• TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
    Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
    Join freeLog in
    Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.

LAMINATED WOOD means Plywood correct?

If a bass body is made of "LAMINATED WOOD" that means it is plywood correct?

A body can be made of a solid base material, say basswood, and laminated with bird's eye maple. That doesn't make it "plywood". On the other hand, one can definitely build a bass out of "plywood".....meaning a material made up of many layers of thin wood. Rosewood, ebony, etc. fretboards are "laminated" wood. They typically are not made of a solid hunk of wood. Early Fender maple necks were.
 
Hi.

If a bass body is made of "LAMINATED WOOD" that means it is plywood correct?

No.

There's a million ways to define both methods of using smaller layers of wood.

One trade definition for laminated wood is that it's made out of solid cuts, plywood on the other hand is always made out of turned sheets (obviously).

Sometimes plywood is said to be laminated instead, if the individual ply thickness is thick compared with the thickness of the plank, usually over 6mm/ 1/4".

Regards
Sam
 
Take a presentation-grade Tobias, with a figured top.

You've got the main body core, laminated to a fancy top, with a sheet of black veneer in the middle to make a contrast line. Taking this to extremes, you could argue that it has a 3-ply plywood body!

Ditto for the bass in my sig, which has thick figured maple body wings, split and laminated around an 1/8" slice of Bubinga for visual contrast.
 
plywood is made from scraps / chunks of wood boiled and glued together under high pressure

laminated wood comes in various qualities and is made from stacking sheets of wood and which can be steamed to form curves and then glued together

laminated wood is always stronger since the grain of each slice is still intact

think of laminated wood like a layer cake
and plywood like gravel glued together
 
Also, the laminations in commercial plywood are generally set at right angles, to reduce warping and increase stiffness in all directions.

By controlling the angles between the layers in a hand-laminated product, you control how the product looks. You can also vary the angles in order to control the stiffness in each direction.

For instance, a fancy tennis racket might made to resist axial twisting, yet have more flexibility in the direction of the strike. Or a bookmatched top on a fancy bass might be cut and laminated at an angle, to create a nice V figure...
 
ampeg little studs basses from the 70's were in fact plywood

Ah yes, the early Japanese instruments. "Some of the Stud instruments were poorly built (e.g. the plywood bodies and necks on the Little Stud), while others had good-quality features (e.g., gold-plated hardware on the Super Stud)." - Wikipedia.
 
Is plywood that bad?

No. One of the best bass sounds I ever got was from a pickup I rewound and stuck in a plywood body which had TI JF34s on it. That was definately the best bass tone I ever got from a split P pickup.

I was excited and moved the pickup to my "real" P bass which had LaBella 760FM's. Plugged it and and didn't like it. Had to have been the difference in strings, and I wanted the stiffer feeling LaBellas, so I ebayed the pickup. The buyer was very pleased.