Mahogany neck and body combinations

[river]

So something I've been wondering about- perhaps someone could explain this to me. Say you are building an LP style guitar with a mahogany body and neck. If you had a blank large enough, would you build both from the same piece of wood for consistency and a good pairing, or would it make more sense to build a body from a less dense piece and a neck from a very dense piece? This would yield good resonance in the body and more stability in the neck.

And something I haven't seen much of would be going so far as to mix similar sounding woods like African/ Honduran mahogany and Korina.

Does anyone have any thoughts, theoretical or from experience?

 

[line6man]

would you build both from the same piece of wood for consistency and a good pairing

I would think that would be the opposite of a good pairing. You don't want everything having the same resonant frequencies or you could have trouble with dead spots.

 

[bob7point7]

I would cut the body out of the mahogany, save the rest for a future project, and add a wenge neck.  :laughing7:
Seriously though, I have a Taylor BTO with Honduran mahogany neck and African mahogany neck and sides and it sounds wonderful (I know acoustic and electric are totally different situations, just pointing out that good things can come from mixing mahogany species). I don't think you would gain anything by making everything from the same piece.

 

[musicispeace]

Interesting question and I have to defer to those with more wood working experience. But the only example I am aware of of what you are talking about was Billy Gibbons supposedly having a tele style guitar custom made by John Bolin from the same wood blank. Granted 99% of us will only hear it on youtube but nothing struck me as vastly superior about it. It was practically a work of art though.

 

[fdesalvo]

It's funny - sometimes we hear subtle differences; other times we don't.  Either way, it all gets lost in the wash of a live performance.

 

[Cagey]

It's funny - sometimes we hear subtle differences; other times we don't.  Either way, it all gets lost in the wash of a live performance.

I suspect a lot of the time it's because we don't get to hear single changes, if we get to hear a change at all. Even with identical specs, you can't compare two separate guitars. Has to be the same unit, with only one change at a time. Even then, the change may be so subtle that it's overcome by other influences.

For instance, I recently put some threaded inserts in a neck for a local player. The guitar had been in use for several months, so he was quite familiar with how it sounded. Playing it here acoustically and through my rig, he wasn't sure he could hear any difference, but wasn't really upset about that - he just wanted to be able to remove/re-install the neck repeatedly without wear. Got it home, and called me later that evening all excited. Through his rig, the thing sounded better than it did before. "Richer", he said. "More ring".

Now, we actually changed two things. Removing the neck to install inserts also required a string change at reassembly. New strings often sound richer and more articulate, depending how old the set coming off was. So, we could attribute it to that. But, if that was the case, why didn't he hear it here? Could be the environment. Point is, what appeared to be a single change was probably actually three, and that was with a single guitar, and it was still subtle.

 

[fdesalvo]

Yerp