ash strat n tele pickups

[copperheadroads]

i just finish a couple projects strat and tele,both with a swamp ash body and ebony board
new hardtail strat build - Page 2 - GuitarsCanada.com - The Canadian Guitar Forum
TELE'S TELE'S & more TELE'S heres another one - GuitarsCanada.com - The Canadian Guitar Forum
the tele has a 1/4" maple top all with alnico 5 pickups the strat has very nice cleans very bright overdrive is not quite so nice, i was just wondering if a wound alnico 2 pickups would it smooth-en the tone a little bit, not be so bright even though it sounds pretty good so if you would go with a alnico 2 pickup would you over wind it

[Zhangliqun]

A2 would definitely smooth the top. You'll lose a touch of output, but the good news is that with A2, you can raise the pu's a little closer to the strings to make up for that without running into the ol' Strat warble.

[Possum]

...

change your tone cap.....

[ake]

i just finish a couple projects strat and tele,both with a swamp ash body and ebony board
new hardtail strat build - Page 2 - GuitarsCanada.com - The Canadian Guitar Forum
TELE'S TELE'S & more TELE'S heres another one - GuitarsCanada.com - The Canadian Guitar Forum
the tele has a 1/4" maple top all with alnico 5 pickups the strat has very nice cleans very bright overdrive is not quite so nice, i was just wondering if a wound alnico 2 pickups would it smooth-en the tone a little bit, not be so bright even though it sounds pretty good so if you would go with a alnico 2 pickup would you over wind it

Nice guitars.

[automan]

change your tone cap.....

I would try this and also try lower pot values to choke it down a bit.

[David Schwab]

Ebony fingerboards are pretty bright sounding too. Not like maple, as the emphasis seem to be higher. They have a lot of attack.

A rosewood board would warm that guitar up.

[automan]

I never found the fingerboard material to make much of a difference in the way an instrument sounds. They feel different to the fingers, but imo that is a sales tool more than anything else.

[David Schwab]

I never found the fingerboard material to make much of a difference in the way an instrument sounds. They feel different to the fingers, but imo that is a sales tool more than anything else.

That's totally wrong. Build a few identical necks with different fingerboards and you will hear the difference, especially if you use carbon graphite bars to even out the response of the neck.

Every piece of wood on a guitar contributes to the overall tone, based on the materials' properties. In my view, the neck is the largest contributor to the tone of a guitar or bass. The frets are sitting on the fingerboard, and the fingerboard absorbs energy from the strings. Even stainless steel frets sound different from nickel silver.

Ask a few bass players... a lot of funk guys like maple fingerboards because they are brighter than rosewood. Better for slapping.

I made a series of basses with phenolic boards, and you can really hear the different between that and ebony or rosewood. It has a "chirpy" high end.

My experience is rosewoods are on the warm end, maple is brighter and ebony is a different kind of bright. Basically the harder the wood the brighter the tone.

[automan]

I have plenty of building experience. I built in the Gibson Custom Shop, then moved over to building Gibson's bluegrass instruments. From there I went to Crafters of Tennessee building acoustic guitars and have built on my own since leaving there. I was also a professional touring bassist for years. This isn't something you can state an absolute like "That is totally wrong." When I built my first maple fingerboard strat, I didn't like the feel of a finished fingerboard. I have a nice piece of cocobola laying around so I heated off the maple fingerboard and made fingerboard from the cocobola that I slotted, fretted and installed on the neck. When all was said and done, there was no noticable tonal difference between it and the finished maple, it just felt much different to my fingers.

I don't imagine I will change your mind on this. I just wanted to offer my opinion developed over the building of hundreds of instuments over the last 15 years.

[David Schwab]

Well that's not my experience at all. It's simple to test for as well.

I think there are other builders who would disagree as well. People don't just choose woods for the looks.

And as long as we are stating stats, I built my first instrument in 1972. My personal basses were made in '94.

Just a quick look at what other builders have to say results in this:

Mike Tobias:

The MTD American

maple neck and rosewood board is more open and slightly warmer than a maple neck and maple board. Ebony on maple is very quick in its response with lots of snap. I have been trying ash as a neck material and found it to be leaning towards wenge but more open.

http://www.jemsite.com/jem/wood.htm

Fretboard Woods:

Perhaps more significant than neck wood, the fretboard is the place your string launches from. It is the “bridge” on the other side. Fretboard differences are as dramatic as those between a hardtail and a tremolo.
Maple:
Very bright and dense, Maple is highly reflective. When used on a fretboard, Maple encourages tremendous amounts of higher overtones and its tight, almost filtered away bass favors harmonics and variations in pick attack.

Rosewood:
The most common fretboard, Rosewood is naturally oily, and works well for any surface that sees frequent human contact. The sound is richer in fundamental than Maple because the stray overtones are absorbed into the oily pores

Ebony:
Ebony has a snappy, crisp attack with the density of Maple, but with more brittle grains, oilier pores, and a stronger fundamental tone than Maple. It has a tremendous amount of percussive overtones in the pick attack, that mute out shortly thereafter to foster great, long, sustain.

Pao Ferro:
Quite simply, Pao Ferro is a wood that falls between Rosewood and Ebony, and the tone follows suit. It has a snappier attack than rosewood, with good sustain, and its warmer sounding than Ebony. Some consider Pao Ferro to represent their favorite aspects of the two.

Alembic:

Alembic - Fingerboards

(while they say it doesn't matter as much on a fretted bass as a fretless, they give the following impressions)

Ebony is our first choice for fingerboards.
For fretless basses, Ebony offers the most versatile sound. Unmatched for smooth glissando, Ebony adds a melodic quality to the tone. Growly sounds are possible, but take a little more effort on the part of the player to produce.

If you are looking for a "no-brainer" growly sound for fretless, Pau Ferro is your wood.

As with all Rosewood fingerboards, Coco Bolo wears well and has a very slightly tacky touch. It's a good middle ground between Ebony and Pau Ferro. It offers a fair amount of growl without much effort, but retains access to more melodic sounds.

Warr

WarrZONE.com: Wood Science

Fingerboard woods will also play a role on the finished product, especially with the wider fingerboards found on touch-guitars. The overall affect on tone is small, but noticeable. Wenge is a bit of an exception to the dark/light rule, and has some nice high-end to it. We consider it well balanced, and that is why it is used so much for our fingerboards. Purpleheart is pretty neutral, and while it looks nice, we don’t have a great fondness for its tone. Pau ferro has an excellent tone, but is not always available. Goncolo-alves also sounds very good, and has a unique look due to its grain and bright colors.

Suhr

Suhr Guitars Information on Wood - Expanding the Experience of Tone!

Maple – Maple has a unique tone, strong in the midrange with a sweet spanky high end. Maple will cut through when you need it and it is never muddy on the bass.

Maple / Pau Ferro – Quarter sawn Pau Ferro has the good properties of Ebony but seems to be more reliable and stable. Pau Ferro is a tight grained hardwood with excellent clarity on the "chunk" tones when using gain, especially when teamed up with an alder body. In overdrive mode it has a fatter low end and more pronounced sparkle when compared to Maple.

Maple / Indian Rosewood – Sweet and warm with some sparkle on the top end, Indian Rosewood is probably one of the most popular fingerboard woods. It is open grained with colors ranging from brown black to red brown. Warm and fat, it is not too bright and not too dark - very neutral, it does however have more "sizzle" than 1-piece Maple necks.

Maple / African Rosewood – African Rosewood is rich in color: red brown with interesting patterns to sometimes almost black. Madagascar seems to have a wide frequency response - brilliant highs and punchy lows. It is tight-grained Rosewood similar to Brazilian Rosewood. This fingerboard wood is good with darker sounding body woods and humbucker settings. Exhibiting strong upper midrange and extra presence, it's slappy. The African is very similar to Brazilian in color and tone. Our species is actually a brown Madagascar.

Maple / Brazilian Rosewood – Limited in availability, Brazilian Rosewood has the characteristics of Indian and Madagascar rolled into one. It doesn't have as much brights as the Madagascar and is more crisp than Indian. It is best not used on Ash unless you like brights or you compensate in some other way like using darker sounding pickups or bridge.

Now do you notice that as subjective as describing tone with words is, all these builders are saying the same thing about the tone of each wood? What does that tell you? They are all hearing the same thing.

Yeah, it's all marketing.

Also, the same bodies with different tops will sound different, even if the top is only 1/4" thick. My zebrawood top bass is much warmer sounding than the maple top bass, even though all the other woods, including the neck, are the same, and from the same boards.

[automan]

Mike Tobias and I had this same conversation in his shop when it was located off Massman Drive in Nashville, TN. He is definitely in your camp. He believes that any wood you add or remove from an instrument changes the tone enough to notice. I personally think that an ebony head stock veneer gives a more focused sound than an ebonite veneer. ;-)

On the others, I bet we could dig up the sales information on most every guitar manufacturer in the world and find comparisons from the warmness of rosewood to the tightness of ebony, but they are just that... sales literature. Seth Lover said he would have done away with the adjustable pole pieces, but the sales staff wouldn't hear of it.

I grew up thinking all these different woods sound different just from reading all that sales literature as a kid. I believed it into my first years as a luthier, but after a while, I noticed that I just couldn't hear a difference with a lot of different things. Do I believe mass changes tone? Absolutely... when it comes to the big parts of an instrument like a body. But in the scope of an eight pound instrument, do I think changing from an ebony to a rosewood fingerboard will warm up the sound of an instrument? Not so much.

I respect your opinion, though. Maybe your ears are just better than mine.

[David Schwab]

You are missing an important point. It's not al about mass, it's stiffness vs. weight. For example, you can even out the tone of a neck with dead notes by either adding mass to the headstock, which can even be a weight clamped on it, or by making the neck stiffer. If it's stiff enough, you can even make it out of lighter wood for a warmer tone.

Building other people's guitar designs wont teach you as much as trying your own designs. You learn technique, but you need to try different ideas and see what they do.

Regarding headstock veneers. Gibson has a crappy neck design, in that they band saw the neck out. The headstock is weak and flexible. You see how many heads break off in falls. Using a spliced on head with back strapping makes a stronger head and a better tone.

When I started designing my main bass model back in the early 90's I had definite ideas about the tone I was going for and how to get it using various wood combinations.

On my very first neck from scratch, I replaced a maple Fender P neck with my own design that had graphite rods and an ebony board. It sounded like a different bass. Not slightly, but very profoundly. More low end, and a much smoother upper midrange. That experience taught me a lot about neck design.

Oh and I think Mike's a great luthier. I guess we are in the same camp, which is really the Rick Turner camp. A very good friend of mine worked for Tobias when he was in Florida, and I saw and played many of his early instruments, including the very first bass, which was fretless, and went on tour with Ian Dury. He made a lot of guitars back then. Gibson can't touch him... just look at the lousy job they are doing with his designs. I wont get into the debauchery they made of Steinberger either.

This is the way I do a headstock.

This bass was made in '94.

[Possum]

....

Yeah I'm with Dave, a rosewood strat and a maple neck strat are noticeably different.

Try lowering your pickups, I knew this guy at the jam who had his bridge in his strat bottomed out, it sounded like a neck pickup, very dark. You can also try demagnetizing your magnets down to say 600-800 gauss, it will help a tiny bit but also give you more sustain. Also strat bridge pickups I lower the treble side a bit lower than the bass side and that helps tame the shrill too....

[automan]

Here is the last bass i built for a customer (my wife is holding it). He designed the body and decided the woods he wanted. I normally put a headstock veneer, but he asked me not to. He likes seeing the neck-through pieces from the front.

[David Schwab]

Here is the last bass i built for a customer (my wife is holding it). He designed the body and decided the woods he wanted. I normally put a headstock veneer, but he asked me not to. He likes seeing the neck-through pieces from the front.

That's purdy! See, you do the hippy sandwich thing too! My fingers hurt just looking at purpleheart! Every time I touch the stuff I get a splinter. I use a of of it though.

Very nice work.

Here's the bass in the head photo.