baked, torrified,.roasted...

Re: baked, torrified,.roasted...

Havent tried the torrified or roasted but I picked up an SG standard from 2011 that baked maple and I like it. Plays and feels greats it doesnt sound a world apart from my rosewood SG's. I think it compliments the guitar well.
 
Re: baked, torrified,.roasted...

You thinking of the boards or necks constructed of the stuff?

I've got a neck on a guitar I bought brand new - Was shipped from the manufacturer to the dealer then to me, so no time to sit around at the dealer. Seemed to be some settle in time where I needed to tweak the truss rod, but lately (since last string change in December) not needing to touch a thing. Its coming up on its 1st anniversary.
 
Re: baked, torrified,.roasted...

Sorry, I mean the boards only....just wondering if they care like standard maple, or like rosewood/ebony etc.
 
Re: baked, torrified,.roasted...

I clean mine like i do rosewood not like a finished strat board... sorry i missed that earlier thats what I get by posting from the thread title sorry.
 
Re: baked, torrified,.roasted...

I like them quite a bit. They feel good and add some focus to the tone, pretty much similar to ebony. You can oil them and they do absorb it and get darker. From a couple feet away you wouldn't know it wasn't rosewood. I've had a couple Gibsons with it, currently have a satin 61RRI SG with it and its pretty cool. Problem for most people, myself included, is getting over the mental barrier that its supposed to be rosewood (on Gibsons) for no other reason than tradition and expectation.
 
Re: baked, torrified,.roasted...

How do you care for it? No oils like a standard maple?

I always remember being told that maple needed a hard finish.... So every time I used it I'd at least use Danish oil which has the built in varnish. I've never used a baked board though so I don't know how much it varies from regular hard maple.
 
Re: baked, torrified,.roasted...

Maple boards usually have a finish over them, which is why you don't oil them. Rosewood boards usually do not, so you can oil them. In the case of baked maple, there's no finish, so they take oil like any other raw wood. Maple itself is a very hard wood and baked maple is like superwood strong
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Re: baked, torrified,.roasted...

How dark is the baked maple in person? It isn't that nasty dried out golden brown look you see in the catalogs is it?
 
Re: baked, torrified,.roasted...

Some is, some is darker. Different cuts of wood and different degrees of hydration to begin with. I've seen rosewood look like that as well. The bigger difference here isn't as much the color as the grain. I've had both lighter and darker maple and they both got darker with oiling. You'll never get an ebony look or even a real dark rosewood. But you can get fairly dark, and acceptable.

Here's a close up of my current 2012 SG 61RI satin with maple, kinda looks like rosewood doesn't it? Like I said, the bigger issue is the mental hurdle of - hey these aren't supposed to have this.





Her's another shot of the maple on a 2011 SG Junior I had, it was one of the first ones to get it.

 
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Re: baked, torrified,.roasted...

That looks like very convincing rosewood.

I could easily get past the "hey this isn't supposed to be here". I'm not very traditionalist when it comes to the woods used (for example I like SGs with a maple neck).
 
Re: baked, torrified,.roasted...

I have a roasted neck on my Suhr T (See it in the Super T voting.) It's extremely stable, I've got the action set fairly low for me and I haven't touched it all summer and we've played a lot of outdoor gigs in cold/wet and hot/wet conditions. I opted for plain, nearly featureless, piece of maple for the fretboard for purely cosmetic reasons. The feel and sound is just good maple, but that may have as much to do with John Suhr's wood selection as anything else.

JT
 
Re: baked, torrified,.roasted...

Thanks folks. Good to know about being able to use an oil.

The two ES Studio models I saw last week had very nice darker boards like TC's. . Some of them I have seen have been much lighter (and fuggly, IMO)
 
Re: baked, torrified,.roasted...

I don't think that this fried maple needs a finish. It definitely doesn't look so, it looks naked. If that's the case, I wonder if you could stain it black. If it takes the stain, I guess it would look and feel much closer to ebony than ebonized rosewood.

On the other hand, "standard" or more precisely "raw, uncooked" maple, will discolour and eventually rot if unprotected. That's why it ought to be finished in one way or another.

I'd say forget the mental barriers... Because african mahogany is not honduran - they aren't even closely related. Because indian rosewood is not brazilian, because Nashville stud mount is not an ABR-1, because acrylic isn't mother of pearl. So, what's orthodox about today's Gibsons anyway? Some of the materials used in the yesteryears are just not available anymore in sufficient quantity for a large volume production. "Crying won't help ya, praying won't do ya no good"... Vintage-correctness costs a fortune today, whether it's an authentic old instrument, or a new reproduction from the custom shop or boutique builders. I'd just suck it up, and trust my ears. If it sounds good to you, feels good to you, looks good to you - it is good for you. There are many ways to building an amazing instrument.
 
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