Is Cherry A Good Tonewood?

[Thirdjeff]

Hello everyone. I am getting ready to start my first project guitar. I managed to get my hands on a cherry wood body blank. I got this for free from a friend. However I have never heard of a guitar being made from cherry wood before. Does anyone know if cherry is a good tonewood for guitar? Or would I be better off buying a body blank made of a known good tonewood such as alder, swamp ash, ect? Thanks for your help.

[thedoctor]

Dry cherry is a great wood as long as no heartwood is included. It is also a DREAM to work with.

I forgot IMHO

Edited May 29, 2005 by thedoctor

[Drak]

Yes it's usable.

Tone is on the bright side, close to Maple.

It's hard as hell, so no need to worry about nickering it up or being overly gentle with it.

It's a closed-grain wood, so no grain filler is needed prior to applying a finish.

Overall, a great choice for a first guitar. Good luck and remember to have a sh*tload of fun building it.

[orgmorg]

Yeah, cherry is really nice. Everybody likes to stain it dark, but it really looks best when it gets to age naturally. It is also very stable.

When thedoctor says avoid the heartwood, I believe he means the wood around the very center of the tree, like the middle 4 or 5 inches, and he is right. That part cracks, checks, and twists badly. It is usually sawn up for pallets. And the rest of it IS very nice to work with, not just his opinion. I've never considered it a particularly hard wood, though. Definitely harder than walnut, but not nearly hard as rock maple.

[skibum5545]

I have no experience with it tone-wise, but you can find some pieces with crazy beautiful grain, and even some with minor curl, that would just make a fantastic solid-body guitar.

[thedoctor]

Some of cherry's grain patterns approach the bizarre. I set pieces aside when they are particularly eye-catching but they are all too small to make much of a contributuion to a guitar. Stain it all you want. A lot of it is too light to begin with and it LOVES stain.

[tirapop]

Yesterday morning, on public radio, one of their commentators was shilling his new book. His old acoustic got destroyed by baggage handlers. His wife let him pull the trigger on getting a custom acoustic for his birthday. Having the guitar built got him into researching the history of the guitar in America.

Oh, what about cherry? The sides and back of his guitar are cherry. WILD figure. You can listen to the story and check out the pics of the guitar here.

[DrummerDude]

I have the books "Building Electric Guitars" by Martin Koch and "Guitar Builders FAQ" by Bill Wyza and both guitar builders use cherry a lot.

In my country, we have two kinds of cherry, though and I really do not know which one is used in guitar building.

The first one would literally translate in English as "domestic cherry" or "cultivated cherry" - this is the tree that gives us the fruits we all love to put on the top of the icecream.

The second kind would translate as "wild cherry". As far as I know this tree's fruits are not used for food and I don't even know what they look like.

In my country "wild cherry" is a very expensive wood.

So, what do you mean by cherry? The cultivated tree?

[DrummerDude]

I just learned that the common English name of the tree I know as "wild cherry" is CHOKECHERRY (Prunus virginiana)

I bleive that this is the tree used in guitar building since its wood has great qualities several of them being its very small pores, its extreme stability and its interesting pattern.

Or am I wrong?

Edited June 3, 2005 by DrummerDude

[Meegs666]

westheman has some guitars made with cherry. i would pm him.

[Pr3Va1L]

Art & Lutherie (Godin...) makes acoustic guitars of wich the top is "wild cherry"

link

it's a beginner guitar, but my friend(s... like 4 or em) has one and i can tell you it sounds very good (for the price anyways...)

sound shouldn't be a problem... just watch out since its soft, it'll ding easily.

Edited June 4, 2005 by Pr3Va1L

[tirapop]

That site says the wild cherry top is laminated, so, the cherry probably isn't much more than a veneer.