Chambered Basswood Body. Good Idea?

[trleft]

Hello Unofficial Warmoth community!

I am almost ready to purchase my first custom Warmoth parts guitar.
My idea is a Chambered Basswood tele with a flame maple top, 3 Pickup routing HHP-90.  I am trying to get a very lightweight guitar and some extra sustain with the chambers.

Would choosing basswood be a good idea?  There's not too many out there (hence why I want it)  would Basswood have good sustain if chambered?
plus how light would the body be?  I know basswood is already a rather light wood.  But I'm not trying to get a Neck-Heavy guitar (Like my Epiphone SG-400)

Please give me as much feedback as possible, before i put all this money down.

 

[bagman67]

Well, as you suggest, basswood already tends to be pretty light.  You may not realize all that much benefit for the extra money you'd pay for a chambered body.  Also, basswood tends to be softer than swamp ash and mahogany, so that's worth thinking about. 


The chambers will have approximately zero effect on your sustain.  If anything (and it's a pretty big "if"), you'd tend to lose sustain since the guitar will have less solid mass and thus will be ever-so-slightly more likely to dampen the strings' vibration.  If you're really after weight loss, you want a hollow guitar, not a chambered one.  A hollow guitar is also more likely to feed back, which may be what you're thinking off when you suggest a chambered guitar body might enhance sustain.

 

[Great Ape]

Builder Tom Anderson, on the other hand, uses maple on basswood as his build combo of choice. I confess ignorance regarding his stance on chambering basswood, but I'm sure that checking out the
Anderson Guitars website would give you that info. Enjoy your project!

 

[Ace Flibble]

A chambered, basswood body with three pickups is a recipe for missing out on sustain, not increasing it.

Basswood with any heavy routing (e.g. Jazzmaster, Strat with universal route, etc) tends to be about as light as any other wood with chambering. Chambering and heavily basswood is almost guaranteed to neck dive, unless you are also very careful to create the lightest neck possible. Given that any chambering muddles the lowest frequencies and removes high frequencies, the already mids-focused basswood is going to be missing out on a lot.

As Bagman said, it's likely chambering will reduce sustain compared to a similar build with a solid body. Sometimes this is such a small difference you don't notice it, but with three pickups as well, I would not expect to get much sustain at all. The more wood you take out, the more air in the build and the stronger the magnetic pull on the strings, the shorter your sustain gets.

If you want light and the longest possible sustain, your best bet is to go with solid alder or ash—they're both available in light weights and sustain better than basswood—and either don't take a middle pickup, or be very careful with your pickup choice, sticking to pickups with alnico II and III bar magnets to keep the magnetic influence on the strings as weak as possible. If you're really set on a chambered or semi-hollow body, mahogany is what I'd go for for chambered and maple for semi-hollow. (Or even fully hollow.) Mahogany and maple both maintain great sustain even when chambered or hollowed out, though a chambered/semi-hollow mahogany or maple body is no lighter than a solid alder body.

Also, be careful with your neck and hardware choices. It's easy to accidentally add a lot of weight to a headstock or body by choosing particularly fancy hardware, and if you're going for a Warmoth neck then be aware that the standard Warmoth 'pro' construction features a much heavier-duty truss rod than most guitars featrure, which adds a lot of weight to the neck. You'll probably want to stick to vintage modern construction, use a second hand Fender neck or go to another parts company if Warmoth's vintage modern doesn't support all the options you want and weight is a concern.