Custom Made Bass Guitars
Welcome to My Guitar Home Page
This Web site features my own guitars (I might be selling them soon!) and general tips for care that I've gathered from research and from experience.
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My Guitars
Because bass guitars in general are hobbies of mine, I constantly buy, fix, and sell mine, often using this site to advertise. I plan to also advertise others' instruments on my site for free. See the information on the Contact page, if you're interested. I currently have a custom built (pictured on this page) and a MM lookalike that I put together. If interested, see my Contact page.
Woods and Tone
The Quest for Tone
Michael Tobias
Excerpt
The Elements
The tone of wood comprises many components, and it can be analyzed and described in a variety of ways. I'll try to do it here in non-scientific terms that will be meaningful to qualities of different types of wood is to rate them in terms of hardness. Simply put, hard
woods have a sound that is brighter, clearer, more articulate, and more conducive to a sharp attack than soft woods. If a bass is made entirely of hard woods, what you hear predominantly is
the attack and the fundamental. Soft woods are more sensitive, allowing you to hear the swelling of the overtones as a note sustains. By combining hard and soft woods, a builder can take advantage of both qualities --if the recipe is right.
A second, even more simplistic, way to rank woods is by color: light woods are generally brighter than dark woods. Sound silly? Think
about it--light -colored woods such as maple, alder, ash, and poplar are all brighter sounding than dark woods such as walnut, koa,
zebrawood, and rosewood.
A third factor in tone is weight/density. Lightweight wood is brighter
than heavy wood. The perfect example is swamp ash (also called light ash or southern ash). Lighter pieces of swamp ash have sweet
treble response and punchy midrange--but if the wood is too light, the bass response is weak. Heavier pieces lack the sweetness in the treble and that nice midrange, but they have a fuller, rounder low end.
The tone of a piece of wood is a combination of these elements. For instance: Bubinga is an extremely hard wood, even harder than Eastern rock maple. It does not have a brighter sound than maple, though, because it is much heavier.
Bubinga and such other hardwood as rosewood and goncalo alves contain large amount of oil, wax, or resin; this tends to darken their tone, even though they are hard.
