I am new to the bass, but in starts I could not hear any tonal difference that wood brings. I had the same pickups in alder, ash, poplar, and basswood. Not new wood, always old instruments that are done aging basically. The only difference I noticed with wood is that the basswood bodies vibrated quite a bit more than others. From the two basswood bodies I tried at that time one of them was some Japanese weird Floyd rose knockoff bridge strat with humbucker routings (no pickguard) for which I had to make a single coil adapters, was very light and vibrated like an acoustic, was pretty loud unplugged as well. I love that in some weird way. Have no clue what brand it was as I just got the body with bridge painted bright yellow poly. I know it is basswood because I completely stripped it and refinished in dark gray stain with golden stripe through and coated in nitrocellulose lacquer. Apart from vibrating and being light which felt very good, it did not do anything else tonally to the sound of the electronics. Oh... Almost forgot, the basswood is also very soft so much easier to damage hard finish like nitrocellulose lacquer. So Alder is about twice harder than basswood... Swamp ash however well over twice as hard as alder... Basswood is a candle wax comparing to swamp ash. Not sure if there is any use in that above, but I like basswood for weight and feel. My bass is mahogany maple neck through, which pulls 10lb on a luggage scale. I am constantly thinking that I need to get a basswood bass to try. Maybe one of these days I find an SUB on Craig's for a couple of hundred bucks and see how that goes. So far I have not tried a basswood bass.
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Alder body vs. Swamp Ash body
- Thread starter dmaki
- Start date
what stops you? for some of us: the comfort thing far outweighs other considerations because it can 'liberate' you from some of the distractions of a heavy ax...especially since the other things have way more effect on tone.
for "lightweight," i'm into paulownia bodies in a serious way, but they all need neck-dive mitigation.
try a lightweight EB --- they sound the same but they are way more fun than the boat anchors. good luck!
... also note that there are several types of ash is used in bass bodies (not just "swamp ash"). Ash is also inconsistent in weight and two identical ash bodies, made out of the same type of ash, can have a very obvious difference in weight and some might appear to be lighter than an alder body. Not only in weight but also how they vibrate from the strings. Alder is more predictable in that respect. Obviously there are other factors when comparing two fully assembled bass guitars starting from amount of the removed wood from various cavities, to the neck differences, to even pickups as some are a lot heavier than others. If I myself was choosing from Ash or Alder, I would pick Ash not for tonal advantages that it may or may not bring to the table, but because it is more a better conversation piece (IMO).
