Trees have always been a source of many important raw materials for human kind, and many of us take these materials for granted on a daily basis. Lets be honest, when was the last time you thought about where your toothpick came from? In the world of guitars however this sort of blissful ignorance is inadvisable. This is because the wood that is used to make your guitar will ultimately shape the tone, feel and timbre of the instrument. So why would your wood play such an important role in shaping your guitar sonically? It’s because the density, weight and grain composition of the wood play important roles in the way vibrations are conducted throughout the body of the guitar. Different wood types affect the vibrations differently and consequently, different types of wood have different “sounds”.

Body Woods

When it comes to building a guitar body, luthiers usually use dense woods for heavy styles of playing and less dense woods for ‘rock n roll’ and jazz. The thickness and body construction also go a long way in producing different types of tones. For instance, an Electric Solid Body Guitar will sound completely different to an acoustic arch top guitar. This is because a solid body guitar has more wood in it and does not rely on the vibrations of air particles to amplify its sound; the pickups turn the kinetic energy of the vibrating strings into electrical energy and then sound energy.

Guitar companies generally use the following woods for their bodies:

• Basswood (Tilia americana) – This is a relatively inexpensive wood used by many guitar companies such as Ibanez. The wood is light and soft, so highs are smoother and dampened. As a result of the smoother highs, lower frequencies do not resonate as well as the high frequencies, so lead guitarists usually prefer Basswood as it adds a bit of lightness and clarity to the higher notes while maintaining enough presence in the mids and lows to play the occasional bit of rhythm guitar.

• Alder (Alnus rubra) – Favored by companies like Fender and Yamaha, this wood is light in weight and has tight pores and complex ring patterns in the wood. This is very much like Basswood, but Alder has more room for lower frequencies and cuts the mid frequencies to make way for higher frequencies. Think of a basswood tone that is more complex and versatile.

• Swamp Ash – Used occasionally by guitar companies, this wood has a very dull and subdued sound due to its high density. However no two Swamp Ash bodies sound the same due to the fact that its sound depends on which part of the tree you acquire the piece of wood from. The further up the tree, the deader it will sound since it is more uniformly dense. Jazz musicians love the subdued and dampened sound of Swamp Ash.

• Mahogany (Khavya ivorensis) – Used by companies like B.C.Rich and Gibson, this is a wood that is best suited to metal musicians or technical-metal axe men. This heavy wood is very dense with complex wood grain patterns. All this culminates in a wood with a lot of harmonic response, high and low accentuation and a dampened mid frequency. Extremely useful for those in the extreme-metal scene.

• Bubinga (Guibourtia demeusei) – Extremely rare to find in a guitar body, but it is so dense that It would sustain for ages! It is also very expensive to use Bubinga in a guitar body and as a result it is usually offered as a neck wood or fret board wood.

• Maple (Acer saccharum-Hard Maple) – Usually used for neck construction or fret board wood, maple has many forms and types. The most commonly used is eastern Hard Rock maple and Western Soft ‘Big Leaf’ Maple. The grain patterns are very close together and the wood is light so the sound obtained from this type of wood is extremely bright.

There are many more types of wood used in bodies, such as Poplar and Redwood, however those types of wood are usually offered only by custom guitar manufacturers as they are expensive and exotic.

Neck Woods

The crafting of the neck is one of the most important aspects of building a guitar. The neck will usually make or break the instrument as it contributes to the look, feel, and tone of the instrument; as well as how comfortable the guitar is in your hands. A thin, flat neck will allow a guitarist to move up and down the fret board quickly with ease, while a more curved and fatter neck is better suited to playing basic chords and finger picked styles of music. Ibanez guitars come with the thinnest and flattest necks in the guitar scene, creating such beauties as the ‘Wizard II’ neck and the luxurious ‘Super Wizard Prestige’ neck. Companies like Fender opt to have slightly larger “D” shaped necks which some old school guitarists prefer.

The neck of an electric guitar is usually made of hard woods to prevent warping and to make it more stable. Maple and Mahogany are the 2 most common woods.

Maple necks produce a bright sound with long sustain. Mahogany necks are heavy and hard with very warm tone.

The 3 basic neck shapes are ‘C’, which is flatter and thinner, ‘D’ which is larger and rounder than a ‘C’ neck and ‘V’ which is commonly found on many acoustic guitars.

After a luthier builds a neck, it is time to lay in the fret board, also known as the finger board. This is where the metal frets will be inserted so as to allow a guitarist to produce notes on the instrument. There are two important factors to consider when it comes to making fret boards – the radius and the type of wood.

The radius is the curve of the fret board across its width to accommodate the natural shape of your fingers. A smaller radius is better for playing chords and a larger radius is better for shredders.

Next is the type of wood, and as we saw in the body wood section, each wood has a sound of its own. Rosewood has a smooth feel and warm tone but has clarity on higher frequencies. Ebony is a dark brown wood which is extremely smooth and has a “fast” feeling. It is very bright with oodles of sustain. Maple has an extremely bright tone with a good amount of sustain, but a Maple fret board must be finished with a gloss or oil so as to protect the wood. This finishing affects the feel of the wood.

A rather interesting and luxurious method of making necks nowadays, is to make “multi-laminates”. This means that instead of using one piece of wood to make a neck, 3 or 5 pieces of wood are used. On “3 piece necks”, 3 pieces of neck wood are glued together then put under high pressure to make them bond. Then the newly formed plank of wood is used to create a guitar’s neck. From the tip of the headstock to the butt of the necks heel, there are 3 pieces of wood . This greatly improves stability and the guitars resistance to temperature changes. The “5 piece” neck consists of 2 different types of wood being spliced together. On the Ibanez Prestige line, the ‘RG1570′ comes with a 5 piece Maple and Walnut neck. This means that from the tip of the head stock to the butt of the heel, there are 5 pieces of wood. This gives the guitarist the best of both worlds, the bright clear tone of maple; and the snap, attack and sustain of walnut.

Not many guitarists realize just how important the wood in their guitar is, but I hope that this article has made you aware to just how important it is. See you until next time and please, don’t hesitate to write in with your questions at guitarguru@backdoormag.com.