Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken Carr
I always thought that natural acoustic "reverb" sound was due to a quality cedar top. Do those of you who have guitars with both cedar tops and spruce tops notice a tendency for one or the other tops to have more of that airy, beautiful reverbish sound? Or do you think it has more to do with the top thickness?
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I have 5 cedar topped instruments built by 3 different builders. One is my recently bought Eastman E2OM-CD guitar. Two are carved top mandolins (a hybrid F4 from a local builder and an F5 from another custom builder in MN). One is a carved top F4 octave mandolin by the MN builder, and one is a custom carved top 10 string Hardanger viola also from MN.
My other guitars are spruce topped (except for my resonator, which outrings them all). Sure my Altamira gypsy jazz guitar doesn't bloom like my Eastman OM, and neither does my Eastman arch top, but those guitars
aren't supposed to. Can I make any meaningful comparison between my Sitka topped HD-28, Ovation 12 string, ancient Applause with thick plastic finish and my cedar top OM attributable
only to the top wood? I doubt it.
I can't say if the sustain/bloom of my cedar topped instruments is due most to the top wood, the thickness, the bracing, the builder's technique.....the arch topped mando's and fiddle are way thicker than the flat topped Eastman, but that's a real stretch to try to make any correlation from that.
We all like to boil things down to a repeatable, consistent recipe, but I don't personally believe the real, natural world works like that most of the time.