Average Joe wrote:
I reckon theres probably dozens of woods as good / better than alder and ash for electric bodies.
Have to disagree with you there. There are other good woods, but they are I've tried a
lot of different woods and always come back to swamp ash - not only that, but I know from experience, what weight of ash will work for me on a Strat, what's gonna work on a Tele, etc.
Fender uses alder because its cost effective and available
That was the original motivation, but they couldn't change now because those woods have become a part of the Fender sound. Medium weight was also in the original spec. Easier to finish was why alder took over from ash, etc. Even different species of a medium weight wood can sound radically different - compare eastern and western maple or swamp with baseball bat ash. Hardwoods are for the most part unsuitable unless you're making a skinny guitar like a Ric, or using it as a cap for a much softer wood or for a laminated hollow body. Even when hardwoods like maple are used for body applications, they tend to the softer varients.
rosewood bodies i would imagine would be far superier
Have you ever played a solid rosewood bodied guitar? Weighs an absolute ton and is generally pretty dead (yeah, a fingerboard or neck blank will ring like a bell, but it doesn't scale up to a body, where it acts more as dead weight than anything). Pine makes a better wood for a body...
But someone who understands wood can do anyting.
True in an acoustic or an archtop, but the Bob Benedettos of the world are rare (and it's a huge amount of work). Solidbodies are different animals too - they are slabs so you can't carve the top or braces to adjust the sound one way or another. The only thing you can do is wind pickups to suit.
I have a friend making mindblowing clasical back and sides out of olienhout!
The primary concern of back and sides in an acoustic is rigidity. While it does have a small influence on the resulting tone, it's nowhere near as critical application as a top or even the neck and there are a lot more woods that are suitable.
This isn't all to say that the established woods are the only ones that will work - I've loved ovankol since I first heard it used in cheap Korean guitars and pao ferro is my favourite fingerboard wood (In fact, I've been around since before blackwood and Nato were acceptable tonewoods). Speaking blackwood, its rare to find logs large enough to make guitar backs and 90% of a log is wasted in splitting/cutting - which explains why ebony was the preferred tonewood for lutherie over blackwood.
So while there are other woods that will work besides the traditional ones, there are often other factors to take into account and you never really know if something will work until you try it.
