Quote:
Originally Posted by Osage
Plenty of vintage Gibson archtops that were sold as maple are actually birch. Although always advertised as maple, they used the two woods more or less interchangeably for years. It's a very good wood in this application. Also, they're clearly tonally similar as Gibson got away with this for like 30 years.
|
I haven’t played enough Gibson archtop guitars made from birch to have a preference, but when it comes to those old oval soundhole A model and F-4 mandolins I
definitely prefer the ones made from birch. They have just a bit more sustain and low end response than the same models made from maple.
There was a guy here in Alaska named Dave Carlson who was making mandolins that he built from the spruce and birch trees that grew on his property. They sounded remarkably good. It didn’t take him long to saturate the market up here for custom-made birch mandolins, though, as you might imagine, and I haven’t seen or heard of him in quite a while now. Ten years at least.
I admire him for doing something creative and not just trying to build yet another Gibson F-5 copy, even though that’s what most mandolinplayers want.
whm