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fretboard material

#141
There's more to the cleanability of a finish than how it is initially. The thing about maple is that though at first the finish is easy to clean (since maple almost always has a hard finish) once the finish get's any kind of nicks or wear it fairly quickly get's black stains and is hard to clean.

Rosewood and ebony on the other hand will get dirty, but even if playing with the nastieset hands you can naptha out the grease and oil it back to a lovely shine.
 
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#142
Brad Johnson said:
That explains your confusion.

I've repeatedly said that electric basses are fundamentally acoustic devices. I've explained at length why. Not once did I say that this involved an amplifier of any type... other than a chin or drywall.

So you insert that into this discussion for what purpose? A white flag? And the sound of an unplugged Mellotron's tapes just continues the silliness. Can't respond to the Hammond? No doubt. Yes, the Leslie's rotating devices make noise. Can you take that sound, play it in 16ths, play a I-IV-V progression... because you can on an unplugged bass.
:D

PITCH MATTERS. Do you seriously not understand that? If so, cool.
:D
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I disagree that electric basses are acoustic instruments. To me they are clearly electro-mechanical devices in which any sound heard acoustically is incidental to their function. I have tried to explain this, but seemingly failed to do so convincingly.
 
#143
Eilif said:
There's more to the cleanability of a finish than how it is initially. The thing about maple is that though at first the finish is easy to clean (since maple almost always has a hard finish) once the finish get's any kind of nicks or wear it fairly quickly get's black stains and is hard to clean.

Rosewood and ebony on the other hand will get dirty, but even if playing with the nastieset hands you can naptha out the grease and oil it back to a lovely shine.
Click to expand...


The Maple thing is true in many cases but really depends on the finish. I have several finished Maple boards that have years of gigging on them and are neither dirty nor worn. They still look new. It can happen. As far as wearing quickly after a nick, that's a finish, not Maple issue IME.
 
#144
-Asdfgh- said:
I disagree that electric basses are acoustic instruments. To me they are clearly electro-mechanical devices in which any sound heard acoustically is incidental to their function. I have tried to explain this, but seemingly failed to do so convincingly.
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Cool. Name another not acoustic instrument that you can hear and play without amplification? Besides a Fender Rhodes.
;)

Here's a quote from an old friend:

"The most important thing I learned is that no matter what the instrument is, it is first and foremost acoustic. If an instrument sounds weak acoustically, adding pick-ups will just amplify its shortcomings. Throughout my career, I have tried to apply this principal to everything I build. By experimenting with different types and combinations of wood, I seek to get the best possible tone from an instrument." - M.Tobias

I remain unconvinced that you can't hear or play an unplugged electric bass.
:)

To the main topic, Mike has experimented exhaustively over several decades with neck and fingerboard materials and gets very consistent results with various combinations. I don't believe that to be coincidence.
 
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#145
Completely agree. I've had approx 80 basses over last 20 years and fully agree with mr Tobias on his thoughts. It's sad, almost ocd, but I'm at the point now where I can predict from the woods the bass is made from and the weight of the instrument im able to pretty accurately predict how it will sound. I don't need to plug it in either.

This is not a big thing to 95 percent of people likely. I'm unfortunately in the cork sniffer, glass swirler smaller percentage. Most folks are happy with bud light. Lol
 
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#146
-Asdfgh- said:
Even if a rosewood and maple fretboard are measurably different, they may not be audibly so, and you'd need to sample many examples to determine if it was related to species of wood and not some other variation.
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You really don't need to do a lot of sampling - it's already been done. This debate has been addressed many times at TalkBass and there have been a fairly large number of folks who have sampled rosewood and maple boards. There may not be 100% agreement, but generally it seems that the samplers either could not hear a difference or felt that maple was brighter sounding. It's not scientific proof, but it's a decent size sample group.
 
#147
-Asdfgh- said:
They have made guitar bodies from cardboard, concrete, and perspex, and they sound pretty much identical. I haven't heard anyone making a neck from concrete, but there are graphite ones. Still sounds like a bass or guitar.

If the wood makes a significant contribution to the sound, then a significant amount of energy needs to have gone into the material. Due to the nature of wood, not much us going to be imparted back to the string from a large block, so it is subtractive. Subtractive loss to the resonances of a block/bar is a dead spot.
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Subtraction of overtones does not equate to a dead spot. It does change the timbre of the resultant sound.
 
#148
Brad Johnson said:
The Maple thing is true in many cases but really depends on the finish. I have several finished Maple boards that have years of gigging on them and are neither dirty nor worn. They still look new. It can happen. As far as wearing quickly after a nick, that's a finish, not Maple issue IME.
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I agree that it will be largely the fault of the finish but it Is a maple issue because it is not an issue off concern with the other common board woods.

Anyone buying a maple board instrument should know there is a chance of discoloration over the years. You can avoid this by promptly addressing any finish damage that occurs but it is an issue with maple and not darker woods.
 
#149
I would only expect someone to "sniff the cork" when ordering the house Merlot at Olive garden.
JPMcGuire said:
Completely agree. I've had approx 80 basses over last 20 years and fully agree with mr Tobias on his thoughts. It's sad, almost ocd, but I'm at the point now where I can predict from the woods the bass is made from and the weight of the instrument im able to pretty accurately predict how it will sound. I don't need to plug it in either.

This is not a big thing to 95 percent of people likely. I'm unfortunately in the cork sniffer, glass swirler smaller percentage. Most folks are happy with bud light. Lol
Click to expand...
 
#150
Turnaround said:
You really don't need to do a lot of sampling - it's already been done. This debate has been addressed many times at TalkBass and there have been a fairly large number of folks who have sampled rosewood and maple boards. There may not be 100% agreement, but generally it seems that the samplers either could not hear a difference or felt that maple was brighter sounding. It's not scientific proof, but it's a decent size sample group.
Click to expand...

It's not statistically valid sampling, under controlled conditions, so it's both not scientific but also not necessarily even correct. People can, if not done under controlled conditions, claim to hear, see, or feel all sorts of things that under double blind, or even single blind, tests cannot. So I am sceptical. My null hypothesis is no change. Since I have both maple and rosewood fretboard necks available, I could test it.
 
#151
Brad Johnson said:
I remain unconvinced that you can't hear or play an unplugged electric bass.
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Of course you can hear it, but that doesn't make it an acoustic instrument as the means of presentation of the sound on a recording or to an audience is not a microphone picking up the sound that directly emanates from the instrument, but from the electro-mechanical system. An acoustic bass guitar is potentially an acoustic instrument as you can present the natural sound on a recording or to an audience, although to an audience you typically need to amplify it. Put it this way, I have played an acoustic bass guitar in a folk club with other instruments in a quiet session without amplification, but it would be pretty much impossible to do that with an electric bass guitar. I have played both in folk clubs with amplification too.
 
#152
Brad Johnson said:
"The most important thing I learned is that no matter what the instrument is, it is first and foremost acoustic. If an instrument sounds weak acoustically, adding pick-ups will just amplify its shortcomings. Throughout my career, I have tried to apply this principal to everything I build. By experimenting with different types and combinations of wood, I seek to get the best possible tone from an instrument." - M.Tobias
Click to expand...

If the characteristics of the electro-mechanical system are modified by the nature of the wood, it still doesn't make it an acoustic instrument. The wood is fulfilling the effect of a filter in an electro-mechanical system.
 
#153
-Asdfgh- said:
It's not statistically valid sampling, under controlled conditions, so it's both not scientific but also not necessarily even correct. People can, if not done under controlled conditions, claim to hear, see, or feel all sorts of things that under double blind, or even single blind, tests cannot. So I am sceptical. My null hypothesis is no change. Since I have both maple and rosewood fretboard necks available, I could test it.
Click to expand...
Statistically valid or not, on something like this if the majority of people feel a certain way about something there's a cumulative validity to what they are feeling. Even if scientifically they are wrong.
 
#155
-Asdfgh- said:
I don't feel stands up to logical analysis. I am not sure I could prove it doesn't. :)
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Who cares? Like the old saying - "if it looks like a duck, smells like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a duck". Even if it isn't a duck, we'll call it one 'cuz that's the way we feel about it. Even if you could prove it isn't a duck you'll get an argument from those who think you are wrong. And the duck?.... she thinks she's a llama. We could prove her wrong, but our time is better spent roasting her with some chestnut dressing accompanied by a nice bottle of Reisling. While playing the ultimate bass solo.
:cool:


...on a bass with a nice bright maple board. Hah!
 
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#156
I don't believe it really matters what material your fretboard or neck is made of. There will be some difference in sound but it won't be much. I think you should purely go for the looks or stability of the neck instead of sound.

The denser the wood, the less it will react to humidity and temperature differences. That's why my preference goes to ebonol, which is non organic and isn't affected by wheater changes XD
 
#157
I once saw a guy on youtube go on for a whole hour on the mathematics of why the type of wood doesn't make any difference to the sound on an electric instrument. He had a white board with formulas, etc. Of course, I wasn't about to endure the whole hour or even a significant part of it; I'm not a mathematician nor was the subject that important to me. He kept iterating, "you can't argue with the math". I couldn't help but think, "but how do we know you're not misapplying the math?" In other words, one hour of mathematical gymnastics and measurebating doesn't necessarily amount to something. But who am I to say.
 
#159
The math does support different woods, different tone for sure and many of the other factors involved. Many mechanical engineering text books cover the basics on this. Look under, acoustic engineering, or noise, vibration, harshness and a bunch of books will come up. It will not necessarily cover a guitar/bass specifically of course, but will outline the engineering/math relationships you could apply. With a rubber mallet, an accelerometer, freq analyzer, software you could test and model and compare basses acoustic response mathematically/with data. It could even be correlated in FEA sim and then run sims on all kinds of factors.

70s Custom Mod said:
I once saw a guy on youtube go on for a whole hour on the mathematics of why the type of wood doesn't make any difference to the sound on an electric instrument. He had a white board with formulas, etc. Of course, I wasn't about to endure the whole hour or even a significant part of it; I'm not a mathematician nor was the subject that important to me. He kept iterating, "you can't argue with the math". I couldn't help but think, "but how do we know you're not misapplying the math?" In other words, one hour of mathematical gymnastics and measurebating doesn't necessarily amount to something. But who am I to say.
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