A.Davis Guitars - Custom Options

Choosing woods for the various parts of the guitar can be an exciting or confusing task. As wood is an organism, environment plays an important role in the performance of tonewoods. Parts made from the same species can have very different qualities even when cut from the same tree. If you are looking for a sound you haven't heard before or are unfamiliar with certain species; this process becomes even more difficult.
To simplify things, we group tonewoods into wood for tops and three sub-groups for backs and sides. We use mahogany for necks and very rarely maple. The fingerboard is usually Brazilian rosewood or ebony. The peghead veneer and even the binding can make a difference in sound. Since the body is the heart of the guitar, comprising 90-99% of the sound, we concentrate on the body and the basic criteria first and then use bridge and fingerboard choices to clarify what we are trying to end up with. Knowing that a great piece of wood can outshine in the qualities of its neighbor, a target sound is always attainable through careful construction.
There are other woods related to the types mentioned here that are currently being made into guitars. Guitar companies that are making two or three hundred guitars a day have to consider a wide range of resources to fuel their need for raw materials. Handbuilders, reaching for new color or sound, are constantly searching for new woods to fill a need or inspire their creativity. We like to stock a limited number of traditional species in the highest grade available. This allows us to concentrate our efforts on building a truly outstanding instrument.
Below are some general descriptions of wood types and some romantic descriptions of what you can expect to hear from them.

German and Engleman spruce can be mellow with a subtle crispness or bright and brash just like the fiddles they get mostly used on. Seemingly not as hard as Sitka, Engleman grows almost anywhere Sitka does and all over the Wasatch and Rocky mountains. German spruce is a close kin to Engleman and the warm creamy color belies the sometimes vicious conditions these types of trees are subjected to in North America and Alpine Europe.

Adirondack, Appalachian, or Red Spruce comes from the North Eastern United States and south to the Smoky Mountains. The warm buggy summers and sub-zero winters give this wood its character. It seems to have the hardest winter growth -the dark lines- and softest summer growth in all the top woods. It has an almost schizophrenic ability to create a note that is both sweetly sonorous and explosively brash at the same time. These trees stick together in small stands throughout the forest and are rare indeed. One for a guitar has to be full size -200 by 3 or 4 feet and 200 years old. Carpathian and Bosnian spruce from Eastern Europe are related to Red Spruce through sound and workability.

Western Red Cedar is what pencils and some telephone poles are made from. Sweet smelling, it is also sweet sounding. The soft/hard relationship of the growth rings gives it the multi dimensional brightness and clarity of Adirondack with almost no propensity for brashness except when overstressed through playing. Unlike the spruces, it quickly turns into a dullard when overbraced so it is best used for lightly braced fingerstyle and classical guitars.

This wood is dark, rich, and predictable. When bending, it bleeds tar that you could chink a boat or roof a house with. It will load up sandpaper and tools with oily grime and this is a problem for modern builders. The early builders used axes, froes, saws and scrapers. They were blessed by this wood. A good straight board will lead the saw well. It can be scraped to a glasslike sheen and when in its final dimensions, thin and almost brittle, it will hold its shape like hardened steel.
Soundwise, these woods are real utility players. Something like a glass of wine...a soft flavorful sip that passes through you, changing shapes and colors. The glasslike bell tone of your finger running on the rim of the glass. Cling! A toast! A final gulp and smashing the glass into the fireplace hearth with the sounds of splintering glass and the last drops of wine sizzle into the hot crackling fire.
Some modern wood has qualities that make it unusable for the older builders. We have better glues and techniques that make these precious woods usable. The wild figure that makes them harder to work with also makes them prettier and we are getting great sounding guitars from ridiculously rare wood.

These woods are first noted for their elegant tiger striped curls or quilted figure that resembles the waves in bunched up silk or satin. While beautiful to look at, it is tedious and time consuming to work with. If you try to take too much wood with a blade, you can rip the curls right out of it. The saw will sometimes cut straight and true. Other times it will travel like Marco Polo or stop dead in the kerf as if you hit a stone. Bending is unpredictable. It can bend like a piece of fabric lays over your arm or it can explode like a handful of angel hair pasta.
While these woods are generally regarded for a tight or well defined sound, there are great differences in the same species. The harder, figured pieces yield fewer overtones and are great for getting that well mannered, bell tone type of sound. The clearer stuff is usually easier to work with and can give a warmth and openness to the sound that rivals anything you can make a guitar out of. Still, these woods have been most unpredictable and can produce interesting variations and contradictions to the above mentioned guidelines. They are best matched to a specific need by holding the wood in ones hands and testing it or building the instrument and hearing it in completed form.

This is the warm, fuzzy group. Like a well trained puppy, they smell good, feel good, are easy to work with and generally just a joy to be around. We include Monterey Cypress, Canadian Cypress along with Mahogany and Spanish Cypress for their likeness in sounds and workability. Of these, only Spanish Cypress and more recently, mahogany would be considered traditional tonewoods. Even today, the cypress' are used almost exclusively for flamenco guitars.
That little guitar being played in the corner of the room. The sweet melody, like a bird calling from high in the forest, the clopping of horses hooves through a babbling brook, the crash and cacophonic crescendo of real violence that can stupify a room full of bright boisterous Spaniards.
Like the warm puppy, it can be warm, cute and cuddly and at the same time, its bark will have every string in the piano ringing. These great and mysterious qualities from our simplest class of woods are currently changing the state of the art in recorded sound and performance.

Fingerboards and bridges are an important interface during tone production. Usually, they are made from matching woods and are used to either tame some of the brighter harmonics with ebony or add warmth or brightness with Brazilian rosewood. These qualities seem bipolar but the two types of wood can meet in the middle so we use one of them or a combination of the two for just about everything we make.

"Does it make a difference in sound?" We are often asked and the answer is always "Yes! But it may be immeasurable...". An ornate inlay may change the tension in the top .060" of your fingerboard. What about the different densities in binding made from wood or nitrocellulose, ABS or other materials in a spot that most consider immovable on the guitar?..or a pickguard that may or may not dampen the portion of the top that it is adhered to? It's best to let us worry about these things - and don't worry too hard about where Maraschino cherries come from, either.
The major impact of the following items is the visual perception given to the audience, band members, husbands and wives, etc. An otherwise plain piece of wood that was chosen for sound can look stunning when framed with the right elements. On the other hand, a fantastically bright instrument can be subdued in order to avoid upstaging your star singer or raising the hackles of a jealous family member. It may just be that you have a taste for pawnshop guitars.
Usually we combine these elements into a theme; Maple binding with maple leaf fretboard markers, Koa and engraved hibiscus or lotus blossoms and rosewood. If it's a custom guitar for yourself; it's anything goes and the rule is true: If it looks right, it is right.

Binding is like a picture frame. It protects the edges of your artwork from inclusion by the weather (or the guests). It can also enhance the piece or help it to harmonize with the surroundings. From the very start, this utilitarian device has been modified to suit; the musician, the audience, esthetics, the traditions in luthiery. It's an expression from the heart of the builder about the balance of beauty and performance.