What is the best wood to use for a guitar?
I am building an electric guitar. It has a custom shape but is similar to a tele (but with more indents and curves) I am using a mahogany/rosewood neck (pre purchased) and cannot figure out what wood to use for the body. What wood would give me the best sound quality and durability? Originally I used ash, but i messed up the center line.
cnosal,
Sounds cool that you've got your own custom shape. For my part, I love the tone of a great mahogany/maple top guitar, but I also like alder and others. You've already got a mahogany neck, which will add a great warm tone to whatever wood you add it to. I'd say do alder or ash (even better would be swamp ash) but there are a lot of other interesting choices:
Walnut is a wood sometimes found in guitars (rickenbackers ...) and sounds and looks awesome. Also Basswood has a great balanced tone and is relatively lightweight and lots of the guitar gods use basswood (vai and satriani ... ).
I have a link to a site with very deep analysis of the different woods and their tone so you can dig deeper. I'll include the link below.
Note: Be sure to play with pickups when you are done, try a few different sets and see what sounds best - there are big differences with different woods. Take a look at bill lawrence pickups (the ones not from stew mac).
Good Luck with the build,
John
P.S. I'll also include a link below to a place where you can get cheap ash and alder blanks that you can use to carve your guitar out of.
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