Rosewood Fingerboards

[Hep To The Jive]

Just got a new neck for my tele, and it's... maple! First time in my life I have a maple fretboard neck, I always preferred the look of rosewood! The reason I had to get it is the D shape, which is super rare apparently, and Fender only makes them maple But I can't hate wood so much so I'd skip on the most comfortable neck( for me)!

Just do it- get the rosewood one

[iim7V7IM7]

Why not go with both rosewood (cocobolo) and ebony?

[neatomic]

Yeah, I play surf, too - love it!! Have a lead on a '64 Jazzmaster but may just get a MIM Strat - I need a whammy bar on about 3 or 4 songs. I built a Tele with a Strat tremolo and ended up selling it... it was pretty neat!

go jazzmaster... can double for jazz..the rhythm circuit gives you two distinct neck tones..leo wasnt kidding when he called it the jazzmaster..he was going for it..and i think he did great..jazzmaster pup is leo's take on the p90 ...wonderful rethinking

a well set up jazzmaster is tough to beat


cheers

[kid335]

You won't feel the same way about Brazilian Rosewood.

[jazzbow]

Yep!! Bought it for $260 with brown Lifton case and sold it to a dealer friend of mine the next day for $800, then I think it might have gone to Gruhn's. It was a plain top, though - no flame. That was in the late 70's when they were only bringing about a grand. I also had a mint '47 Super 400 that I shouldn't have traded - I think it ended up in a museum somewhere. Oh, and there was an ES-5 Switchmaster and a '54 LP Custom 'fretless wonder' and an ice tea sunburst L4C that went for $450 and the blonde Johnny Smith that I was only into $700 and so many more......sometimes it haunts me to this day!!!

Ah, so much regret and doubt!

If I had a penny for every regret and doubt I would have about £9.52 by now. No wait, after this post £9.53.

How about 'Toasted Maple' fingerboards?!?

I had a Maple necked Tele and I couldn't get on with it, however, I swapped the rosewood neck on my Strat for a superb Chandler one piece Maple Strat neck! Whatta peach! I guess it's down to ease of feel for me.

Could you be tactile defensive?
Tactile Defensiveness

It's amazing how this disorder impacts on our sensory development.

At the moment I am adverse to washing up the dirty crockery in the kitchen sink. My wife doesn't understand.

Seriously tho', immerse yourself in rosewood and ebony therapy...

Go to your local furniture store and force yourself to fondle the carcasses of dark hard woods, sniff the pungent aroma of waxed drawer linings and walk over parquet flooring in stockinged feet.

Wah! That's it... I'm done......

[Para]

As the Eagles said "it's all been wasted time"

[destinytot]

As the Eagles said "it's all been wasted time"

Did someone say Eagles?

[Para]

Not a great fan of maple boards but I'm considering a very nice Music Man Axis Sport Deluxe MM90 with peizo that has a maple board I've just been offered.

[Ol' Fret]

At the moment I am adverse to washing up the dirty crockery in the kitchen sink. My wife doesn't understand.

Great! Somehow that reminds me of Thelonious Monk: "My mind ain't working tonight. I can't think of shit... Next time we get together, it might be working. I just woke up."

Or it reminds of Charles Mingus: "In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time."


It would be as much fun to debate on esthetics and technical properties of tropical wood fretboards, like their hardness, elastic modulus, shrinkage, dampening, workability, toxicity, etc. - as it would be on tactile defensiveness or jazz-related auditive hyposensitivity and erectile disorders.




It seems so hard for some of us to grow up mentally just enough to realize that there are other persons of flesh and bone, just like us, on this great, big earth. And if they don't ever stand still, move, or "swing", they are as right as we are, even if they are as wrong as hell by our standards. - Charles Mingus -

[roegtr]

Here's my Gibson with a rosewood fretboard:


It's one of the darkest rosewood boards I've ever seen.

[roegtr]

And here's my Gibson es339 with a rosewood board:

this one is a 2009 and has a very typical rosewood color. Not nearly as dark as the 2014 es390.

[Archie]

I dont like Rosewood, it's ugly for the most part and feels sticky. I'll suffer it on a Tal or Es-175 but thats about it. Ebony all the way! Love the feel and if I give any credence to the 'tone' debate (which I don't) then I would say the quicker response of ebony over rosewood, is actually a necessity on many Jazz guitars, especially laminates.

[mr. beaumont]

Yeah, that's why nobody likes the sound of a 175.

[Skip Ellis]

I will say that the rosewood boards on the Monarchs I've seen appears very dark - I could probably learn to love it. I've also started looking at Manhattans and New Yorks.

[Boston Joe]

Your new guitar ?

AH! An L6S! My first teacher had one of those, and then later, I ended up in a rock band with a guy who had one. I was playing an S-1 at the time, so we were like the weird Gibson band.

[Skip Ellis]

Yeah, that's why nobody likes the sound of a 175.

Yeah, I can't think of anyone who likes the sound of those junky ol' laminate things. LOL!! I guess if it's good enough for Herb and Joe..............

[Jim Soloway]

I dont like Rosewood, it's ugly for the most part and feels sticky. I'll suffer it on a Tal or Es-175 but thats about it. Ebony all the way! Love the feel and if I give any credence to the 'tone' debate (which I don't) then I would say the quicker response of ebony over rosewood, is actually a necessity on many Jazz guitars, especially laminates.

I really dislike the fast response of ebony on any guitar. It's the primary reason why, given the choice, I always go with rosewood. As for feeling sticky, I've been playing guitar since 1962 and I don't think I've ever heard anyone ever say that before.

[MaxTwang]

Would your opinion change if you knew that 90% of cut down ebony trees are left to rot in the forest as only 10% of harvested ebony has consistent dark wood?

[Greentone]

Great scene; great sweater!

Re: Gibson L6S--the fretboard gets good and Telecaster grimy after many years. They're great...and talk about boat necks...

Re: Rosewood--when they get old, they get dark and oily. They do just fine. Or, maybe it's just that the older rosewood was dark to begin with. Anyway, the rosewood on all of my older guitars was uniformly darker than the streaky ebony on some of the newer guitars.

[Ol' Fret]

...there's that dreaded rosewood. Please HELP!!!

Well, if you can't stand Dalbergia woods, just leave them (may a humorless German say 'skip' here?)!
There are some great streaky and whirled woods out there for guitar fretboards:



Ops, one of them is a still a rosewood species... !


Impeccable and consistently black ebony is very hard to come by today. If I had to get this wickedly expensive wood, I'd watch out for getting strictly quarter cut ebony. Not easy to determine... Btw., this is not the same like quarter sawn wood! Both terms are often misused by American woodworkers. Correct is that 'quarter sawing' produces rift cut wood, minus the very center. And 'rift sawing' produces quarter cut wood:




The reason why quarter cut wood is far superior is that it moves much less around as a fretboard material glued to the neck base, compared to flat sawn wood. RH changes are ever present, at least in the part of the world where I'm living. You don't like a guitar neck moving around, and the people who think they could compensate for a moving neck by adjusting a truss rod... are, IMO, barking up the wrong tree. Construction and wood knowledge and selection is essential. Some archtop makers even went so far to pass purposely on flamed maple wood for the necks - to prevent more than the absolutely inevitable movements of the neck/fretboard.
The way Leo Fender built his guitars, necks/fretboards... well, how can I say... was ingeniously streamlined, but from a luthier POV just mediocre.


The look is not the decisive factor in an instrument, but its effect should not be underestimated. We have to accept that more than 95% of the archtop customers just buy with their eyes - even if they think they do not. Really bad can be the effect on the lump of customers when well-known endorsers give statements about the quality of the instruments used by them (those super selected woods, pickups, superior workmanship, and so on). It sounds blasphemous about our musician heroes, but most of them didn't and don't have much clue about the finer points of archtop guitar making.
Thus, the recent use of plastics or composite as a fretboard material by the industry makes sense: ironically, the former often look very similar to the real thing, the ebony fretboards of the highest quality.



- "People may say I can't sing, but no one can ever say I didn't sing." - Florence Foster Jenkins -
Even her longtime companion at the piano, Cosmé McMoon, grimaced desperately behind her back facing the audience when his partner sang a piece partularly wrong. On the other hand, the journalist Brooks Peter wrote that Cole Porter never missed one of her concerts and even composed a song for her. Jenkin's other ardent fans included the opera stars Lily Pons and Enrico Caruso and the British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham.

- "I'll play the first chorus, let the band come in for the second chorus. Then we get up and get our bread and quit." - Thelonious Monk -

[Ghostofachance]

So, the OP has a problem with Eastman headstocks (understandable, I can see why they're not everybody's cup of tea), but apparently has no problem with Tele headstocks? Maybe he's fond of string trees....

[MaxTwang]

Here's ebony



Here's the real story:

https://www.taylorguitars.com/about/sustainable-ebony


Here's Bob Taylor on the future of ebony, the current state of ebony is pretty sad. Personally, I love figured wood and look forward to some wild and interesting fretboards!

If you really have to have pure black ebony, here's the solution (I wouldn't be surprised if the major manufacturers haven't been doing this for a long time to make boards 'perfect').

http://www.lmii.com/products/finishi...ingerboard-dye

[Ol' Fret]

As much as Bob Taylor's "State of Ebony" in general is worthy of support and thought, a good part is just his own story.

More and more of tonewood pricing is based on cosmetics and (visual) perception, not function. The fretboard contributes considerably to the total stiffness of the neck, and the stiffness of the neck for an acoustic guitar matters for the tone. Two pieces of ebony, identical in all respects but with different densities, will have different stiffnesses. This is still valid even if an (adjustable) truss rod or other reinforcements are used.
Grain direction, consistency and pore size of ebony do matter, though the above mentioned sawing procedure, which intrinsically produces a relatively large amount of wastage, is crucial. Plus the correct storage after the sawing: violin makers claim that a period of about ten years air-drying is necessary before ebony wood can be used. Kiln-drying of neck and FB woods would be ok, if not the industry would succumb to the usual dictation 'time is money'. Translated to kiln-drying this means: the temperature is too high, the drying time too short; the result suffers.

The color of ebony really doesn't say much about the quality of the wood underneath. People just think so... and since Mr. Taylor in his video hardly mentions the important features of the Gaboon (Cameroon) ebony slated for fretboards, IMO, he's a bit beating around the bush.



Apropos tonewoods... the guitar maker represented in my avatar had a crazy special relation to the tonewoods he used - I mean crazy. If the players and contemporary luthiers really knew... what even a reputable luthier like Theo Scharpach in the Netherlands hardly could sense when stating on his website "For the Vienna Archtop we use exclusively old tops that are bought from the widow of A. Lang. This old stock I must have bought already in 1990. Lang was a well-known German guitarmaker living in Garmisch Partenkirchen, Germany and died in 1975. Although some of the woods may have minor visual flaws, it is acoustically far-out superior to any new wood due to the extreme old age. The roughly pre-cut tops do sound already like a bell. I estimate that the top wood has been stored to dry in the workshop of Lang for more the 40 years."
What an understatement, LOL, sorry, this is a different story! Even Elmer Stromberg who was said to have scoured the Boston area for suitable archtop plates, could hardly hold a candle to Lang, at least in this respect.





"The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician." - Duke Ellington -

[lawson-stone]

Oh, I agree for sure that these are all valid arguments and nothing has stopped me from playing but I'd hate to spend $1000+ on an instrument that I didn't really want to look at. I can PLAY a rosewood board with no problem and don't even notice a difference in tone but it's a visual thing - rosewood, to me, just looks cheap on an expensive instrument - I'd even go with that artificial black plastic stuff that they're using nowadays knowing that rosewood (especially Brazilian) is high dollar stuff. I'm sick , I tell you - sick ....sick...sick!!!

Skip
I'm with you on this. Not about Rosewood vs Ebony so much as your preference. For many of us, guitars, and especially archtops, are about more than music. There is an element of art, style, and beauty involved for many of us. We don't just want to play music. We like living with the instruments on many levels.

So if your heart says ebony, then hold out for ebony. Search and wait for what you really want and will enjoy.