Adirondack Spruce versus Red Spruce

[Mking]

I have a Martin guitar and three Gibson guitars all with a Sitka spruce top. There a lot of talk about Adirondack Red Spruce and how it is the gold standard for tops (seems to be the rage). I just purchased a 2015 Gibson L-00 Red Spruce Limited guitar. I've seen a few sites on line that state, Adirondack is Red Spruce, but not all Red Spruce is Adirondack. So now I am wondering if this L-00 "Red Spruce" guitar has an "Adirondack" top. Thoughts from the group?

I think a phone call to Gibson in Montana is warranted.

[printer2]

Adirondack Mountains has red spruce growing there. Martin guitars used red spruce from the Adirondack Mountains. Red spruce grows in New Brunswick. Does the guitar know where its roots are from?

[Mking]

Originally Posted by printer2

Adirondack Mountains has red spruce growing there. Martin guitars used red spruce from the Adirondack Mountains. Red spruce grows in New Brunswick. Does the guitar know where its roots are from?

Fred, Good point. Was the pun intended? 😂

[redir]

Six of one and half a dozen of the other. I suppose if you were a real stickler you could make a claim that if your Red Spruce top came from a Red Spruce tree in the Adirondack mountains of New York then it would be real Adirondack, Red Spruce.

BTW I'm building a tenor guitar with red, er umm, Adirondack, er umm, oh heck I don't know... A spruce top!

[tahoeguitar]

I believe that most of the Adirondack Mountains are now a state or national park...? So obtaining real "Adi" red spruce is fairly difficult as park rangers tend to frown on cutting down their trees.

Red spruce grows all over the place and is readily available. In another 100 years many of those trees will be pretty big and it will be even more so. There is such variability in pieces of wood within one species that real adi is no guarantee of a good piece of wood, and there is plenty of really great wood available in plain old red spruce. Much of it tends to be cosmetically "challenged" wide grain streaks and so on.

[Mking]

I get the point. Thank you all for your responses. I appreciate it.
Michael

[B. Howard]

Two different names for the same species of wood "Picea rubens"

[tahoeguitar]

My usual program is to shoot off my mouth on the internet, then think about what I said, then go do some research. Here's a link to wikipedia about the Adirondack park. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adirondack_Park

The article says there is an active but tightly regulated timber industry within the park. There are apparently some areas of untouched old growth within the wilderness zones (never been logged, hopefully never will be).

The reason for the creation of the park in the first place was that people noticed the natural regions in upstate New York were being decimated by logging and mining activities in the 1880's.

So all that being said I'm pretty sure that "Adi" red spruce is not widely available for commercial production of guitars, and is probably nearly as rare as Brazilian Rosewood.

[redir]

It's best just to call it Red Spruce. I'm sure there are other species of spruce in the Adirondack mountains, are those considered 'Adi' too?

I'm building a tenor guitar with Red Spruce now, lovely stuff.

[John Arnold]

Red spruce is the name of the tree, as are Engelmann spruce and Sitka spruce. 'Adirondack spruce' is a common name for the wood. White spruce and black spruce also grow in the Adirondack, but neither one is commonly cut for guitars.
Martin has bought red spruce from wherever it grows, even back in the 1930's. That includes TN, NC, VA, WV, NY, VT, NH, and ME.
Red spruce does not grow 'all over the place'. It only grows in a narrow climate range in the eastern US and southeast Canada where the summer high temperatures are generally less than 75 degrees. That means that the further south you go, the higher the elevation that it grows. IMHO, there is no qualitative difference between red spruce grown at sea level in Maine, or at 5,000 feet in North Carolina.
I have cut red spruce in both states, as well as VA, TN, and WV. Latitude and elevation mainly affect where it grows, but by far, the most important factor that affects the growth rate is availability of light and water.

All this is just to point out that if you think your red spruce must come from the Adirondacks because it is 'best' or 'what Martin used in the Golden Era', you are missing the boat on both counts.

[Alan Carruth]

I read somewhere once that Martin used to use different names for their Red spruce depending on where it came from. Thus they used 'Adirondack' red spruce from up state NY, and 'Appalachian' red spruce from the mountains further south. They may not have gotten enough from further north to warrant a name: a lot of the red spruce from NH, VT, and ME ended up as framing in triple-decker houses in the cites of the northeast. I've gotten some great wood from old buildings.