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What are tone woods on a Fender guitar?
Which Wood is best for an electric guitar?
What kind of wood does a Fender guitar use?
What Wood is used for a guitar body?
Are Fender guitars made of basswood?
What wood should a beginner use for a guitar?
When you’re looking over the specs of a Fender electric guitar or bass, one of the first things you’ll see listed is the kind of wood the body is made of. And with few exceptions, two mainstay woods have been used throughout Fender history for fashioning electric instrument bodies — alder and ash.
What is the best wood for a guitar body? Every tonewood has individual strengths that make it the best for different guitar bodies. So, it depends on what you prefer. For instance, mahogany is the best for warm tones, maple for brightness, and spruce for versatility in guitar bodies.
- Alder. As with ash, it’s impossible to discuss alder without making reference to Fender, which first used alder prominently in the late ’50s and early ’60s.
- Ash. Best known as the wood of classic ’50s Fender guitars, ash is most desirable in the form of swamp ash—wood taken from the lower portions of southern-grown wetland trees that have root systems growing below water level.
- Basswood. Affordable and abundant, basswood is particularly associated with mid-level or budget guitars. But basswood is a good tonewood by any standards, and it has been used by many high-end makers with excellent results.
- Korina. Best known as the tonewood of Gibson’s radical Modernistic Series of the late 1950s—the flashy Flying V and Explorer—as well as more recent guitars that follow these templates, Korina is a warm, resonant, and balanced performer.
For the most part, tone woods are a detail of electric guitar construction that are often considered but rarely well understood. Today we will be having a look at two of the most popular, specifically for the bodies of Fender guitars; ash and alder.
- What types of woods are used for guitars? Not all woods are suitable for use in all parts of a guitar. Spruce, for example, is often used for tops in acoustic guitars (“spruce top”) but is not an ideal material for electric instruments.
- Maple. Maple is a very hard type of wood with good tonal qualities and good sustain. Guitar necks are traditionally made from the dense wood of maple, in part because of its strength, and in part, because the material can highlight and amplify the wood in the body.
- Mahogany. Many guitar and bass bodies are made from Mahogany. There are 49 types of Mahogany, but many are practically extinct because of the wood’s popularity for furniture and musical instruments, and the types used today are not the same as the Mahogany used in guitars in the 1940s or 1950s.
- Basswood. Basswood comes from Linden trees, and it is soft and easy to work with. A side effect of being soft is that it also dents easily. Because it doesn’t have much of a grain or color, it’s most commonly used on instruments that have an opaque paint-job, though this isn’t always the case (as in the photo above).
Ash and alder are two of the most commonly used tonewoods and have been used for electric guitar bodies since the 1950s – when the first mass-produced electric guitar was introduced by Fender.
Because of its proven tonal characteristics, Alder is very popular. Ash: There are two different types of ash, Northern Hard Ash and Southern Soft, or Swamp Ash. Northern Hard Ash: This is a very hard and heavy wood. With its density, the tone is very bright.
