Educate me on swamp ash wood for higain

V

vejichan

Inspired
I have guitars made of alder, basswood, mahogany and koa but never tried swamp ash.

As i got older, i realized i gravitate toward lighter weight guitars like alder and basswood..i avoid heavier woods like koa and mahogany. When it comes to higher gain progressive metal, hows swamp ash compare to alder and basswood? Pros and cons? I have no experience with swamp ash..all i know is that its a common wood used in Telecasters. Please share your experience and thoughts.

Thank you
 
I have a Mayones Regius 7, the body is made of swamp ash. It's hard to generalize about woods and it wasn't the criteria for me to buy this guitar. I just trusted Mayones that they can pick a good wood, that's all.

I can only tell you that I'm very happy with this guitar. Especially since I installed Polymaths. What I got is a very acoustical sound (as I would hear exactly the wood quality) with a good string separation but powerful and sounding full on high gain settings. It's richly saturated in a warm way but not too much at all. OK, this is due to Polymaths. But they emphasize the sound of the guitar itself. Which I like very much, as I already told. I have for the first time in my life a guitar, where if I play AC/DC, its sounds like AC/DC. If I play funk, it sounds genuine. If I down tune it, it crushes while staying very defined. Is it also because of swamp ash? Probably yes. That's my feedback if it helps. And it is indeed a light guitar.
 
Ash in general has open pours and a hardwood structure giving it a bright and immediate response . Sometimes it can lack a bit in the mids but mostly a really good balanced resonance across the spectrum. It actually has more in common with mahogany than alder from a body wood perspective . The reason your typical swamp ash guitar sounds quite different from a Gibson is the construction and the fact that most Gibsons also have a mahogany neck. A light mahogany body on a Fender sounds very similar.
 
I have a Chapman, kind of a mid range guitar, it's a mahogany neck through with swamp ash wings. It's a pleasure to play, very light. The stock pickups were higher gain pickups that I swapped out - thats not really my thing, but before I swapped them out, it sounded pretty good at that style of music.

For sale, if you're anywhere near the Sunshine Coast!
 
Watch this video before diving too deep on tone wood. Enlightening.. and maybe surprising. Then invest in some really good pickups.

 
vejichan said:
I have guitars made of alder, basswood, mahogany and koa but never tried swamp ash.

As i got older, i realized i gravitate toward lighter weight guitars like alder and basswood..i avoid heavier woods like koa and mahogany. When it comes to higher gain progressive metal, hows swamp ash compare to alder and basswood? Pros and cons? I have no experience with swamp ash..all i know is that its a common wood used in Telecasters. Please share your experience and thoughts.

Thank you
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Some dude from PRS spoke at a past Vai academy and was like, strain of wood doesn't matter, we match the pieces. He had a few blocks and hit 'em and discussed what they'd choose to do with each one. Agree pickups, picks and fingers spell out most of the tone.
 
I know it doesn't affect the final tone that gets sent down the cable, but wood absolutely does affect the feel of how the guitar plays.

I personally love the way swamp ash vibrates. It gives the guitar a much more raw and immediate feeling. One of my favorite guitars for high gain is a Jackson HT6 Modern Ash. You can feel every single note even when playing heavily distorted dropped power chords. Definitely an Ash fan here 👍
 
Greg Ferguson said:
It’s interesting, but what woods are his benches made from? And do the benches have nails or screws, and if screws, are they brass or iron screws?
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The type of wood used for benches has been debated many, many times on the Fractal forums.

As for what's holding a bench together ...

I always used to go with nails for blues and classic rock. And, I thought I'd have to have iron screws for heavy music.

But lately, I'm on the fence about that. Of course, the wood used for the fence really makes all the difference.
 
Greg Ferguson said:
It’s interesting, but what woods are his benches made from? And do the benches have nails or screws, and if screws, are they brass or iron screws?
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I would not debate that the sound of a guitar is affected by materials. Certainly true for acoustics, so why not electrics? What I found most interesting about Lill’s video was the degree to which all of his variations affected “tone” as defined in the video. Very little to my ear. I was left with the notion that for higher gain applications, the pickups matter more and that is where I would be smart to put my money. That has worked for me. I upgraded pups in my Gibson explorer and my BC Rich to Jim Wagner’s America’s steel set, and they are basically interchangeable with my PRS for all my AxeFx and AX8 presets. That problem solved, at least for me. Again,others certainly see this differently - and there is a lot of room in this big old world! 😁
 
secondwindow said:
The type of wood used for benches has been debated many, many times on the Fractal forums.

As for what's holding a bench together ...

I always used to go with nails for blues and classic rock. And, I thought I'd have to have iron screws for heavy music.

But lately, I'm on the fence about that. Of course, the wood used for the fence really makes all the difference.
Click to expand...
Petrified wood preserves the fragile harmonics in the crystal lattice. The hard part is sourcing enough petrified wood to build the fence from.


Seriously, I'm not good enough for any of this to matter at all for my playing. My fingers ensure that I sound mediocre.
 
Andy Eagle said:
Wood matters a lot but the species does not . It need to be mechanically fit for the purpose and the pieces must resonate harmonically together . The rest is personal taste and marketing BS. "Tone wood" as a term is BS.
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I've wondered if some of the go-to "tone woods" for certain things have earned that status just because it's easier to get the desired result.

So, a good-sounding jumbo acoustic doesn't have to have an Adirondack spruce top, so long as the wood selected has the properties that make it sound the way you want.
 
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