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Brazillian Rosewood


Fullmental Alpinist

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Although the demonstrations are fascinating and may be illustrating, they merely enlighten the radiating and projecting function of the woods. However, there are solid-borne sound ascpects also coming into play. Years ago I talked to a luthier who told me that it's about speed of sound, mass inertia, elasticity, reflection and diffraction within the body and neck construction. These properties seem to explain what I experience with my piezo-equipped solidbody guitars, too.

 

There are four hard-tail and three Floyd Rose vibrato solidbody electrics, and the different sounds of the bodies translate to the piezo's output, too. The piezos also transduce tapping and knocking on body or neck like noises intentionally or unintentionally caused by the player. They sound distinctively different "boomy" when knocked with muted strings, and overall sound as well as overall behaviour come very close to those of piezo-transduced hollowbody guitars.

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Good stuff. I had a correspondence going on with John Greven several years ago when I was searching for the one "big guitar" I'd settle in on. I must have asked a million questions. At one point he told be that 90% of the sound of a particular guitar was in the top, that he could make a maple guitar sound like a rosewood guitar. Sometime later, he sent me one of his shop guitars on trial, to introduce me to his work. I kept it and played it for a couple of weeks. It was a Martin 0000 size, what John calls an "F," in maple and spruce. I've owned a few maple guitars, and I think maple has a "sound." This guitar didn't have that. It didn't exactly sound like rosewood, but it definitely sounded like "not maple."

 

With that said, Ervin Somogyi is an amazing builder, that piece of Braz sounded like a marimba and that was all very impressive. But there are a lot of ways to build great guitars.

 

P

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