Maple Versus Rosewood

Let’s open a can of worms with the industry experts and ponder the differences between maple and rosewood fingerboards

Ask most guitar players who have been around the block a little what the differences are between a maple and rosewood fingerboard on their bolt-ons, and you’ll get a pretty vocal response: maple is ‘brighter’, rosewood is ‘warmer’ sounding; maple feels ‘slicker’, rosewood is more ‘tactile’. But is this true?

If everything else is equal, all we’re swapping when we consider which does what is a thin slice of wood (typically 4mm to 5mm thick). If we’re talking about the rounded veneer or laminate ’board that Fender introduced in the early 60s, that additional slice of rosewood is even thinner.

Rosewood and maple are very different hardwoods. And, of course, they come in different flavours (species). They might have been dried differently, one might be quarter-sawn (stiffer), the other slab-sawn. So already, when we make a comparison, we’re comparing a lot more than just the common name of two different coloured woods. That applies to any wood used on your electric or acoustic. And even if you were to take a Fender Strat with a maple neck and swap the neck to one with a rosewood fingerboard (keeping everything else the same), you still wouldn’t be on a level playing field because one maple neck might be slightly stiffer, denser than the other, and so on. The maple neck is, of course, the main structure – the fingerboard itself is approximately 10 to 15 per cent of that mass.

Can it really change anything that dramatically? Is there a definitive answer? What do the pros think? [DB]

1 This original 1954 Fender Strat with maple neck and ’board will have a sound of its own

2 As Taylor’s Andy Powers points out, we need to take a holistic view: “While I’ve tapped, flexed and listened a great deal, I’ve never once played a fretboard only! I’ve played the whole neck… what the whole neck composition sounds like”