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Soft Maple Vs Hard Maple For A Drop Top


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For my PRS-shaped guitar, I'm considering topping it with a 1/4" thick set of wild figured Soft Maple (Southern Red, if I recall) that I have laying around. It's pretty wood for sure. However, I haven't really found any info on the sound of Soft Maple compared to Hard Maple.

Has anyone got experience with using Soft Maple in their guitars?

In my case, I don't particularly want an ultra-bright sound or too much extra weight, but I do like the figured maple look, so it seems like the Soft Maple would be less-bright sounding and it doesn't weight very much either. I'm just afraid of finishing the guitar and it sounding like garbage due to a lousy top :D

Should I simply buy a Hard Maple top instead?

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Yes... and send me the soft maple top in question free of charge :D lol

To be honest, using this versus hard isn't going to make any difference. The top is only a 1/4" laminate. It will have very little affect on the tone, cuase I mean, it's a general consus that things below 1/4" have almost NONE on a solid body... so your 1/4" top will not have much either. It's when you start getting into the carved top range where the top is a major percentage of the wood mass that it makes a difference. ie: with a 1" body and 3/4" carved top the maple is almost 50%!! Versus here you've got a 1.5" with a .25" top... the maple is only a mere 1/7th of the wood mass...

Chris

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Of course :-)

Like any of my business wood that I end up keeping, this one had a flaw that made it "unsellable" unless they were building something very specific. It's got a bookmatched knot on either side of the top, however, if I do the PRS shape, it falls just outside the cutaways.

That's good to hear, I may go ahead with it then if it's not going to affect the tone. I've been wrestling with the idea of going with some really exotic top wood, but it just doesn't seem to fit my notion of the PRS guitars with their nice figured maple tops, so I think I'll go with it, it's cool, the figuring is quasi-flame/quilt and goes in random directions.

One other variable, do you think chambering (ie removing) the Mahogany body would make the top's sound more noticeable?

(this is my first topped guitar)

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Yes, I do think chambering will bring out the tone of the maple more because by taking away a part of the surface it's glued down to you're allowing it to vibrate more, and thus make more of an impact. If you're doing the chambering for the sound... I dunno what to tell you. If you're doing it for the weight loss, then I have your solution! Do a honey-comb style hollowing to reduce weight. Just take a forstner bit, or like 1/2" drill and make a bunch of holes (NOT connected) with some adequet distance between them. Since the holes are so small they don't leave a big vibration area for the top like a genuine chamber would. HOWEVER since you ARE removing material, you will lose weight.

But do it only as much as you need for weight loss. Cause the more holes you make, the closer to chambering you will get, and the closer to that maple sound you'll get (which I'm not exactly sure why you're trying to avoid... cause even if you DON'T like how bright it turns out (and I can't tell you if it will cause I don't know the tonal diff. between ahrd and soft) then you can just pick out some pickups that counteract that tone flaw. ie: too bright? get darker pickups).

Look at the warmoth site for honeycombing info... they do it to lose weight and not affect the solid sound TOO much.

Chris

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That's an excellent idea, so basically doing the Gibson style "weight relief" holes. I can handle that. I went to the trouble of tracing out my chamber areas last night, but I suppose I'll just do the drilling in that area. I'd actually prefer to have the drill press doing the work instead of a router right in front of my face. I've had too many bits break :D

I was doing the chambering for weight relief reasons instead of tonal reasons. I wouldn't mind a little extra resonance, but this will likely be the hard rock/metal guitar, so making it to hollow wasn't ever in the plans. I suppose I'll take my postal scale along and see how much weight is being removed.

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Yes, I do think chambering will bring out the tone of the maple more because by taking away a part of the surface it's glued down to you're allowing it to vibrate more, and thus make more of an impact.

Not really true Chris. To make the wood vibrate in the first place, you would either have to be using an acoustic bridge or an archtop bridge/tailpiece, both of these bridge assemblies are designed to 'exite' the wood to vibrate and give up it's tonal contribution, simple cutting a bunch of holes in the body will not make the top vibrate in any appreciable way that one could hear. The ratio of wood glued down (in your Forstner scenario) to the wood free to move wouldn't really add anything at all unless you started to hollow it out -severely-, and even then it's a crapshoot as to whether or not it's contributing anything beneficial.

Go talk to a few archtop builders, they'll explain it much better than I'm doing, and they're really the only people/opinions I listen to in all the endless chambering threads that go on in these forums, those guys live it, it's not just conjecture and heresay and whimsical ideas to them.

As a matter of fact, archtop builders, as a rule, will tell you even if you're just hanging 2 pickups and some electronics from the top wood of an archtop, it will severely dampen the vibrations of the top to the point that you're basically killing your guitar's response in the end, so take that and extrapolate it to the point of gluing the top down to the body at ALL, and well, you get the picture I think. :D

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We're guna disagree big here. Just think about it. The wood will ALWAYS vibrate in a guitar to some extent. Even the wood of a solid-body will. And you cannot try to tell me that a tele thinline has no sound difference than a normal telecaster! And I WAS saying that honeycombing will make little to no discernable difference. However chambering WILL.

Chris

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As a matter of fact, archtop builders, as a rule, will tell you even if you're just hanging 2 pickups and some electronics from the top wood of an archtop, it will severely dampen the vibrations of the top to the point that you're basically killing your guitar's response in the end

Some of the archtop players will go to great efforts to try & minimize how much of their body actually touches the back of the guitar, for this very reason. They all do it sitting down.

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