basswood or poplar?

Robbmonster

mcconnachiea said: Poplar is cheaper than basswood 😉
I think there is a difference. Once I compared my basswood jagstang to an alder reissue and the RI sounded much brighter like a fender 'should'

Were the pickups and electronics the same in both? And the strings?

I think the wood chosen for manufacturing often depends on what is abundant and cheap at any given time. I really do not know how much major guitar manufacturers would say "we are going to use alder for this guitar because it offers more balanced highs and lows", as opposed to "we are going to use alder because there is a plantation 20 miles from the factory.

robertoriginal

poplar is NOT cheaper than basswood if you go to northwest lumber in indiana.

i want to say there is about a 20-30 cent difference in a board foot.

i actually had a brain fart and remembered that ages ago i made a j.s. body, re-assembled it with all of my og parts and it sounded exactly the same as before.

im pretty sure the body was poplar, and the og body being basswood.

let me see if i can find a pic of it. its pretty old so it may take some time.

on the subject of tonewoods, did you know, that the production line of bennedetto guitars are all HPL(high pressure laminate)

i have never been able to a/b a solid sitka spruce benedetto(sp?) with a lamited production model, but i would suspect there is a huge difference, mainly becuz of the fact that its an archtop.

i could go on for days. but basically if you still say that basswood, and poplar sound different, raise your hand, so i can punch you in the dick.

Mad-Mike

I don't care what wood it is as long as the structural integrity is good. I've had guitars made out of stuff like Chipboard, Pine, and even Construction Grade Plywood, and they all sounded good when set up right and played well.

Robbmonster

The Parker Fly isn't made of wood AT ALL and some pretty sweet sounds can be plucked out of those things too.

tragictravisty

robert(original) said: the only time that wood really makes a difference is in an archtop or acoustic setting, and even then the bracing will determine the overall sound.

why does it make a difference in a archtop and not a solid body? because the flexibility of the wood and the resonance of the air pocket(s) affect the tone of the guitar? no ####. the same thing happens with different woods - different sized air pockets with different resonant frequencies and flexibilities. some frequencies are absorbed, and some are not = different tone.

and bracing is not the most important part of an acoustic, because it affects the soundboard. therefore, the properties of the soundboard are equally or more important.

Doug

I got my 1965 Mustang with lots of dings & scratches. It had already been refinished with the original Dakota Red, so some of the vintage value was lost forever. I decided to refinish it in a nice natural wood tone like the headstock. When I stripped it, woops!...now I know what Poplar is!

The Poplar is dark brown in some places and light tan in others, like it's made from several different species of wood. Also it's very soft so it sands easily...no dings left now. But I see how easily Poplar can get dinged.

And porous Poplar sucks up stain unevenly. Luckily I learned about this before getting too far into the project. Instead of liquid stain, I applied Butternut Gel Stain to the brown wood to lighten it a bit. Then I applied Autumn Gel Stain to the light wood to darken it a bit. Gel Stain does not soak in so it tints the surface of Poplar more evenly than a liquid stain could. Sanding the Gel Stained wood lightly with 0000 steel wool brought the two Poplar colors closer together.

Then I sprayed Fender Neck Amber (from Guitar ReRanch, Texas) in very thin coats. This has brought the brown and tan sections even closer together, nearly matching the headstock, the look I was shooting for. I discovered I could continue to lighten the darkest sections by applying a a poly clear coat then a second coat of gel stain over that (applying coats of gel on top of each other didn't seem to have any cumulative lightening effect, as if the new coat rubbed the prior coat off). Next I'll apply a satin nitro clear coat (from Guitar ReRanch) which is tinted just 20% as much as the Neck Amber to soften the contrast a bit further.

The guitar now looks in really good, clean, well-cared for condition. Not a classically beautiful piece of wood, but it's handsome with unique character.

Regarding the woods-tonal difference discussion, here's my two cents. I'm no expert but I have been doing some peeking into the scientific research on solidbody electric guitars this past year. The hard science seems to come down to this: tonal differences based on the wood are sometimes detectable by scientific instrumentation in laboratory conditions. These differences tend to be beyond the range of ordinary human hearing.

The down-to-earth reality is that placebo effect is real...when we believe we'll hear a difference, we really will...so everyone wins.

I'll upload some pictures when I'm done.

Doug

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