Fretboard woods: can anyone genuinely FEEL the difference?

Skipped · April 2016

If the maple board/neck is on a Fender guitar, and the laquer has been applied with a Creosote Brush, then yes - I can 100% feel the difference. After buying a mid 90's USA Strat I realised that I hated the glossy fingerboard. Who cares what the wood is? It could be any material. My fingers are making contact with what feels like a plastic fretboard.
I hope that Fenders are not all like that. Vintage fenders with heavy wear feel OK to me.

Rosewood and Ebony are closer. I am quite happy to consider that I might be deluding myself when I claim that Ebony feels harder and has more snap to the sound. A Braz Rosewood board on a 50's Gibson feels pretty hard.

Basher · April 2016

As others have said (@ICBM I think) it depends on fret size.
The vintage frets on my strat and low-wide ones on my SA2200 mean I can feel the lacquered maple and ebony respectively.
The tall jumbos on my Casino and rosewood 'boarded Tokai Tele give less contact so I feel almost like I'm playing a scalloped neck.

I would say this though. On something like the Yamaha, or any block inlay guitar, surely you're playing as often on the inlays as you are on the fretboard. If there was that much of a difference in feel between materials you would be able to tell when you're fretting on wood or inlay?

johnonguitar · April 2016

Basher;1032825" said:
As others have said (@ICBM I think) it depends on fret size.

The vintage frets on my strat and low-wide ones on my SA2200 mean I can feel the lacquered maple and ebony respectively.

The tall jumbos on my Casino and rosewood 'boarded Tokai Tele give less contact so I feel almost like I'm playing a scalloped neck.

I would say this though. On something like the Yamaha, or any block inlay guitar, surely you're playing as often on the inlays as you are on the fretboard. If there was that much of a difference in feel between materials you would be able to tell when you're fretting on wood or inlay?

That's a good point!

ICBM · April 2016

Basher said:
I would say this though. On something like the Yamaha, or any block inlay guitar, surely you're playing as often on the inlays as you are on the fretboard. If there was that much of a difference in feel between materials you would be able to tell when you're fretting on wood or inlay?

Yes, and you can.

johnonguitar · April 2016

ICBM;1032829" said:
Basher said:I would say this though. On something like the Yamaha, or any block inlay guitar, surely you're playing as often on the inlays as you are on the fretboard. If there was that much of a difference in feel between materials you would be able to tell when you're fretting on wood or inlay?

Yes, and you can.

What's the deal with someone shoving a bunch of mother of pearl inlays in your braz rosewood board then? Surely that totally ruins the tonal quantities?

richardhomer · April 2016

johnonguitar;1032856" said:
[quote="ICBM;1032829"]What's the deal with someone shoving a bunch of mother of pearl inlays in your braz rosewood board then? Surely that totally ruins the tonal quantities?

No - the frets are seated in the wood, not the inlay.

I'm unconvinced a Brazillian board makes a massive difference over and above Indian - but insofar as fingerboard woods DO make a difference, inlays have nothing to do with what you hear.

ICBM · April 2016

johnonguitar said:
What's the deal with someone shoving a bunch of mother of pearl inlays in your braz rosewood board then? Surely that totally ruins the tonal quantities?

Not the tone - that's determined by the hardness of the wood where the frets are mounted into it, I'm pretty sure - but I do find large pearl plastic inlays can feel odd on a rosewood board, because there can be a difference in texture between the very smooth plastic and the rougher wood. Much less so on ebony because they're more similar.

octatonic · April 2016

Confirmation bias a-go-go.

Thing is that we can see our fingerboards which skews our opinion of how they sound and in lieu of a double blind test it is going to rumble on forever.

Having a stab- in terms of feel, if you are given a guitar that you cannot see then I reckon you could maybe tell the difference between a finished and unfinished board because they feel so different under the fingers.

As to whether people can tell the tonal difference between different types of rosewood- I don't believe it.

In acoustic guitar body woods, telling different species is possible because it has such a different impact on sound... maybe, just maybe the neck woods.

Fingerboards are such a tiny amount of the overall mass of the instrument and not really a tonal contributor, and there are so many variables with bracing and construction techniques.

Also, variation within wood species- you can get bright rosewood or dark sounding rosewood- it depends on the piece of wood.

In an electric- it is pretty much all the amp/speaker/pickups.

Also manufacturers have a vested interest in feeding this sort of thing within guitar culture.

ICBM · April 2016

octatonic said:

Confirmation bias a-go-go.

Thing is that we can see our fingerboards which skews our opinion of how they sound and in lieu of a double blind test it is going to rumble on forever.

Somebody did a blind test (audio samples, I can't remember what resolution) between maple and rosewood boards, and there was no consistently detectable difference.

This is not surprising since maple and rosewood are actually of very similar hardness.

octatonic said:
In an electric- it is pretty much all the amp/speaker/pickups.

But I completely disagree with that.

If it was all the amp, speakers and pickups then a Les Paul, an SG and a 335 fitted with the same pickups would all sound the same.

Even with the same type of solidbody guitar there is objective scientific evidence which proves that the body wood makes a substantial difference - frequency graphs taken with two different bodies and all the rest of the parts swapped.

octatonic · April 2016

ICBM said:

But I completely disagree with that.

If it was all the amp, speakers and pickups then a Les Paul, an SG and a 335 fitted with the same pickups would all sound the same.

Even with the same type of solidbody guitar there is objective scientific evidence which proves that the body wood makes a substantial difference - frequency graphs taken with two different bodies and all the rest of the parts swapped.

LP/SG and 335 have a different type of construction though.

I am talking about a scenario where one variable is changed- such as body wood, neck wood or fingerboard wood in an electric guitar construction.

Take the same body thickness with different species of wood.

Wood species makes less of an impact than pickups/amplifier/speaker.

The construction type makes more of an impact than wood species.

A friend of mine wrote his dissertation on this topic.

I'll see if I can dig out his research but he made something like 10 telecaster bodies out of different woods and then made some recordings, even using a device so that the force used to pluck the string would be the same from guitar to guitar.

He used the same neck for everything.

Same pickups, same bridge, same everything.

The results were that there was very little difference between the various types of wood.

p90fool · April 2016

Did he make one out of teak? I did, it had horrible upper midrange overtones I couldn'tget rid of. The difference wasn't subtle, just a body swap turned it into a vile sounding guitar.

octatonic · April 2016

p90fool said:

Did he make one out of teak? I did, it had horrible upper midrange overtones I couldn'tget rid of. The difference wasn't subtle, just a body swap turned it into a vile sounding guitar.

IIRC it was the usual suspects: alder/ash/korina/basswood/mahogany.

He made a couple of versions of each species.

The point of doing that was to compare variation within a single species to variation between different species.

I'd need to ask him for the results but I remember him saying to me that there was no appreciable difference in the variation between two pieces of wood within the same species as there was between wood of different species.

kjdowd · April 2016

I definitely prefer a rosewood or ebony board to play, and struggle a bit with maple boards.

ICBM · April 2016

octatonic said:
LP/SG and 335 have a different type of construction though.
I am talking about a scenario where one variable is changed- such as body wood, neck wood or fingerboard wood in an electric guitar construction.
Take the same body thickness with different species of wood.

Wood species makes less of an impact than pickups/amplifier/speaker.
The construction type makes more of an impact than wood species.

Yes, I agree with that - but it's a completely different thing from saying that the sound of an electric guitar is pretty much all down to the pickups, amp and speakers.

The construction of the guitar makes a very big difference, and the type of woods used can - depending on what, and where - also make an important difference.

octatonic said:
A friend of mine wrote his dissertation on this topic.
I'll see if I can dig out his research but he made something like 10 telecaster bodies out of different woods and then made some recordings, even using a device so that the force used to pluck the string would be the same from guitar to guitar.
He used the same neck for everything.
Same pickups, same bridge, same everything.

The results were that there was very little difference between the various types of wood.

Is that the study where the published conclusion was that the wood species made no difference, but when you looked at the actual graphs, there were differences of around +/-10dB at some frequencies? Which completely contradicts the written conclusion, and does in fact prove conclusively that wood type does make a *big* difference.

If it wasn't him, someone else did exactly that.

Sassafras · April 2016

I find a very noticeable tonal difference between say, a mahogany body and an ash or alder body.

octatonic · April 2016

Sassafras said:

I find a very noticeable tonal difference between say, a mahogany body and an ash or alder body.

But you are prone to confirmation bias and that really is my point.

You think you can tell the difference but you are a flawed human being with a tendency to fill in the blanks and hear things that under lab conditions can be disproved.

crunchman · April 2016

Body wood definitely makes a difference. You can hear the difference between a PRS Custom and a PRS Standard. The only difference is the whacking great big maple cap on the Custom but there is definitely a difference in sound.

Neck wood also makes a difference. Again using PRS as an example, track down a rosewood necked McCarty and compare it to a regular one with a mahogany neck.

Fingerboards may make a difference. I do hear a difference between my maple board Strat and my Rosewood board Strat but I do wonder if some of that is down to the neck construction. A 50's style neck where the fingerboard is an integral part of the neck, and the truss rod is put in from the back (skunk stripe) is a different construction to a rosewood board neck. It would be interesting to compare necks with a separate maple board constructed in the same way that a rosewood one is constructed.

ICBM · April 2016

Ah… found it.

http://www.stormriders.com/guitar/telecaster/guitar_wood.pdf

The graphs are absolutely clear: there is a large difference in the tone of the two bodies, both unplugged and in the amplified signal.

How they can come to the written conclusion that there is no real difference is beyond me - it can only be a lack of understanding as to what differences of that sort of dB level actually mean, even though the graphs are very approximately similar in shape.

octatonic · April 2016

ICBM said:

octatonic said:
LP/SG and 335 have a different type of construction though.
I am talking about a scenario where one variable is changed- such as body wood, neck wood or fingerboard wood in an electric guitar construction.
Take the same body thickness with different species of wood.

Wood species makes less of an impact than pickups/amplifier/speaker.
The construction type makes more of an impact than wood species.

Yes, I agree with that - but it's a completely different thing from saying that the sound of an electric guitar is pretty much all down to the pickups, amp and speakers.

Perhaps I wasn't speaking as precisely as I would have liked in my first post.

Let me try again.

What I am saying is when all other things are equal changing wood species of a single component is not significantly different from changing that component to another piece of the same species.

There can be as much tonal variability within two pieces of wood from the same species as there can be between two pieces of wood of different species.

In acoustic guitars this difference is more observable because there are no other filters between the instrument and the audience.

With an electric guitar the signal chain of pickup -> amp -> speaker is changing the tone significantly enough to mitigate much of whatever difference occurs.

Is that the study where the published conclusion was that the wood species made no difference, but when you looked at the actual graphs, there were differences of around +/-10dB at some frequencies? Which completely contradicts the written conclusion, and does in fact prove conclusively that wood type does make a *big* difference.

If it wasn't him, someone else did exactly that.

No, that wasn't him.

You won't have seen this research s it was an undergraduate project (although it was very well done) and I do not believe it was published.

octatonic · April 2016

ICBM said:

Ah… found it.

http://www.stormriders.com/guitar/telecaster/guitar_wood.pdf

The graphs are absolutely clear: there is a large difference in the tone of the two bodies, both unplugged and in the amplified signal.

How they can come to the written conclusion that there is no real difference is beyond me - it can only be a lack of understanding as to what differences of that sort of dB level actually mean, even though the graphs are very approximately similar in shape.

Yes, I agree that study isn't very well done.

For a start there is no uniformity in the strength of each pluck of the string.

My colleague came up with this very clever apparatus where each pluck was exactly the same strength.

I agree that the interpretation of the data was not great either.

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Fretboard woods: can anyone genuinely FEEL the difference?

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