Best Tonewoods For Acoustic Guitars

Rosewood is a very popular wood for guitars and has been used a lot traditionally too.

Best tonewoods for acoustic guitars.

Smooth lacking harshness even response. Affordable and abundant basswood is particularly associated with mid level or budget guitars. Brittle loss of clarity on the verge of distorting. 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.

But basswood is a good tonewood by any standards and it has been used by many high end makers with excellent results. 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. Woody deep rich lacking metallic sounding overtones.

As a guitar top dense mahogany has a solid punchy tone with low overtone content and good high end response. The bass and or treble frequencies are not overly dominant. Articulate clear. Because it was logged so heavily the use of it was slowed drastically.

We offer a great selection of tonewood for instrument builders including red adirondack spruce carpathian spruce figured maple and other domestic woods new offerings acoustic back side sets. Also known as red spruce this wood offers a wonderful tone. 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. Oregon wild wood is the luthiers source for fine tone wood from the pacific nw.

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. Airy spacious not overly compressed. Adirondack spruce picea rubens this was the choice wood used on pre war martins. Koa is native to hawaii and is used commonly on ukuleles but less so on guitars.

And yet all the same benefits. There s nothing else like it the first and only the tonewoodamp is a must have device for any acoustic guitar player. What makes an acoustic guitar sound the way it does. Punchy powerful but controlled.

Special thanks to builder john mayes for the information and images below. 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. It s prized for its rich golden coloring curly figuring and agreeable sound. Guitars intended for fingerpicking are best when the tone is well balanced e g.