Warmest to brightest tone woods??

[CES]

Rosewood warmest and with most overtones, maple brightest...warmest to brightest, L to R

[Marty Jacobson]

This is a little bit like saying "what kind of tires are fastest". Sure, they make a difference, but much less than whether you choose to drive a 1992 Sentra or a new Corvette.
You can build a bright instrument with rosewood, and a mellow instrument with maple. I don't control brightness of my instruments through wood selection, I control it through structure and air volume.
My sense is actually the opposite of what has been stated above in some posts.

If you want a dark sounding rosewood instrument, you have to thin the back down to ridiculously, almost dangerously thin in some areas. Without doing some specific work to get it to sound darker, a rosewood mandolin will inherently be quite bright, like this one (which is Padauk, basically identical as a tonewood to East Indian Rosewood).



And here's an instrument which is very similar in structure, but has a mahogany back. How would you rank these two instruments in terms of "darkness" or "brightness", and does it fit your internal conception of where these woods fall in the "darkness/brightness spectrum", if you have an internal model of that?
I'm not talking to anyone in particular, by the way, just thinking through this stuff.

[Frogstar]

Which do you prefer? Did you have a chance to play them in person or just based off of sound clips?

Overall I prefer the M11. Didn't have a chance to play either first, I picked up the M2 after watching for used Big Muddy deals, it was the first one that showed up. About a year later the M11 showed up at a price I was willing to gamble on, all told I have both of them for what a new one costs.

[CES]

Firewall won't let me listen at work, but will do so when I get home. I appreciate any education you can give me, man! I didn't realize the thicknessing issue with RW on mandolins, and find that very interesting. My comments above are based on how my ears hear my cedar/RW guitar, which is really dark/warm, the Spruce/RW one a little brighter but still darker and more overtones than my Spruce/Hog or any maple backed instrument I've ever played. Also, I've got a Spruce/Hog Martin Style A that sounds warmer than my Flatiron 1N. The only walnut I have is my RM-1, which doesn't count in this discussion.

I totally believe what you're saying, though, which is why I'm encouraging him to speak with his builder. In fact, I recently played an all mahogany Taylor guitar that sounded amazingly similar to my 714 (Cedar/RW). Mine was warmer, but not by much (actually disappointed me, because I liked the all mahogany one but couldn't justify getting it based on tone ) And, I know Brentrup has built some awesome sounding oak backed guitars...You guys are pretty awesome!

[fox]

As far as I can work out, the subject of tone woods & their ability to effect the sound of an instrument, is becoming quite controversial!
I often read very heated threads on the guitar forums I frequent!
I think it will take the next generation of musicians before folk come around to excepting that the back & side material only plays a tiny part of how the instrument will sound.

[sblock]

The main contributors to tone in a tonewood are these three properties: wood density, stiffness, and damping. The density contributes mass, obviously. The elasticity (compliance) contributes to how much deflection occurs for a given force imparted by vibration. The damping will control the duration of the vibration (ring-down), and also the mix of overtones as the notes ring out.

No two pieces of wood are absolutely identical, of course, because it's a natural material. But the important thing to realize is that the RANGES of available stiffness, density, and damping for all the tonewoods under discussion here (rosewood, redwood, cedar, mahogany, maple, koa, etc.) have a substantial amount of overlap. Yes, they do exhibit some general tendencies, because the mean values are all a bit different, but it's possible to get just about the same brightness/darkness with any one of these woods, given careful wood selection. Furthermore, things like wood thickness graduation, chamber shape, and tonebars exert enormous influence on the tone that can transcend the wood type. So can the wood treatment during drying and ageing (or something like torrefication), and the bias along which the wood was sawn.

For all these reasons, it is not especially meaningful to write categorical statements like "cedar is warm" or "rosewood is bright." A good luthier can make these woods sound differently than you might expect. Furthermore, even considering the average properties, and not the wide ranges, differences from one type to the next are just not that large. Attempts at generalization are fraught with exceptions, and therefore on pretty shaky ground.

I realize this is something of a heresy on the MC, where advocates of (say) Englemann spruce tops will insist that they sound significantly different than Red spruce. And do doubt that selected examples of these wood tops DO sound quite different! But this observation says more about a bunch of other things (density, damping, elasticity) in these examples than the type of spruce tree.