At Moore Music, we have worked with several of our manufacturers in hand selecting tone wood for some really amazing custom acoustic guitar builds. Recently I spoke with Jay Myer, our Martin Guitar rep, about the different spruce species commonly used for acoustic guitar tops, and got some answers and opinions on this topic.
I'm going to start off with Adirondack Spruce. This species is really considered the "holy grail" of spruce tops, and has been used for many decades. Adirondack spruce was very widely used by most American manufacturers prior to World War II. During that time, they did quite a bit a harvesting, and pretty much wiped out a lot of the old growth, causing it to be hard to come by and very expensive if you did find it. Over the last 50+ years it is had quite a serge again, but is still very expensive due to the availability of high-quality Adirondack, and what I mean by high-quality is nice grain patterns, a really nice even color and high density. Adirondack is very dense and stiff, making it very loud, and is probably the loudest volume of any species for top woods.
Next, we move on to Sitka spruce. This species is "the standard" and most commonly used spruce for guitar tops. The reason for this is that it is a very mellow and even sounding tone wood across the board. Due to its availability and typically very sizable tree, it makes it very easy for harvesters to get quite a bit of tops from a single log. Sitka is not as stiff as Adirondack, but it is still pretty stiff and resembles the lightweight tones of other soft tone woods. It has a very nice volume, well-rounded tone, and looks very nice and symmetrical as far as the grain patterns are typically concerned.
Carpathian and Engelmann spruce are probably the softest of the spruces. They are both very intricate and in-depth tonally, and make great choices for a singer-songwriter instrument.
Swiss spruce is another one we’ve seen here at Moore Music, and is very close tonally to Adirondack spruce. While Alpine spruce closely resembles Sitka spruce, right down the middle tonally.
Something else we see often in our custom shop guitars is "bear claw". Bear claw is a figure that can occur in all of the spruce species. It is a figure that is similar to flame or curly maple, but the striations and rippling patterns are pretty random on the tops. Bear claw is typically found in older trees and make for incredible tone woods in tops because of their stiffness and the volume they produce.
Please feel free to email, call or stop by Moore Music's show room and take a look and listen to all of these tone woods.
Thanks for reading and as always, rock on!
Dennis
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