Best wood for bass?

[jd56hawk]

My newest bass is a G&L L2000…empress with maple.
7.2 lbs.
Sounds incredible.
I wonder why.

 

[BioDriver]

The best sounding bass I’ve ever owned had a cherry body. I’m not sure why it’s not more poplar [pun intended]. But seriously, cherry.

Didn't Fodera use cherry bodies as their default for a spell? I've played some cherry basses and agree they sounded phenomenal. I'd imagine it's not more popular because it's not one of the traditional woods - alder, ash, or mahogany.

 

[Lesfunk]

Morning

 

[Solarmist]

Wood indeed is important to bass construction being it provides a mounting surface for bridges, tuners, electronics, fret wire, and more.

Does anyone want to see the list of the 125+ threads on "does wood matter"?

 

[Solarmist]

I heard Woody Allen is working on a new movie entitled "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Wood, But Were Afraid to Ask"
Sorry - I just had to.

 

[Durham52]

I feel like this is getting too complicated... It's a very simple question. I'm not asking about pickups or strings, I'm asking about wood and wood only. Like a few people said, there are other things than tone. I do believe wood vs pickups and strings etc. is a very interesting conversation, but I'm asking about wood. If you believe wood makes no difference, just don't respond from here on. I do believe this is an awesome subject, but I'd like to get it back on track a bit...

OK, after 30+ years of making and repairing guitars, I can only say that wood makes a difference to some degree, (variable?) but that difference can occur within the same species as well as between different species. Wood is a natural product, not every Alder, Maple, Ash, or whatever tree will grow the same, under the same climate, or with the same soil/nutrient balance. I once read that Lee Sklar said he tapped over a dozen P bass bodies to pick the one that went in his trusty and much played and recorded twin P bass pickup instrument. Likewise Clapton's Strat "Blackie" was made up of the parts of different Strats, with Eric settling on the combination of neck, body, pickups etcetera, that he thought sounded the best.

So just saying "I prefer 'whatever' wood, doesn't always mean that every 'whatever' body will sound exactly like every other 'whatever' body. Some people will say there's no difference, others will say there is.

Also we tend to judge an instrument as it sounds to us while playing it. To others listening to that instrument from a distance, possibly with background noises, or the effects of a rooms acoustics, the differences we hear may be lost, or reduced.

As a result I've always accepted that building an instrument out of particular woods, won't always give exactly the results hoped for, but mostly it does. (If you check every piece of wood before using it. But still sometimes.....)

I've had instruments that worked better with particular pickups, over others, (to my ears of course) but I had one body (hard ash) that just never sounded good to me with any neck/pickup/electrics combination. Though someone else really liked it. Each to their own eh?

 

[MtManiac]

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It's been scientifically proven that different woods affect tone via reverberation, absorption, vibration, etc:

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Sound quality assessment of wood for xylophone bars. - PubMed - NCBI
Wood for sound. - PubMed - NCBI
Material identification of real impact sounds: effects of size variation in steel, glass, wood, and plexiglass plates. - PubMed - NCBI
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As for the "best wood for bass," it's incredibly subjective and really depends on the sound you want, what other instruments you're playing with, style, genre, and other factors.

All of those studies appear to only be about longitudinal waves - basically, how air is compressed in between the source of the sound and your ear drum - so they *do* apply to acoustic instruments. *Electric* instruments however do not involve longitudinal waves, except for what you hear unplugged, and what comes out of your amp. Everything in between the string vibration and the amp's output relates to transverse waves - the vibration of the strings through the magnetic field created by the pickup, then the electrical signal created by that vibration and whatever is done to that electrical signal by the pickups, the pots, the effects, the cable lengths, the preamp, and the power amp. *Any* impact of the guitar's body wood will be minimal at best, if even discernible, with all of those other things having a much greater affect. If you disagree, that's fine, I don't need you to agree, but if you want to argue about it, you'll have to provide scientific studies that actually involve electric instruments, or perhaps a blind test. Any blind test I've heard, there has either been zero difference, or at least zero difference that matters, such as what might be different between two identical alder and rosewood P basses.

If after 35+ years of playing, *I* can't tell a difference, what impact can we suppose tonewood has on our audiences?

Play what you like, for whatever reason you like, and pay for it whatever you feel is justified, but we really need to end the bunk about alder and rosewood being "warmer" and ash and maple being "brighter and more aggressive sounding." For electrics, it's similar to naturopathy - it's purely designed to justify taking your money, and just isn't true. Maybe it works for you, but it isn't based on any thing factual or useful to anybody else.

 

[mongo2]

Just like people have different eyesight, they also have different hearing capabilities. Some can hear the differences and some can't. It's as simple as that.