TONEWOODS, PART ONE: WOODN’T IT BE NICE?

The guitar is a magical instrument, but its construction is almost completely practical. There’s nothing mysterious about the components. The mystery is how these components, in the hands of a master luthier, can come together to create something special. It starts with ”tonewood” – that category of timber that helps make the magic happen. Actually, many of the timbers used in guitar building are used in other fields of manufacture (such as furniture) and are not regarded with the same awe. We call them tonewoods not just because most are hardwoods, because a “hardwood” is not necessarily hard (balsa is a hardwood). So, what do these tonewoods do for us?

Tonewoods – timber that affects the sound in a specific way – can be analysed and assessed in terms of their sonic quality, allowing the player to achieve an expected tone or even a personalised sound. It’s actually easy to hear the difference if you tune in to the various types of timbers, and not get distracted by other factors like colour, shape, pickups, celebrity, snobbery, and so forth. Let’s look at electric guitars…

Gibson and Fender took quite different pathways in achieving the same thing: a practical electric guitar. Gibson’s approach was to produce an artisan-level instrument, while Fender’s was more of a mass-produced item made on a conveyor belt. For the Les Paul, Gibson used a mahogany neck on a mahogany body with a maple top.

While mahogany is generally regarded as a heavy timber, Honduran mahogany (Swietenia Macrophylla) was Gibson’s tonewood of choice in the 1950s, and is lighter than the mahogany available today. It has a warm, dark tone, and was a good vehicle for the woody clunk of their P-90 pickup. A few years later, Gibson outfitted the Les Paul with their new humbucking pickup, and a classic tone was born. The darker humbucking sound mated perfectly with the warmth of the mahogany body and neck, with the maple top adding a touch of brightness.

Fender’s approach was much more practical: they used what they could get easily and cheaply. Their early instruments (in the early ‘50s) were built with ash bodies and maple necks. Swamp ash (Fraxinus Caroliniana) is a lightweight timber and has a much brighter tone than mahogany, so the top end is clear and present, the mids subdued, and the bass tight and defined. Maple (Acer Saccharum) is a very bright timber, providing loads of treble clarity (that’s why it’s used to make violins) and subdued lows. The combination is a bright, spanky tone.

Fender then used single coil pickups, which have a treble and upper mid focus, and this produced the classic tones of the Telecaster and Stratocaster – only sonically different, in their simplest forms, because of the different pickups applied to each model. Fender soon started to use alder (Alnus Rubra) as an alternative to ash. Alder has a very even tone spectrum – the highs remain bright and snappy, and mids have good breadth. Both ash and alder became the standard for a Fender-style guitar.

Some guitar builders are using Spanish cedar (Cedrela Odorata) in place of mahogany for their guitar bodies. This timber is neither Spanish nor cedar – it comes from Central and South America, and is more like

Honduran mahogany. It’s lightweight like the Honduran mahogany of the 1950s, and has similar tonal properties. Boutique luthiers tend to use this timber, as well as some larger manufacturers such as Godin on their Summit models.

Claro walnut (Juglans Hindsii) and black walnut (Juglans Nigra) have often been used by major builders (Fender’s 1982 Walnut Strat and Gibson’s 1978 The Paul) and boutique custom luthiers (Ed Roman and Alembic). It’s a little lighter that mahogany or maple, and is warmer than maple but still has plenty of bright sustain. Silver maple (Acer Saccharinum) and bigleaf maple

(Acer Macrophyllum) are also being used for guitar bodies. These species are about 20 percent lighter than rock maple (Acer Saccharum) and have a bright, resonant impact on the tone. Gibson use laminated maple for the ES-335, to add brightness to the warmth of the humbucker/semihollow combination.

I have a couple of custom electrics that required some planning. I knew

I wanted to use EMG pickups because of their low impedance design and their strong focus on mids, but I’d loaded them into ash- and alderbodied guitars and felt that the treble disappeared. Knowing that maple adds a lot of top-end, I had the renowned luthier Gerard Gilet cut a Strat body out of a slab of rock maple – this added the treble presence that balances out the dark pickups. It’s even simpler today, when there is so much information to access and so many options available from body and neck makers. It just needs a bit of thought.

Of course, an even simpler way is to check out the specs on the guitar you’ve been salivating over, and evaluate what it might do for you. As above, you need to consider the body and neck timbers, and then think about how the pickups might interact with them. Most builders, large and small, will readily offer this info. The more guitars you try out, the more informed you’ll be – so, go to your local music store and talk to the boss. They’ll usually know their stuff.