Not sure if this is allowed to be published or not but JB Priestley had this to say about wood... Essay on Wood by J B Priestley, from “Delight” published 1949 I am not as clumsy with my hands as many bookish men I know, but I have never had any training or practice in handicrafts, and apart from sawing and splitting logs and knocking a nail in here and there, I have had little to do with wood. Yet I never go where wood is being worked, never stand near a joiner, carpenter or cabinet-maker, without feeling at least a tickle of delight. To handle newly-planed wood, even to look at it or smell it, is to receive a message that life can still be in good heart. The very shavings are a crisp confirmation. There is a mystery here. Atavism will not explain it. Our remoter ancestors, winding back into the mists, were chippers of stone. I have seen their flints, inside and outside museums, and have never yet felt a quiver of sympathy. Woodwork as we know it, needing sharp metal tools, must be one of man's newer activities. Is this perhaps the secret? Is this stuff still so excitingly new? But light alloys and plastics are newer still, the discoveries of today, and yet no message comes from them. Is it because wood, no matter how chopped and trimmed and planed, somehow remains alive? I put my hand on the desk on which I am writing now, and it is almost as if my palm fell on the shoulder of a brother. Into this patient material have passed rain and sun, steely mornings in March, the glow of October: it has lived as some secret part of us still lives. And notice how few men who work with wood seem unhappy, defeated. When we write a book about a Carpenter, we call it the New Testament.
Crimson Custom Guitars totally disagree did not go on longer than necessary. I could have easily listened to another 30 or so minutes on this topic 😂😂😂.
Can buy old growth mahogany by the ton at furniture auctions. :) The Victorians loved that stuff in their sideboards and tables. My problem is every time I do buy a solid half ton of gorgeous table for next to nothing .. I can't bring myself to cut it up.
thats a tough one ; i would say if the table is in good enough condition to carry on as a table let it be .once all the old furniture is destroyed its gone forever .thats why i hate shabby sheik idiots destroying vintage furniture .Ive spent more time than i should restoring old furniture ...hm ...again thats a tough one ..were would that wood be most valued .... good luck ... its probably a good problem to have
Hi Ben, going off on a tangent (although you did make a slight reference to having some old wood.) storing wood! How do you store your wood stock, and do you maintain any sort of spacific temperature- humidity control? Do you keep pre-cut bodies and necks 'vertical/up standing, hanging, on their sides? Etc.. And.. Do you have any kind of 'dry oven' 'de-humidifier' or whatnot to 'age' your stock? Cheers
Also, we don't necessarily want the guitar as resonant as possible. You could press a guitar from thin sheet of stainless steel and get an extremely resonant instrument, but I wouldn't like how it sounds. Wood is moderately resonant, and what's even more important, it's selectively resonant. It has a tone of it's own.
Great video. I think "other" materials will come yo greater prominence as prices rise due to scarcity of supply (e.g. Brazilian tosewood, anyone?!) AND mass production techniques based on 3d printing improve. The Martin composites are an interesting step forward (sideways at least). Steinberger, Status, Bond... are bassists more adventurous than guitarists? The use of exotics like cocobolo, tulip, pau ferro and wenge (Alembic, Warwick, Wal) seems to suggest that even when it comes to organic materials bassists are happier to look beyond alder, ash, maple and rosewood.
I have a Switch Vibracell guitar. 1 piece injection moulded plastic with a wood fret board. Sounds like mahogany, very light and easy to play. Cheap as hell too.
Go to 3:22 where the question is read, and the answer is one word:) Won't spoil it, tons of good info from a guitar builder on this one...interesting watch, thanks for posting it.
Yo Yo! See thru bass...totally cool & marketable! Version 2 prototype could try: 1) thicker neck 2) two truss rods 3) truss rods extend past neck heel 4) LED implants (various locations) with various colors/modes... I love brainstorming! I am a luthier wannabe...
My first acoustic was an Applause in the mid-'70s. Fiberglass bowl back, a plastic top, an aluminum fretboard with a spine on the back onto which was an molded plastic neck and headstock. The only wood was some bracing under the top and the bridge. It sounded like a guitar. A basic guitar-- because I am not a great player, it was adequate. Years later, I acquired an Ovation. Almost identical bowl back, but the rest was wood. Yeah, it sounded richer or fuller, but not to where I would have smashed up the cheaper Applause, and sent it to the dump. I never had a chance to do a side-by-side comparison (the Applause had suffered a fatal accident some years before), but I can recall a brightness that I've seldom heard in an entry-level "cheap" guitar since. Wood is wonderful, for all the reasons Ben gave and probably more. Don't automatically avoid non-wood materials; they can also be crafted into fine instruments.
will thanks for all the great advice and podcasts I just finished my first guitar build and it was awesome thanks to your instructions a big thank you God bless you
plastic is just not stiff enough to match wood on acoustic instruments, although it's not as bad as you would think. The 'modular fiddle' is a 3d printed violin that actually sounds ok. It's hard to beat the stiffness of spruce with any material
Suggestion. Instead of stringing up the shop wall to do wood tone tests, just install pickups in the middle of another $1 coffee table and check that tone on that.
Yeah wood is unique in that each piece, even if it't the same species of tree, has subtle (or not so subtle) differences in color, grain and appearance in general. I prefer wood over any other material for sure. Remember the old Kramer aluminum necks? Interesting but I still like wood.
I love timber for all reasons you say but I also own a carbon fibre bass that has been set up once in eight years and it has never changed, I can put on new strings and tune up and they rarely go out of tune, got to admit my timber bass just doesn't get used these days.
What about forest sustainability? I think North American does okay in managing tree harvests, but I'm not sure about other countries. Some of the great species may get depleted if the demand is too high. We may have to play guitars of plastic and carbon fiber someday.....That would suck ! Its a valid concern and I'm surprised you didn't bring it up.
Someone finally gets it! Great topic and covered well. With a diminshing resource due to high plantation \ processing and labor costs - quality wood is becoming scarcer and hence more expensive. We need to explore alternatives. Search for 3D printed guitar here for something different.
Can I point out Stone Wolf Guitars? He makes lovely guitars using rare (or usually unusable for guitars) burls with resin to make beautiful guitars. Saw them at the Birmingham show when I went to see Crimson's Copperchasm and loved them.
I've just discovered your podcasts. Wonderful stuff! Here's another pronunciation that you might want to check up on. I have always pronounced 'basswood' like the fish, and not the musical instrument. Watching this video, it certainly is the first time that I have heard it pronounced the other way. Keep up the great work.
I store and dry the best cuts I find for luthier’s and rotate through the store every three years or just find unusual wood for guys like Ben and give it all away for free in exchange for a guitar. I’ve at least two tons stored now. Sycamore at neck widths, beautiful curly birch but mostly burl from chestnut and all sorts. I only keep the cross cut live edge for coffee tables etc.
Just like someone mentioned below, check out Aristides Guitars made from a new materiel they call Arium. Also a Korean company named Ogre is making 100% Magnesium guitars and basses. You can find a few videos on TH-cam if you search Ogre Guitars NAMM 2014 and 2015. I love my wood but metal is cooler XD
Interesting What I think is that wooden guitars will always be with us. Not only for all the reasons mentioned but also because so many have been made and most of them are not going anywhere. My old guitar making friend tells me of the early 60's when he shared one guitar between all his friends. Now pretty much everyone we know has got at least half a dozen of the things and the price of a pretty nice second-hand squire strat is not much more than the price of 4 sets of strings. The guitar event horizon is approaching.
Come to Australia, ben, it might get as low as -1 degree (Celcius) at 3 in the morning in the dead of winter! of course summer is a totally different story, with sometimes weeks of 40 degree + days. An adaption for sure.
give it another 50 years and carbon fiber will probably become much much more common as it becomes easier to produce and we discover new ways to handle/work with it, for the moment wood is much more common and easy to work with at the moment (for the majority of people -i'm guessing), you can get a variety of woods to make a good sound too, heck i've got 2 marlin sidewinders (K32 and K34) that are heavy, sound nice (to me at least), excellent to play and the bodies are made out of ply! only trouble with them per-say is the sustain when amped up, which i think may be the poles needing a bit of re-magnetizing or replacing and the frets need a little bit of work, which i don't think is bad after 30-something years use :)
I often think about the longevity of an instrument and how some materials - almost always wood - "grows" in tone over years of being strung and strummed. There's a reason why there's not much of a market for vintage Ovations. My 1973 Yamaha FG 110 has matured to the lovely full sustain that it produces, properly cared for though definitely showing the scars sustained at the hands of a practiced hacker. It was the eminent British scientist, Keef Richards, who once pointed out that vintage 50's instruments have outlasted and can still outplay virtually every attempt at improving or otherwise modernizing the craft since. As we're finding with 40 and 50 year-old plastics (and other inorganic materials), they do have a shelf life; unlike wood that when properly engineered and then later cared for can give a player decades of reliability all-the-while "growing" in tonal richness. Perhaps someone out there can think of a player of any long-lived career who's "number one" was made of anything but wood. Everyone and his dog has had a go at various materials over the years, but inevitably, fashion fades and the trend returns to what actually works.
wood is like finger prints, there are no two the same in all the woods of the world and all the types you can not find the same grain. Every piece is individual, like finger prints and people. From the beginning of time. rock on
LOL!! A cheapo coffee table becomes a $10,000 guitar. Awesome. I got the nut slotting files you sent. They are great. I'll be putting them to use this weekend on an aluminum nut. Thanks again for offering high quality hand tools Ben. So far I've been very impressed.
Its pretty funny because im not so sure about carbon fiber guitars after seeing that carbon skateboards are rather horrible. Even though carbon fiber has come a long way we still havent made a proper replacement for wood in skateboarding. Decks with carbon in them are good but decks max of carbon are very inconsistent and dont feel very good
Apart from what is already said in the video, wood is very easy to cut and glue together compared to plastics and metals. Composite materials are ridiculously hard to work with, especially if you want to make several models of guitars. And wood has a great rigidity/strength to weight ratio. Given, i did 3d-print a violin recently, it's not too heavy, it sounds good enough, and it was cheap. But it would be kinda hard to do with a guitar
Sometimes you find a video where a guy talks for 16 or so minutes, doesn't actually say much, and yet it's immensely enjoyable. This is one of those videos.
I try to understand the tone wood argument but no one ever listened to a song and thought "wow listen to the wood on that", surely it's a combination of pick ups, nut, bridge etc? Love the podcast though, and your presentation style. (You're a shoe-in for the Hogwarts music teacher vacancy!)
and simply wood feels nice when your playing it. I really would like to leave my necks unfinished , even oil finished feel like a bit of a barrier they would soon become very grubby! Maybe I'll leave one naked wood?
i think we are back to 3d printing to make the perfect guitar, when you made the magnet vid the other day the back of that guitar was a piece of art on its own. now i know that plexiglass guitars exist who cares if they bend a bit some of those rubber strings should sort that .
Though they have a wooden neck and centre block/spine (I guess you could do a through neck) oil can guitars are fun and have a very good tone too being more versatile than they're African/World music origins.
I remember those.. I too thought they were solid marble but now I really think they must have been made from corian.. Ie kitchen worktops. Do you remember who made them?
3D printing: good for prototyping, bad for productivity. Good for exotic geometries that can be measured, bad for sculpted geometries that cannot. Additive manufacturing has its place, but it is the realm of A: It cannot be done any other way, or B: you're more concerned with the shape than the material.
Playing music with less sophistication on a strung grandfather clock is encouraged by the big guitar companies, it saves them having to retool and innovate AND keeps all the old tripe selling on the record shelves whilst modern talent has to rely heavily on self promotion. 'Classic rock' is an anachronism.....
Wood is alive. Its why all guitars are different animals with different tones and feels. The variables even if you CNC all the wood to same spec are enormous add in handmade and the slight differences make a guitar. Even something as standard as pickups have variables and that is the glory of guitars they are like Harry Potter's wand every guitar has a player it has to find
True! Well, mostly.. It seems that all to many 'guitar' woods are endangered and getting more so.. The tone is ripe for either other materials or other sources of more sustainable timbers imo
Crimson Custom Guitars I'm all for using any sustainable as well as reasonably eco friendly materials that still sound decent. Carbon for example is awesomely clever but an ecological disaster.
I can't believe I forgot to mention metal Guitars.. I have made a Les Paul type with a copper top and have plans for more, it is a fascinating material and has loads of potential
I saw in some Forum a build from a hobby-ist who made probably the most gorgeous Telecaster I've ever seen. The body was pure stainless steel (hollow of course) and the neck was carved out of 1 block of aluminium and just some steel frets added.
imho you've missed the most obvious point: wood is a natural resource and using this material, the carbon footprint you'll leave handling it is slim to none compared to working with carbon fiber or any other compounds even if you leave the processing of those materials out of the equation. also, even if we "print wood", we can't duplicate nature's looks, sure we can come up with an algorithm that makes almost identical patterns, but nature has some sort of harmony to it that we just can't copy :)
Would be a sad day if guitars ceased being made from wood. Sexy? Of course. Tactile? Certainly. But more important, what would become of the rack of wood working tools in the back drop? You would wind up having to replace the unoccupied spot for the #1 Stanley-Bailey with a pair of carbon fiber shears. Not the future I had hoped for.
I wanted to re-paint or stain my first bass when i was a teenager, when i began removing the paint i discovered it was made out of MDF, imagine my disappointment
Put simply wood has such great plasticity. You can shape however you want without having to make molds etc. Wood comes i an infinite variety of grain pattern and colors. There is a wood for whatever you want your instrument to look like. I would say that refinishing or repairing must also be a whole lot easier with wood. It is great to see makers putting new spins on things, and using different materials. However the buying public votes with it's wallet, and largely stays with the traditional instrument. Maybe if instruments made with alternative materials were cheaper the market would expand. There are no instruments really at the lower end of the market in this category.
I like to see the wood of a guitar. I like to see its patterns and know it's unique. I would never want to own a plain painted instrument'. That cheap coffee table turned out to be a beautiful guitar and it's what matters. Good that no one wanted an ugly Telecaster ashtray on it.
3D printers will print wood and everything else now. So probably closer than you think. If not tried already. Wood also gives you the ability to make changes and customize on the fly as well.
I hope the guitar industry becomes dominated by alternative material, there will always be a place for true crafted wood instruments, and a day will come where the big music stores will have very few of these wood instruments. Will be much easier to source woods and sell instruments with big factories out of the picture.
Why wood. It's cheap - it grows on tree :D - it's sustainable, it's relatively safe to handle and any numpty can do a half decent job of forming a shape from it. Man-made materials involve using oil for the most part, so cost a fortune. Carbon composites are expensive and difficult to work with - it isn't as simple as buying the materials and away you go. Wood has the perfect density - mass per unit volume - so it's the ideal weight when formed into a guitar shape. Wood is the best compromise, but at the end of the day, it's the most cost effective way to make a guitar.
cudos on not feeding us buckets of bullshit like a some luthiers do about how wood is essentially magic and on an electric guitar the wood is somehow 90 percent of the sound that absolutely cannot be beat by any other material. i get sick of hearing that crap over and over when as an amateur luthier myself have made guitars without wood and with combinations of material that sounds perfectly fine. yes, i prefer wood for most if not all the reason you mentioned here, convenience and aesthetics , but its nice to hear a speech about tonewood that actually calls it out for what it is. personal preferences and traditions that have some lasting reasons rather than elvin prophesy and how "living" material is scientifically superior because "take my word for it" and mystical trickery. i dont mind that some guitars are expensive because they use rare and specialized woods, because custom and rare things are expensive and quality costs time and money, but when someone tells me this identical guitar in their lineup is 5 times higher because it uses this special wood they have and then they tell me that all other materials are essentially shit because of "tonewood magic" i immediately lose interest in their guitars. obviously they dont mind lying to us because it makes them more money, so cudos on saying the real deal instead of trying to trick us all. i respect that, even if i cant afford your guitars...or any guitars that arent broken or scavenged parts really. im broke as hell.
There have always been thongs that resonate more than wood, but as with all things, wood has just the right amount. Middle ground. And if you're not processing the life out of the signal, wood will always sound better.
Why wood? Easy to handle, lots of experience and cheap to get. Carbon fiber and other "modern" materials certainly have their advantages, but are more difficult or at least different to build with.
Then there's the Finnish "Flaxwood Guitars", who make guitars out of (I quote) "an innovative new tone material that is created by breaking the grain structure of natural wood and injection-molding it into shape together with an acoustically sensitive binding agent." More information here: www.flaxwood.com/support/faq/
Not sure if this is allowed to be published or not but JB Priestley had this to say about wood...
Essay on Wood by J B Priestley, from “Delight” published 1949
I am not as clumsy with my hands as many bookish men I know, but I have never had any training or practice in handicrafts, and apart from sawing and splitting logs and knocking a nail in here and there, I have had little to do with wood. Yet I never go where wood is being worked, never stand near a joiner, carpenter or cabinet-maker, without feeling at least a tickle of delight. To handle newly-planed wood, even to look at it or smell it, is to receive a message that life can still be in good heart. The very shavings are a crisp confirmation.
There is a mystery here. Atavism will not explain it. Our remoter ancestors, winding back into the mists, were chippers of stone. I have seen their flints, inside and outside museums, and have never yet felt a quiver of sympathy. Woodwork as we know it, needing sharp metal tools, must be one of man's newer activities. Is this perhaps the secret? Is this stuff still so excitingly new? But light alloys and plastics are newer still, the discoveries of today, and yet no message comes from them. Is it because wood, no matter how chopped and trimmed and planed, somehow remains alive? I put my hand on the desk on which I am writing now, and it is almost as if my palm fell on the shoulder of a brother. Into this patient material have passed rain and sun, steely mornings in March, the glow of October: it has lived as some secret part of us still lives.
And notice how few men who work with wood seem unhappy, defeated. When we write a book about a Carpenter, we call it the New Testament.
That is beautiful, and true.. Thank you for introducing me :)
Crimson Custom Guitars totally disagree did not go on longer than necessary. I could have easily listened to another 30 or so minutes on this topic 😂😂😂.
how long before we are arguing about "tone aluminum"?
personally I would love a Rainsong carbon acoustic...
Can buy old growth mahogany by the ton at furniture auctions. :) The Victorians loved that stuff in their sideboards and tables. My problem is every time I do buy a solid half ton of gorgeous table for next to nothing .. I can't bring myself to cut it up.
thats a tough one ; i would say if the table is in good enough condition to carry on as a table let it be .once all the old furniture is destroyed its gone forever .thats why i hate shabby sheik idiots destroying vintage furniture .Ive spent more time than i should restoring old furniture ...hm ...again thats a tough one ..were would that wood be most valued .... good luck ... its probably a good problem to have
I would like to add the word "art" to the reasons.
Hi Ben, going off on a tangent (although you did make a slight reference to having some old wood.) storing wood! How do you store your wood stock, and do you maintain any sort of spacific temperature- humidity control? Do you keep pre-cut bodies and necks 'vertical/up standing, hanging, on their sides? Etc.. And.. Do you have any kind of 'dry oven' 'de-humidifier' or whatnot to 'age' your stock?
Cheers
Also, we don't necessarily want the guitar as resonant as possible. You could press a guitar from thin sheet of stainless steel and get an extremely resonant instrument, but I wouldn't like how it sounds. Wood is moderately resonant, and what's even more important, it's selectively resonant. It has a tone of it's own.
What company does he mention at 8:55?
Did you ever come around to fix that Mandolin? (I can't remember seeing any videos about it, might have missed it).
Great video. I think "other" materials will come yo greater prominence as prices rise due to scarcity of supply (e.g. Brazilian tosewood, anyone?!) AND mass production techniques based on 3d printing improve.
The Martin composites are an interesting step forward (sideways at least).
Steinberger, Status, Bond... are bassists more adventurous than guitarists? The use of exotics like cocobolo, tulip, pau ferro and wenge (Alembic, Warwick, Wal) seems to suggest that even when it comes to organic materials bassists are happier to look beyond alder, ash, maple and rosewood.
I have a Switch Vibracell guitar. 1 piece injection moulded plastic with a wood fret board. Sounds like mahogany, very light and easy to play. Cheap as hell too.
Go to 3:22 where the question is read, and the answer is one word:) Won't spoil it, tons of good info from a guitar builder on this one...interesting watch, thanks for posting it.
I could never give up wood guitars. I love a natural finish or a see through finish. It's gorgeous.
I didnt realise Bill Bailey made guitars...
Also, I have an acrylic Flying V, it is heavy but sounds pretty good :)
I have a WIDOW HEADLESS 37 SCALE (my own design not bc rich) bass that i need help making ..what woud or how much would i need to have the bass made?
What is the MOST resonant material to use for a guitar?
wood is king. the smell, the feel the grain. its just great
i love tasting the wood on my guitars
Ashley Johansson I know right
NONE of my electric guitars smell like wood.
Yo Yo! See thru bass...totally cool & marketable! Version 2 prototype could try: 1) thicker neck 2) two truss rods 3) truss rods extend past neck heel 4) LED implants (various locations) with various colors/modes... I love brainstorming! I am a luthier wannabe...
would it make any sense to carve an inlay slot, then fill it with something that hardens, and later sand it to be even with the wood?
+Torwulf games Epoxy inlays are done all the time. What you're saying already happens :)
My first acoustic was an Applause in the mid-'70s. Fiberglass bowl back, a plastic top, an aluminum fretboard with a spine on the back onto which was an molded plastic neck and headstock. The only wood was some bracing under the top and the bridge.
It sounded like a guitar. A basic guitar-- because I am not a great player, it was adequate.
Years later, I acquired an Ovation. Almost identical bowl back, but the rest was wood. Yeah, it sounded richer or fuller, but not to where I would have smashed up the cheaper Applause, and sent it to the dump. I never had a chance to do a side-by-side comparison (the Applause had suffered a fatal accident some years before), but I can recall a brightness that I've seldom heard in an entry-level "cheap" guitar since.
Wood is wonderful, for all the reasons Ben gave and probably more. Don't automatically avoid non-wood materials; they can also be crafted into fine instruments.
will thanks for all the great advice and podcasts I just finished my first guitar build and it was awesome thanks to your instructions a big thank you God bless you
plastic is just not stiff enough to match wood on acoustic instruments, although it's not as bad as you would think. The 'modular fiddle' is a 3d printed violin that actually sounds ok. It's hard to beat the stiffness of spruce with any material
Suggestion. Instead of stringing up the shop wall to do wood tone tests, just install pickups in the middle of another $1 coffee table and check that tone on that.
Allan McKenzie I've seen someone string up a steel I beam in a high rise basement. it sounded amazing.
Come on folks let's get him that CNC machine!
We're well on the way, thank you so much for your support! I am blown away right now!!
Yeah wood is unique in that each piece, even if it't the same species of tree, has subtle (or not so subtle) differences in color, grain and appearance in general. I prefer wood over any other material for sure. Remember the old Kramer aluminum necks? Interesting but I still like wood.
Is Perspex the same acrylic?
+Daniel Bell (DanjaBellza) Yes just a brand name.
And your thoughts on HPL?
I love timber for all reasons you say but I also own a carbon fibre bass that has been set up once in eight years and it has never changed, I can put on new strings and tune up and they rarely go out of tune, got to admit my timber bass just doesn't get used these days.
What about forest sustainability? I think North American does okay in managing tree harvests, but I'm not sure about other countries. Some of the great species may get depleted if the demand is too high.
We may have to play guitars of plastic and carbon fiber someday.....That would suck !
Its a valid concern and I'm surprised you didn't bring it up.
Timber is probably a more sustainable option. I saw a guitar made from an old pallet on another channel. The results were simply stunning.
Someone finally gets it! Great topic and covered well. With a diminshing resource due to high plantation \ processing and labor costs - quality wood is becoming scarcer and hence more expensive. We need to explore alternatives.
Search for 3D printed guitar here for something different.
Can I point out Stone Wolf Guitars? He makes lovely guitars using rare (or usually unusable for guitars) burls with resin to make beautiful guitars. Saw them at the Birmingham show when I went to see Crimson's Copperchasm and loved them.
I've just discovered your podcasts. Wonderful stuff!
Here's another pronunciation that you might want to check up on.
I have always pronounced 'basswood' like the fish, and not the musical instrument. Watching this video, it certainly is the first time that I have heard it pronounced the other way.
Keep up the great work.
Recommendation: Minimal break angle at the nut? Suhr has straight headstock but no string trees? 🤷🏼♂️
I store and dry the best cuts I find for luthier’s and rotate through the store every three years or just find unusual wood for guys like Ben and give it all away for free in exchange for a guitar. I’ve at least two tons stored now. Sycamore at neck widths, beautiful curly birch but mostly burl from chestnut and all sorts. I only keep the cross cut live edge for coffee tables etc.
Just like someone mentioned below, check out Aristides Guitars made from a new materiel they call Arium. Also a Korean company named Ogre is making 100% Magnesium guitars and basses. You can find a few videos on TH-cam if you search Ogre Guitars NAMM 2014 and 2015. I love my wood but metal is cooler XD
Interesting
What I think is that wooden guitars will always be with us. Not only for all the reasons mentioned but also because so many have been made and most of them are not going anywhere.
My old guitar making friend tells me of the early 60's when he shared one guitar between all his friends. Now pretty much everyone we know has got at least half a dozen of the things and the price of a pretty nice second-hand squire strat is not much more than the price of 4 sets of strings.
The guitar event horizon is approaching.
+Donavon Howard no ones mentioned that the stuff grows on trees so plentyfull
Come to Australia, ben, it might get as low as -1 degree (Celcius) at 3 in the morning in the dead of winter! of course summer is a totally different story, with sometimes weeks of 40 degree + days. An adaption for sure.
Those acrylic guitars and basses were so heavy. I had one, loved the sound.
give it another 50 years and carbon fiber will probably become much much more common as it becomes easier to produce and we discover new ways to handle/work with it, for the moment wood is much more common and easy to work with at the moment (for the majority of people -i'm guessing), you can get a variety of woods to make a good sound too, heck i've got 2 marlin sidewinders (K32 and K34) that are heavy, sound nice (to me at least), excellent to play and the bodies are made out of ply! only trouble with them per-say is the sustain when amped up, which i think may be the poles needing a bit of re-magnetizing or replacing and the frets need a little bit of work, which i don't think is bad after 30-something years use :)
I often think about the longevity of an instrument and how some materials - almost always wood - "grows" in tone over years of being strung and strummed. There's a reason why there's not much of a market for vintage Ovations. My 1973 Yamaha FG 110 has matured to the lovely full sustain that it produces, properly cared for though definitely showing the scars sustained at the hands of a practiced hacker. It was the eminent British scientist, Keef Richards, who once pointed out that vintage 50's instruments have outlasted and can still outplay virtually every attempt at improving or otherwise modernizing the craft since. As we're finding with 40 and 50 year-old plastics (and other inorganic materials), they do have a shelf life; unlike wood that when properly engineered and then later cared for can give a player decades of reliability all-the-while "growing" in tonal richness. Perhaps someone out there can think of a player of any long-lived career who's "number one" was made of anything but wood. Everyone and his dog has had a go at various materials over the years, but inevitably, fashion fades and the trend returns to what actually works.
wood is like finger prints, there are no two the same in all the woods of the world and all the types you can not find the same grain. Every piece is individual, like finger prints and people. From the beginning of time. rock on
What about our Aussie gumtree chop a couple down we have plenty to spare for guitars
Always good stuff on your channel!! Thank you for sharing all this great knowledge. Rock on from Ohio in the U.S.
I've found a stunningly beautiful bit of French Walnut that I so desperately want to use.
I have an Explorer with a Richlite composite fretboard, and in the way of tone and feel it's identical to Ebony.
LOL!! A cheapo coffee table becomes a $10,000 guitar. Awesome. I got the nut slotting files you sent. They are great. I'll be putting them to use this weekend on an aluminum nut. Thanks again for offering high quality hand tools Ben. So far I've been very impressed.
Its pretty funny because im not so sure about carbon fiber guitars after seeing that carbon skateboards are rather horrible.
Even though carbon fiber has come a long way we still havent made a proper replacement for wood in skateboarding. Decks with carbon in them are good but decks max of carbon are very inconsistent and dont feel very good
Hey thanks your awesome, could you do a vid in fixing chips in guitar Finish
Apart from what is already said in the video, wood is very easy to cut and glue together compared to plastics and metals. Composite materials are ridiculously hard to work with, especially if you want to make several models of guitars. And wood has a great rigidity/strength to weight ratio.
Given, i did 3d-print a violin recently, it's not too heavy, it sounds good enough, and it was cheap. But it would be kinda hard to do with a guitar
spent many years working marble. resins were used on an hourly basis. Terrible stuff. avoid it.
Ben what about Rick Toone! Aluminum necked ergonomic guitars!
I wish you'd shown the Parker, I'm desperate to see it haha
Now when you can 3D print a tree I might buy one, I don't ever imagine a 3D Stradivarius sounding like a wood one, on this planet.
Sometimes you find a video where a guy talks for 16 or so minutes, doesn't actually say much, and yet it's immensely enjoyable. This is one of those videos.
2jears later- but ben,you are a master of wood&a
real poet!
rockn rolly!
I try to understand the tone wood argument but no one ever listened to a song and thought "wow listen to the wood on that", surely it's a combination of pick ups, nut, bridge etc? Love the podcast though, and your presentation style. (You're a shoe-in for the Hogwarts music teacher vacancy!)
thank you Ben love the rants i have to chuckle at em at times
and simply wood feels nice when your playing it. I really would like to leave my necks unfinished , even oil finished feel like a bit of a barrier they would soon become very grubby! Maybe I'll leave one naked wood?
It all starts here: 3:06.
Wood has soul.
Funny you should mention 3D printers... Just today I printed a 12" radius 250mm long sanding block to radius a fretboard!
i think we are back to 3d printing to make the perfect guitar, when you made the magnet vid the other day the back of that guitar was a piece of art on its own. now i know that plexiglass guitars exist who cares if they bend a bit some of those rubber strings should sort that .
I've not watched this yet, got to visit my old mum for the rest of the day .
But at some point Switch Vibracell guitars must have been mentioned...???
bugger just noticed the date - over 2 years ago..
this was at the top of today's youtube daily recommended videos..
Though they have a wooden neck and centre block/spine (I guess you could do a through neck) oil can guitars are fun and have a very good tone too being more versatile than they're African/World music origins.
Video starts @ 3:00.
Some years ago in London at a Guitar Show I saw and Played a Strat with the a body compleately made of solid Marble ..Yes it's True
I remember those.. I too thought they were solid marble but now I really think they must have been made from corian.. Ie kitchen worktops. Do you remember who made them?
No I just know they were Heavy as Hell
3D printing: good for prototyping, bad for productivity. Good for exotic geometries that can be measured, bad for sculpted geometries that cannot. Additive manufacturing has its place, but it is the realm of A: It cannot be done any other way, or B: you're more concerned with the shape than the material.
Crimson Custom Guitars you should google "arium guitars" it very interesting because the material arium was specialy made for guitars
If you guys are looking for cool not-wood guitars you should check out Aristides guitars
Aluminum and Lucite guitars were available from Kramer in the 70s. You dont see them making them like that anymore. No demand.
LOTS of aluminum and lucite guitars in the world. Name a number and you can find that many.
because current non-modern guitarists have their head up their asses and won't go past the 60's
Why would you want to go past the 60's?
Playing music with less sophistication on a strung grandfather clock is encouraged by the big guitar companies, it saves them having to retool and innovate AND keeps all the old tripe selling on the record shelves whilst modern talent has to rely heavily on self promotion. 'Classic rock' is an anachronism.....
I wonder what a glass guitar would sound like...
Or an ice guitar made in Russia
Very glassy
Wood is alive. Its why all guitars are different animals with different tones and feels. The variables even if you CNC all the wood to same spec are enormous add in handmade and the slight differences make a guitar. Even something as standard as pickups have variables and that is the glory of guitars they are like Harry Potter's wand every guitar has a player it has to find
Basswood is pronounced like the bass fish. I thought it was “basewood” too for a long time
My custom electric Strat made of hardened Double Bubble gum gives me that elastic, rubbery sound I crave...
Wood: it's just amazing. That sums it up rather nicely :-)
The mandolin looks like a jtl Jerome Thibouville Lamy from france nice instrument
I'd add timber is also sustainable as a fourth point
True! Well, mostly.. It seems that all to many 'guitar' woods are endangered and getting more so.. The tone is ripe for either other materials or other sources of more sustainable timbers imo
Crimson Custom Guitars I'm all for using any sustainable as well as reasonably eco friendly materials that still sound decent. Carbon for example is awesomely clever but an ecological disaster.
James Trussart makes aluminum guitars. Dan Armstrong guitars have lucite guitars and aluminum necks.
I can't believe I forgot to mention metal Guitars.. I have made a Les Paul type with a copper top and have plans for more, it is a fascinating material and has loads of potential
I saw in some Forum a build from a hobby-ist who made probably the most gorgeous Telecaster I've ever seen. The body was pure stainless steel (hollow of course) and the neck was carved out of 1 block of aluminium and just some steel frets added.
Aristidese uses Arium.
wood is king, and endless tone difference, on endless species and density!!!!
imho you've missed the most obvious point:
wood is a natural resource and using this material, the carbon footprint you'll leave handling it is slim to none compared to working with carbon fiber or any other compounds even if you leave the processing of those materials out of the equation.
also, even if we "print wood", we can't duplicate nature's looks, sure we can come up with an algorithm that makes almost identical patterns, but nature has some sort of harmony to it that we just can't copy :)
love the videos keep them coming!
Would be a sad day if guitars ceased being made from wood. Sexy? Of course. Tactile? Certainly. But more important, what would become of the rack of wood working tools in the back drop? You would wind up having to replace the unoccupied spot for the #1 Stanley-Bailey with a pair of carbon fiber shears. Not the future I had hoped for.
I wanted to re-paint or stain my first bass when i was a teenager, when i began removing the paint i discovered it was made out of MDF, imagine my disappointment
Put simply wood has such great plasticity. You can shape however you want without having to make molds etc. Wood comes i an infinite variety of grain pattern and colors. There is a wood for whatever you want your instrument to look like. I would say that refinishing or repairing must also be a whole lot easier with wood. It is great to see makers putting new spins on things, and using different materials. However the buying public votes with it's wallet, and largely stays with the traditional instrument. Maybe if instruments made with alternative materials were cheaper the market would expand. There are no instruments really at the lower end of the market in this category.
How about the Gittler guitars, made from aircraft-grade titanium (and featuring the ultimate in scalloped fretboards ;-) )...
3 simple words.
Respect the wood!
I like to see the wood of a guitar. I like to see its patterns and know it's unique. I would never want to own a plain painted instrument'. That cheap coffee table turned out to be a beautiful guitar and it's what matters. Good that no one wanted an ugly Telecaster ashtray on it.
3D printers will print wood and everything else now. So probably closer than you think. If not tried already.
Wood also gives you the ability to make changes and customize on the fly as well.
That flexibility is the reason I will never completely stop using real wood for my builds! B
I hope the guitar industry becomes dominated by alternative material, there will always be a place for true crafted wood instruments, and a day will come where the big music stores will have very few of these wood instruments. Will be much easier to source woods and sell instruments with big factories out of the picture.
Why wood. It's cheap - it grows on tree :D - it's sustainable, it's relatively safe to handle and any numpty can do a half decent job of forming a shape from it. Man-made materials involve using oil for the most part, so cost a fortune. Carbon composites are expensive and difficult to work with - it isn't as simple as buying the materials and away you go. Wood has the perfect density - mass per unit volume - so it's the ideal weight when formed into a guitar shape. Wood is the best compromise, but at the end of the day, it's the most cost effective way to make a guitar.
cudos on not feeding us buckets of bullshit like a some luthiers do about how wood is essentially magic and on an electric guitar the wood is somehow 90 percent of the sound that absolutely cannot be beat by any other material. i get sick of hearing that crap over and over when as an amateur luthier myself have made guitars without wood and with combinations of material that sounds perfectly fine. yes, i prefer wood for most if not all the reason you mentioned here, convenience and aesthetics , but its nice to hear a speech about tonewood that actually calls it out for what it is. personal preferences and traditions that have some lasting reasons rather than elvin prophesy and how "living" material is scientifically superior because "take my word for it" and mystical trickery. i dont mind that some guitars are expensive because they use rare and specialized woods, because custom and rare things are expensive and quality costs time and money, but when someone tells me this identical guitar in their lineup is 5 times higher because it uses this special wood they have and then they tell me that all other materials are essentially shit because of "tonewood magic" i immediately lose interest in their guitars. obviously they dont mind lying to us because it makes them more money, so cudos on saying the real deal instead of trying to trick us all. i respect that, even if i cant afford your guitars...or any guitars that arent broken or scavenged parts really. im broke as hell.
There have always been thongs that resonate more than wood, but as with all things, wood has just the right amount. Middle ground. And if you're not processing the life out of the signal, wood will always sound better.
Things
If you like thongs go check out Air on the G String by Andrew Huang
Why wood? Easy to handle, lots of experience and cheap to get. Carbon fiber and other "modern" materials certainly have their advantages, but are more difficult or at least different to build with.
How do you remember to get up in the morning!😂😃😂
I love wood guitars and I think the world does to due to not changing material and sticking to it
He doesn't even mention a resonator guitar!?
Then there's the Finnish "Flaxwood Guitars", who make guitars out of (I quote) "an innovative new tone material that is created by breaking the grain structure of natural wood and injection-molding it into shape together with an acoustically sensitive binding agent."
More information here: www.flaxwood.com/support/faq/
Were you michael in Mary Poppins?
I'll take that as a compliment.. But why would you say that..? My wife wants know :)
+Crimson Custom Guitars of course! and i don't know, you just look like what I would expect the kid who played michael to look like when he was older
Unfortunately, Michael died in 1977.
11:20 lol looked like and sounded like you let one rip
Suppressed belch, apologies.