Way To Know If Wood Is Good Quality?

[Mincer]

Re: Way To Know If Wood Is Good Quality?

I'm a firm believer in lighter weight equalling better tone, at least for solid electric guitars.

I gotta say I agree. Lighter guitars always sounded more complex to me. Just richer.

As far as figure, I am not that big a fan of it, really. It doesn't do anything for me one what or the other.

I do like the idea of using non-traditional woods. Or no wood at all. Whatever gets the job done with the least impact on the environment.

 

[Thurisarz]

Re: Way To Know If Wood Is Good Quality?

Some of them would take wood from trees that live in extreme weather conditions, up on mountains close to the tree line where they are subjected to high winds and cold temperatures. This supposedly toughened the wood.

I wanna see Fender climb mountains just to get perfect wood! :laugh2:

 

[Zerberus]

Re: Way To Know If Wood Is Good Quality?

Grading wood: Unbelievably in-depth topic, more than you can probably imagine (was 6 months out of my 3 year apprenticeship), therefore I will not go into it here, as it ywould for the most part implode the forum.

But...

tapping on wood to determine quality is something that goes back hundreds of years, Stradavarius and company would select the wood for their violins like that. ....d.

There is unfortunately very little truth to this (some, yes). Tap-toning, aka. Pitch matching, is not in any real way a method to see the quality of the wood, but a way to HEAR it´s resonant frequency. Why, you may ask? Because if you have a neck and a body with a similar resonant frequency, worse the exact same, you get "wolf tones", notes that seem unproportionally louder than all of the others. Proper tap tuning is a way to help avoid this by matching the woods by res. Freq. No more, no less

How the woods are "tuned" to each other is a matter of luthier´s preference. Fourths and thirds are most common, but some use fifths. I personally match the neck and body in fourths and if feasible use a fretboard eiuther a third above or a third below. Otherwise I try to pick a fretboard a fifth above or below

Unfortunately, it has become quite rare in production axes, other than John Suhr I couldn´t name one off the top of my head that I know for a fact still does it.

Hope it helps clear things up a bit :friday: