builder without having some of your own experience. If the two of you share a common reference point - a guitar that you’ve both played, for example - this is ideal.

That being said, you should get Adirondack spruce. Ha ha. Or Carpathian.