Re: what sounds righteous in maple?
Take in consideration that in the previous post "twinreverb" plays through fenders and most likely does not do alot of shred or metal????? Maybe that is what he plays I dont know. Point is, the Fenders are a whole different animal if you are playing that kind of stuff.
I play all kinds of stuff, depending on my mood. You can't claim that someone doesn't understand metal just because they don't play it all the time. Besides, you did say "I don't know", which is true: most people don't know what I play, mainly because they haven't taken the time to ask, which I find very ironic. They get mad when others stereotype them based on their gear, yet they stereotype me for my gear.
I find it ironic that people said over and over "play what sounds good to your ears" because they were sick of the stereotypes, yet now these same people stereotype me as not being a metal player because I play a Fender amp.
But since you brought it up, I've said repeatedly that I love versatility. I play my mood. While at church I don't play metal obviously, I play metal at home every once in a while. I play basically everything from jazz to classical guitar to blues to country (old-school, not new-school) to hard rock to metal. My CD collection is everything from John Denver to Vivaldi to Cake to Zeppelin to Metallica, including Disturbed and Deftones.
How can you tell ash apart? You really cant. Look through a good website for high end lumber. You will see nothing listed as "swamp ash" or "northern ash". You will just find "ash". When it comes to music, woods and such have so much BS to it. Limba, its easy to find and aint that expensive. Koa, same way. Honduran Mahogany, you can find it all day long for not that bad of prices either.
Just a FYI.
Wikipedia - Ash Tree
Fraxinus americana: White (hard) Ash
Fraxinus nigra or pennsylvanica: Black or Green (swamp) Ash
People tell them apart by species. Color seems to go with it.
As for woods having BS to it, I cannot agree. I had the same pickups (alnico ii pro staggered neck and middle) in a Lite Ash Stratocaster and an Ibanez RX240. The ones in the Lite Ash sounded much more musical, especially in having more harmonics in the highs and lows. When I owned both, the Lite Ash also responded much better to dynamics, had better harmonics, and dampened less of the low mids and high mids. Swamp Ash sounded very musical. The soft maple of the Ibanez, while it had highs and was crisp in the high range, absolutely blew chunks in the low range and low mids. Now, like I said before: cheap soft maple guitar, so I can't be sure if it was the quality or the wood itself.
We had discussed on the forum not too long ago that it's not just the wood species (although that has a great deal of bearing on it) either: it's where and how it grew. They just discovered that the real secret behind Stradivari's violins, for example, was a very tight, very uniform grain pattern due to the "Little Ice Age". Much less, anyone who's picked up one guitar that's mahogany and another that's more of a "select" mahogany can tell the difference: and price usually follows. So everyone seems to know now that it's not just the species: it's other factors. How did we forget this so quickly?
Bottom line, I think you need a "time out".
For what it's worth, however, you can always EQ the brightness out of the guitar if you're absolutely determined to put a JB in a maple body guitar, for what it's worth....
