Guitar tops - which wood is best?

[OutdoorsInTexas]

I know cedar and Sitka spruce are great woods for solid guitar tops. Are there any out there considered better or is any variety considered the absolute best?

[ljguitar]

Originally Posted by OutdoorsInTexas

I know cedar and Sitka spruce are great woods for solid guitar tops. Are there any out there considered better or is any variety considered the absolute best?

Hi oit…
Well as a singer-songwriter and arranger Cedar top is best for me...my go to is the Cedar top as a fingerstyler, and singer, and accompanist...except when I'm in the mood to play a full and robust jazz treble and then my Italian Spruce topped ends up in hand.

And when I’m just comping and playing 2nd guitar behind someone else for a gig, my Sitka spruce topped one is really cool.

And when we're travelling the voyage Air VAOM-06 has a wonderful ''Select Spruce solid top'' and when I select that guitar, it sings to me as well.

It really is your style and technique and your ear which count, so you need to play as many as possible without just taking our word for it. We only think we know what's best...

[pbankey]

Quick answer: Nope
Longer answer: Very subjective. A "perfect" topwood is generally sound preference and whatever complements a person's playing style. There is no "best" wood, but each wood has a unique personality. I'd just experiment to find which one you looks.

[AZLiberty]

Pretty much any of the softwoods can be used for a guitar top, I have guitars with Sitka, Englemann, and Italian spruce tops. There are wonderful guitars out there with cedar and redwood tops

There is no "BEST". There may be what is better for a particular style of playing, but there is no best.

My favorite guitar is still my Englemann topped Rosewood OM.

[Andromeda]

Like with most thing with our guitar playing it is very subjective. I really love cedar and it has become my favorite topwood. I am beginning to find spruce a little harsh for my ears. Some people don't like hard wood tops like Mahogany, Koa or walnut but I really love both all mahogany and all walnut guitars.

[Jeff M]

I'll just pile on to what the others have said, there is no "best".
Depends on who built your guitar, guitar design, how you play the guitar, what you like to hear.
There are lots of excellent top woods to choose from.
Sitka, Adirondac, cedar, "European" spruce, Engelmann, Lutz. Redwood.
Some folks like the way hardwoods like mahogany and koa can sound.

[ewalling]

Currently I own two sitka topped guitars, one adirondack and one carbon fibre birch veneer (I suppose that one doesn't count, does it? ) In the past I've owned a few cedar-topped guitars, too. My difficulty in saying I prefer this or that is that I never know which part of the sound is attributable to the shape, which to the bracing, which to the weight, which to the back and side woods, etc. For that reason, I would never look for a guitar with a particular top, just as I would not look for specific back and side woods. Such an approach would be too unpredictable, in my view.

[Wade Hampton]

Just to add to the general ambivalence of the thread so far, what you'll typically find is that there is so much variation within any given species of spruce that no one can absolutely predict what top will sound best in which application. There are some general characteristics that can be assigned (rather loosely) to each of these spruce species - Sitka is robust and warm, Englemann does well on fingerstyle guitars, Adirondack is clear and direct and works well for flatpicking, Carpathian does this, German does that, etc., etc. - but the truth is any spruce can mimic any other spruce. So the truth is it really depends on how THAT piece of spruce sounds on THAT guitar.

Here are a few generalizations that I think are mostly true:

1.) Cedar tops break in faster and give you a richer tone right away, but often don't have quite the same dynamic range and assortment of tone colors you can get with spruce. What's more, cedar is definitely softer than spruce and thus more prone to dings, dents and scratches.

2.) Spruce tops take a few months longer to start breaking in compared to cedar, and until they do can sometimes sound harsher. But most of the spruce species used for instrument tops are very versatile, and can give you a wider range of tones once you develop enough technique to be able to pull them out of the guitar.

3. Hardwood tops such as mahogany and walnut are definitely quieter than softwood tops, definitely take much longer to break in, and even when fully broken in don't offer as many tone colors as either spruce or cedar. But they have a great sweetness and clarity of tone, so when played in a way that takes advantages of their best qualities they can be exquisitely musical.

What I suggest you do is take the time to make the pilgrimage to a good acoustic guitar-oriented music store, and try to schedule your visit so that you're there when the weekend or after-school guitar thrashers are not. Right after opening time on a weekday morning is usually the time to go if you want to hear yourself.

So make some time to do that, and listen to the various wood combinations and body styles until you can get a sense for yourself how all these various components fit together.

So, short version: there is no "best" topwood, but you may find that there is a topwood that seems to work best for you. But none of us can tell you what that might be, because you basically have to put in the time and discover that for yourself.

Hope that makes sense.


Wade Hampton Miller

[rmyAddison]

Like the gang said there is no best, and what woods the top is paired with counts too.

I currently have tops of Sitka, Adirondack, Engelmann and Carpathian and backs of Mahogany, EIr, Madagascar and Tazmanian Blackwood.

My favorite dreads combo is Adi over Mahogany, smaller body Engelmann over Madagascar.

[mmasters]

Just different flavors, some are more abundant like sitka, some are less abundant like red spruce--that's most of the price difference.

[Howard Klepper]

I consider a good European spruce ("German", "Alpine", "Italian", "Swiss", "Norway", "Carpathian", etc.) top to be the best all around, and it's my default wood. Depending on the guitar's purposes, I might recommend something else.

Yes, the properties of the different softwoods--especially the different spruces--used for tops overlap a lot, and some samples of one species will be indistinguishable acoustically from some samples of another. That does not mean that typical tops of these species do not differ, or that the choice is not likely to affect the sound of the guitar. There are a couple (well, actually just one I can think of) of luthiers who take the substantial overlap to mean that there is no point trying to make generalized distinctions among species, and that it's a mistake or "irresponsible" to say that they differ. IMO that is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and ignores a large body of laboratory test results which show physical differences among these species as well as a large body of lutherie experience.

[random works]

I also wonder if wood from years ago ( if it has been cared for well) sounds much different from the same cut/species harvested and cured recently.

picks and spruce ( or mahogany) seen to go better than picks and cedar.

The "best wood" for a top may change along with your technique and style
just as body type and string selection can.