In my previous blog I talked about different spruce species as a tone wood, specifically for acoustic guitar tops. Today I'm going to talk about some other fantastic tone woods, some that are not as common as the spruce family.
Lets begin with Cedar. Cedar is a very traditional guitar top wood that has been used since World War II. It has a softer, smoother tone or EQ than most of the Spruce family, and is usually a bit less powerful in volume than Spruce. However, Cedar has plenty of bottom or low-end. Cedar is often used for classical guitars because of it's rounded tone and it's somewhat soft sound, but when paired with the right back and sides can be very dynamic when fingerpicking. Many builders like to use this for smaller body guitars.
Next is redwood, which is also really good for nylon or classical guitars, especially when paired with a very dense back and sides like rosewood. Redwood is darker in color than Cedar, but has similar characteristics, and many guitarists like it's focused and balanced tone, even though it has a bit less bass response and a lower volume.
Koa is a tone wood that we see used a lot for back and sides with many manufacturers, but has been used for tops since the 20's. Martin guitars used quite a bit of Koa then while building ukuleles, and had such an abundance of the material that they built some smaller bodied guitars like the 000-28K. In the past couple of years they reissued that model through their "Authentic" series and they sounded great. You can see a couple of ours here on the site. Koa has a very nice mid range tone, which makes it great for slide playing and rhythm guitar. It is also a great guitar to mic up live or in the studio.
Recently we went back to the Martin guitar factory and hand selected some woods for several custom shop builds. While we were there we were shown some highly figured Tasmanian Blackwood and we were completely blown away at its a look and its tone while we tapped it. The highly figured Tasmanian Blackwood often gets confused to be koa because it resembles its figure and color so much, but has a very rich mahogany sound and tone. This was not a tone wood that Martin (or many other builders) had ever typically used as a top, but when we had suggested it (because of its similarity to mahogany as a tone wood), they thought that it was going to be an amazing guitar to look at and to listen to. These guitars have started to roll in to Moore Music, and we were spot on! These guitars look amazing and sound even better.
We have many examples of all these tone woods and many of the Spruce wood's that I spoke of in the previous blog available here on the site or in our shop. Please don't hesitate to shoot me a message with any questions regarding any of these woods or others you may want to build with.
Thanks for reading and rock on!
Dennis
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