IKEA guitar

Jack

Thought some of our luthiers might enjoy this:
http://www.zacharyguitars.com/120300pics.htm

Best,
Jack.

Digger

"What a shame that they would use such amazing "tone-wood" for their cheap furniture. Its a sacrilege."

I hope he had his tongue in his cheek when he wrote that.
I'm sure that guitar sounds fine, and from the photos his work looks good, but use that wood for an accoustic guitar top and see what you get.

klaatu

Interestingly, in Bob Benedetto's book, there is a photo of an archtop that he built using some pretty cruddy-looking scrap wood. He says you can hardly tell the difference tonally, his point being that the luthier's craftsmanship is more important than the wood.

Ken Bloom

There is a big difference between making a solid body electric and very lightly built acoustic. In a solid body electric, weight matters as more mass givews you much better sustain. Other than that, a board is a board. It's the pcikups and the neck that really make the difference. Benedetto is not the only one to make a great sounding guitar from less than prime materials. There is a Taylor, called the Palette guitar, because it was made from wood that was part of a shipping palette. It is definitely the craftsmanship that makes the biggest difference in what a guitar sounds and plays like. Violins are all made from maple and spruce. Some are $50.00 instruments, sone are $50,000 instruments. The difference is the skill and reputation of the maker more than anything else. It's great to have beautiful wood. It's more important to use those materials to their best advantage. Touting the superior qualities of one wood over another is a great selling point but in the end it is way less important than the superior quality of the person using it. Cordoba, Gitane, Park, and Dupont all use the same materials.

andy

Just thought I'd share this passage I just came across in Tim Brookes' "Guitar: An American Life" (Grove, 2005). He's having an acoustic built and is feeling guilty about using endangered Brazilian rosewood:

"The next possibility is alternative tonewoods that are neither exotic nor endangered - native woods, in fact. Cherry. Sycamore. Maple. Oak. Birch. Poplar. These make perfectly good guitars, especially as at least 80 percent of the sound of a guitar comes from the top, not the back and sides, a point proven dramatically by the great Spanish luthier Antonio Torres, who made a perfectly decent-sounding guitar out of a spruce top and back and sides of papier-mache." (p.26).

Cheers,
Andy