If you regularly frequent the dark corners of guitar related channels on YouTube, or participate in the myriad guitar forums, you’ll no doubt have come across some kind of discussion on tonewood. EVERYONE has an opinion on it. Alder sounds like this. Mahogany resonates like that. Cheap basswood bodies are nice and light, but don’t resonate as well as harder woods… So does it really matter?
Well, here’s my two cents’ worth, having played quite a few guitars over the years, from cheap starter instruments to high end Custom Shop ones.
Yes it matters! Play a guitar unplugged and you’ll hear how tone wood affects the sound. Different woods resonate differently. Different pieces of the same wood resonate differently depending on age, density of the grain etc. Some guitars are louder acoustically than others. Some are brighter, some have more natural sustain.
But for me, the question has always been: Can you hear the difference once the guitar is plugged in? Or at least any significantly discernible difference? Of course, pickups make a huge difference too, but that’s a whole other rabbit hole that I’m not going to go down today. But what you find is that each individual guitar has it’s own individual properties which are the result of so many variable factors that I think the question should really be: Does it matter?
And more crucially: Can the audience hear the difference? In fact do they care?
I saw a comment in passing on YouTube that basically stated that, in this age of easy access to a wealth of knowledge and opinion on guitars and guitar gear, have we become so obsessed with what our instruments sound like that we’ve actually forgotten how to play them..?
Let me know your opinions!