East Indian Rosewood Tonewood
Choosing the right tonewood is crucial for the sound of our guitars. That’s why we attach great importance to the quality and origin of the woods we use. This is reflected in the appearance and sound of every Duke guitar. Here you can find out everything about the woods we use for building a Duke guitar.
Spruce & Thermospruce
For both our acoustic and classical models, spruce is our main top wood. We rely on the high-quality spruce wood from the alpine highlands in the Swiss Graubünden. Spruce is still the most used tonewood for building guitar tops. There are various reasons for this. On the one hand, European spruce is especially known for its clear, pervading and balanced sound, which results in a bright and resonant tone. On the other hand, the density and stiffness of a spruce top provide the best conditions for the resonance and stability of a guitar. European spruce produces a clear, penetrating and balanced sound with good projection. This makes it a popular choice for the top of acoustic guitars, as it helps to create a bright and resonant tone.
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Cedar
As a second important top wood, we offer “Canadian cedar”. All Duke models with a “C” in the name have a cedar top. Cedar produces a warmer, darker and more complex sound than spruce wood. The tone quality is often described as “full-bodied”, “sweet” and “harmonious”. This makes cedar the choice of many guitarists who prefer a rich and nuanced sound. We ourselves are thrilled by the warm color and very sensitive response of the solid Canadian cedar top
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East Indian Rosewood
East Indian rosewood is one of the most popular tonewoods for backs and sides of acoustic guitars. At Duke Guitars, it’s the most used wood for backs and sides, along with mahogany. East Indian rosewood has an outstanding resonance ability. It creates a warm, clear and powerful tone, with a very balanced sound ratio. Visually, this wood is very unique. The dark, strong grain makes rosewood so popular to this day as a tonewood.
Mahogany
We use mahogany, as one of two standard tonewoods, mainly for the back and sides of our acoustic guitars. Mahogany has a bright, reddish-brown color and is one of the most popular tonewoods ever. If nothing else this is due to the exciting acoustic properties. Guitars made of mahogany are especially popular for their brilliant and clear tone, the excellent highs and the fast response.
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Bubinga
For our Classic Basis models, we use bubinga as the wood for the back and sides. The unique wave-shaped grain gives these guitars a very unique look. Bubinga is considered an exotic among the tonewoods. This is probably due to the rare occurrences (mainly in tropical forests of Central Africa). The high density and stiffness makes bubinga a powerful and clear tonewood with a balanced tone balance of depth, midrange and treble.
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As long as guitars have been built, and as long as guitars are being built; the discussion on tonewoods will continue. We can’t blame them, different kinds of wood do affect your sound in major ways. Especially on acoustic guitars. We’ll walk you through the different types of woods and hopefully help you whilst making your decision.
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The search for the right acoustic guitar can turn into a sonic odyssey even among experienced players. We each have our own personal touch, and we tend to hear tone in different ways. Let’s set aside for a moment the visual attributes of woods. Colour, figure and grain understandably seduce our eyes, but for the sake of tonal consideration, let’s focus on elements of sound. Each type of quartersawn wood has a particular density, stiffness and flexibility, which, together with the player, translate into a range of tonal frequencies. We describe tone in shadings of bass, midrange and treble, which are also characterized in degrees of brightness and darkness. Below you’ll find many samples of the tonewoods we use to create beautiful sounding and looking guitars. We’ll start by examining woods used for soundboards, followed by woods used for back and sides.
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There are many fine woods used today to build quality instruments. It is important to remember that one wood is not necessarily “better” than another; the suitability of woods for any given instrument depends on a number of factors, such as personal tastes and the type of music you will be playing. For example, a bluegrass player will need woods with a “quicker” response and louder tone than will a player of country music, who would probably opt for a warmer, more mellow tone.
There are certain characteristics of certain woods that can be seen to be detrimental to sound. For example, Mahogany yields a quick response with great cutting ability, but to a small extent this cutting power and midrange comes at the expense of bass response, producing a slightly “thinner” tone than a Rosewood instrument. Similarly, Indian Rosewood yields greater bass response and warmth of tone, but somewhat at the expense of cutting power and balance, and can produce a “muddy” tone if not properly voiced. Because of this, I voice the bracing of my instruments to match the tonal characteristics of the woods used; Mahogany guitars are voiced to yield greater bass response and warmer tone for overall balance, and Indian Rosewood guitars are voiced to yield greater midrange and treble response as a balance to the enhanced bass created by Indian Rosewood.
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CB instruments are not just voiced to enhance the characteristics of the woods used, but to yield the maximum tonal response available from each piece of carefully-selected wood, which can vary significantly from piece to piece. This allows me to create an instrument of greatest possible tone, clarity and volume. If you’ve ever wondered why production instruments from even the most respected manufacturers can vary so widely in terms of balance and clarity of tone, this is why: only a maker who creates instruments one at a time and pays the most careful attention to the tonal response of each piece of wood can achieve an instrument of the ultimate power, balance and clarity of tone.
To help you decide which woods are right for you, I offer the following descriptions of the types of wood that I typically use. There are many other woods available to luthiers, such as Western Red Cedar, Walnut, and Koa to name a few, and I will build you an instrument from any woods you prefer. However, these are the woods that I have found to be able to offer the most pleasing characteristics to the most people.
Behind everything that has ever been said or written about the guitar, it is in fact nothing more nor less than an air pump. As such, the air pumping efficiency of its design and materials are the most important factors a maker needs to consider in his work. Everything else — the guitar’s history, its design aesthetic, its looks, the romance, the art, the techniques of its construction, its noble materials, the fame of its makers, or even its beauty — is secondary.
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Structurally, the guitar consists of a vibrating top and a vibrating back which are separated by a set of non-vibrating sides, and a non-sound-producing neck. Because the top and the back are the only two acoustically active parts of the guitar, the choices of top and backwood are the most important ones to be made in the selection of guitar tonewoods. Tonewoods are called such because they really make tone, or are capable of making tone, compared to more normal woods which are useful for making things like buildings, boats or furniture. Tonewoods can ring when you strike them, just like a bell or a piece of glass. Can you imagine a wood that rings to a musical note when struck? Brazilian rosewood can: it’s the material marimbas have been traditionally made of, and, even in guitar form, such wood can ring like a gong. Good quality face wood also can ring like crystal. Such materials, when studied by scientists or acousticians, are said to have a high degree of liveness, or “Q” [which stands for “quality”], and Brazilian rosewood is only one of many tonewoods that have high “Q”.
Because of the dynamics of the guitar, tonewoods for faces need to be different than tonewoods for backs, if the instrument is to have the best and most even sound. The best guitar faces are made of high quality musical instrument grade softwoods such as spruce and cedar. The best guitar backs are made of high quality hardwoods such as rosewood, ebony, maple, walnut, koa, mahogany or any of a number of other suitable body woods.
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The consensus among luthiers is that face and backwoods need to be chosen from woods of differing densities because the resonant frequency of the back needs to be higher than the resonant frequency of the face, by at least a tone. The best wisdom on this matter is that if there is too great or too small a gap separating the fundamental resonant frequencies of the top and the back, then guitars have an uneven tone. That is, the sound becomes an uneven mixture of loud and quiet notes. Likewise, if the face and the back are most active at the same frequency or frequencies they’ll act in tandem to reinforce certain notes, but leave others weak. It does not matter what the sides are made out of, except that guitars in which the back and side woods don’t match are considered to look too strange and generally won’t be saleable: backs and sides need to match for aesthetic reasons.
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