Woods used in making guitars: Which is best?

TJH, the best idea you'll get is by going to warmoth.com and clicking around until you come to their woods page. There is nothing on that page I would violently disagree with.

Briefly, some woods are suitable for bodies but keep away from the neck, some are great for necks, lousy for bodies, useless for fingerboards etc etc on all possible combinations. The things to consider are weight, ease of (or need for) coating with a finish, stability and, finally, tone. From bright to warm, it goes like this:

Maple, ebony, ash, alder/poplar/basswood, rosewood, mahogany, wenge.

The only wood that you could realistically make a guitar out of for body, neck and fingerboard is North American hard maple. That'd be one right twangy burger, though. I've missed out a ton of other exotics but Warmoth has all the blurb.

Now that's a good Q :wink: . I guess one could define "bright" as being high on initial attack (the pick really rings the note out), a relatively quick decay (the note volume drops fairly soon after picking) and a tendency to emphasize the treble over the bass. "Warm" is the opposite; a tendency to damp the initial pick and hold the note with a slow decay, and favouring the bass over the treble. Of course, the electronics and settings have their say but, all things being equal, that would be the effect of the wood choices.

Going from one extreme to the other...
Suppose you built one guitar with a maple body, maple bolt on neck with maple fingerboard. Then you fitted Telecaster single coils and selected the bridge pickup. You'll definitely get more of a twang than the other guy with a mahogany body, set or thru mahogany neck and a rosewood fingerboard, playing the neck humbucker. Even if the p'ups were kept the same, the maple guitar would be brighter than the mahogany one.

They don't build for you, TJH. What they do well (and for not to much money considering) is take a piece of wood and stick it in their CNC routers that are all set up to do the jobs Warmoth have programmed into them. They don't stray much from that, although they've covered most things.

Really, you have to have an idea of what you want, where. Putting it together is not much more difficult than an Ikea job, and I'd go to a trusted local tech for the final dressing and setup.

Talking of woods, is it true that Brazilian mahogany is internationaly banned? i recently did some work for a UK wood importers and a guy there said that you can still trade in it but it must be 'old stock' which has all but evaporated, thats why most stuff you see these days is Indian mahogany, if this is the case where does PRS get his seemingly inexhaustable supply from? and is the Brazilian mahogany better than the Indian??