Keira WitherKay wrote:
and yes i agree this is the lucky find ......... not like i have found these every day..and i actively search for old instruments weekly .........
again i will say i do believe tonewoods make a difference......... but i do believe after being a solid spruce top fan for most of my life that there's something else ....... that makes the tone what it is............ this yamaha is quite heavy ..definitely heavier than my CGX or the other yamaha i own ...... does that influence the tone........ just as a les paul being heavy??? ok thankfully this is just heavy as classicals go nowhere near les paul heavy heheheheh
I think weight is a consequence of the woods used and the construction, a side effect if you like. I have three acoustic guitars with tangibly different weights. You wouldn't have to put them on a scale to know which one weighed the most. The Smoothtalker weighs the most - but then so many rules are broken with those guitars that it's seldom useful to use them as examples in this kind of discussion. That leaves us with the Larrivee and the Morgan. Similar in construction, but the Larry is at least as big as the Morgan in all respects and visibly bigger in some areas. Yet it weighs less. Rosewood is heavy, and the Morgan has rosewood back and sides.
oh and you do know that in a similar vein...... torres made a guitar with paper mashe sides and back (which still excists in a museum ) to prove that the back and sides have no effect on the tone of a classical ............so maybe that brazillian rosewood back and sides issue may not be as important as they imply it is............ and strangely enough in some of the early literature describing torres's work there is much mention of tops been made out of pine..........(although through a previous post i am lead to believe they the same family as spruce )
Yeah, same family, but not identical woods. Spruce has the highest ratio of weight to strength of widely available woods. That's why it was so popular in the early years of the aircraft industry. Nothing else is as good as spruce by that measure. Cedar is next best.
There is another point I want to make here. Some players have a special touch that makes a guitar sound good (and the better players seem more likely to have that special touch) - certainly when it comes to acoustic guitars. One of the potential traps that luthiers lay out for us is the signature model. The most amazing acoustic guitar sound I ever heard came from Martin Carthy who was, at the time, playing a "Martin Carthy Signature" Martin 000-18. It is possible that the brass bridge pins had something to do with the sound that he gets, but I do not for one moment believe that if I shell out the money for one of those instruments I am going to magically start sounding like Martin Carthy.
Certainly thought needs to be given to alternatives to the traditional woods simply because there is not a boundless supply of good quality traditional woods.
