Re: Walnut as a solid body tonewood...
One of my favorite guitars I ever made was a Walnut strat with a Walnut/Ebony neck, and a Bartolini System 111B. I started making it for myself, and then I recieved an offer I
could not refuse. Later the guy swapped it at a GC and it was talked about for years to come by those salesmen too. Man what a great guitar that was.
There's a word that gets tossed around here that drives me crazy because it's so ambiguous, and sometimes I think it's just one of those "ego words". The word is "complex". Walnut has a very complex midrange, but I'm going to break it down for you even further. I wrote a detailed woods description for another site that's been reproduced in a couple other areas. Here is one place that still has it up:
http://www.dinosaurrockguitar.com/tonewoods.shtml
What Walnut does is to comb away (notch) some midrange frequencies while still having a good, highly present midrange. A huge oversimplification of "combing" would be to go to a 31 band EQ and raise every other fader all the way up, and lower every other fader all the way down. A notch filter takes designated frequencies and eliminates them without affecting the surrounding frequencies, like some feedback filters. So that's how I describe Walnut. It is a great guitar wood. It has a sharper attack than Mahogany because it's harder. It resonates a little like Ash so it's sweet sounding in the midrange, assuming you get a lighter piece. Since it's not as hard or dense as Maple, it still represents the low frequencies well, too. I love it with Ebony and Pao Ferro boards.
It also does great with trems, hard tails, string through, floyds, etc. It really combines with other neck woods well, and various bridges. In that article, I say that it is more sensitive to pickup choices, in that it will impart it's tonal footprint over whatever pickups you put in there. That doesn't mean all the pickups will sound the same. On the contrary. You'll get your wide variance among pickups. But some pickups that usually sound great in most guitars can sound lousy in the Walnut if there's a conflict with some of the main resonant frequencies of the wood. Like my experience is that a JB in a Walnut strat would be lousy. It would sound cheap. But any of the Customs would be great. A lower output vintage tele bridge pickup would probably be less than magical too, while a robust, "power tele" bridge pickup would be fantastic.
It's probably not used in guitars very often because it's generally heavier. So a factory isn't going to go through several pieces to find a lighter one with open pores. But a luthier sure could. That's probably why you tend to see it more often in boutique hand made guitar lines. But if I were a factory, I would use it abundantly as backs in hollowed out guitars like thinlines, and those Schecter-style hollow super strats. It's a great hollow back wood, and then it doesn't matter if you have a heavy piece. Sorry for the rant, but I am a champion of Walnut, and I further it's cause whenever I can. :bigok: :fest7:
They probably needed Brazillian Rosewood fretboards. :laugh2: 
