Best Tonewoods For Acoustic Guitars

Special thanks to builder john mayes for the information and images below.

Best tonewoods for acoustic guitars.

Oregon wild wood is the luthiers source for fine tone wood from the pacific nw. And yet all the same benefits. Because it was logged so heavily the use of it was slowed drastically. Guitars intended for fingerpicking are best when the tone is well balanced e g.

The tonewoods we offer is sourced in ecologically friendly ways including forest and urban salvage commercial fruit and nut grove salvage recycling and re purposing. As a guitar top dense mahogany has a solid punchy tone with low overtone content and good high end response. Adirondack spruce picea rubens this was the choice wood used on pre war martins. Woody deep rich lacking metallic sounding overtones.

It has great mid range like mahogany but also expands well into the high end tones and low end tones producing deep bass notes and bright treble notes. What makes an acoustic guitar sound the way it does. Affordable and abundant basswood is particularly associated with mid level or budget guitars. Western red cedar for example is often used by guitarists who play with the fingers.

As a result less dense timbers generally produce a more balanced sound but sacrifice some responsiveness as a result. Very different to maple rosewood has a high response rate. Airy spacious not overly compressed. Koa is native to hawaii and is used commonly on ukuleles but less so on guitars.

Articulate clear. Falling between rosewood and mahogany is koa a tonewood martin first used on guitars in 1917 as a craze for all things hawaiian swept across america. But basswood is a good tonewood by any standards and it has been used by many high end makers with excellent results. Rosewood is a very popular wood for guitars and has been used a lot traditionally too.

Punchy powerful but controlled. Mahogany back and sides often emphasize bass and treble with more overtone coloration and a woody sound as opposed to the more metallic sound of say rosewood back and sides. It is a very light and fairly soft wood and it s light in color too with minimal grain. Also known as red spruce this wood offers a wonderful tone.

The bass and or treble frequencies are not overly dominant. There s nothing else like it the first and only the tonewoodamp is a must have device for any acoustic guitar player. The tonewoodamp is a revolutionary device that uses an acoustic guitar s own body and soundhole to create a range of enhancement effects. It s prized for its rich golden coloring curly figuring and agreeable sound.