Ordering a Warmoth, need suggestions....

[Gravityfield]

I am ordering a new Warmoth and have a few questions regarding body woods.
I am planning on ordering a strat shaped guitar and am trying to detrmine whether to  make the body alder,ash, or mahogany.
A few thins are certain :
        I defintely want a 3A BIrdseye maple neck and maple fretboard.
        Secondly, it is going to be a hum-sing-sing pickup configuration, and  the bridge pick-up is going to be a Seymour Duncan '78 or a Genesis Mr.Brownie.  Both these pickups are in the 9k range.
          I want this strat body to have a Fender style trem of some sort also.

My question is; is how these woods would react to a hard maple neck such as a 3A maple. Would alder or ash make it an exceedingly bright guitar?
My favorite tones are Les Paul tones, but I also love tremelo bars and the strat body. Which made me consider a mahogany body. Would a bright neck such as the 3A counter some of the darkness of the mahogany body making it more like a Les Paul?

I play classic rock (ZZtop,Van Halen, earlier Rush) and the heaviest I get would be a Van Halen level of overdrive.
Feel free to make suggestions, or to tell me I am thinking too hard about all this.
Thanks.

 

[Patrick from Davis]

I have an Ebony neck on a Korina body telecaster, and it has a nice balance of growl and articulation.  Maple is not that far from ebony as far as how it behaves as a neck wood.  Mahogany is a good wood to balance it out, but I am partial to korina.  It tends to have a bit more bite and less wool than mahogany, but they are very similar.  On the other hand, Fender has been making maple necked ash and alder body guitars for a long time, so that combo does seem to work.  The woods you mentioned would work for a Les Paul, but to get even closer a 24.75 conversion neck might be in order.  Finally, any of the options will make a great guitar, and you would have to try them all to get closer to that sound in your head.  So ultimately it turns out that you should get what you like and go from there.
Patrick

 

[Maltozombie]

A good thing to remember that a lot of the other members on here will testify to is that it's far easier to dial brightness out of a sound than to dial brightness into a sound, so a guitar that's exceedingly bright can be quite nice, pretty much any gripes you have with a sharp, bright tone can be corrected at the amp settings, especially so if your amp has a good presence control,

as i play more i'm always trying to get a sweeter top end out of my sound so my 2 cents are that a guitar that's a little bright is just right, also extremely open to opinion is that the neck wood will make a much bigger difference than the body wood,
so no matter what you pair it with, that maple neck is always gonna sound like a maple neck and the body is going to have a much smaller effect on the overall tone, but if i was recommending for you, if you're going for the 'Superstrat with humbuckers that sounds like a les paul' kind of guitar, the evh style frankenstrat with the maple neck/ash body is a time tested champion, that would make a well rounded guitar that could cover a lot of ground really well.

whatever you choose, have fun, keep us posted.  :icon_thumright:

 

[Death by Uberschall]

Both of my Warmoths are mahogany body with maple necks. One is maple/maple, the other is maple/ebony. Very balanced and warm tones. You won't regret it.

 

[hannaugh]

If you like the LP sound, I would go with a mahogany or black korina body.

 

[Cagey]

While alder, ash and mahogany are all technically "hardwoods", they're all pretty far down the list as far as hardness and weight goes, so they're not terribly bright-sounding but they are usually more resonant. Also, especially with alder and ash, they're highly variable as to weight and hardness. You can go through a dozen seemingly identical Strats and they'll all sound slightly different from each other. Swamp ash is particularly that way. It depends on where on the tree the wood comes from how heavy/dense it is, with the bottom being the lightest and most resonant. Unfortunately, it's sort of a crap-shoot when you're buying the stuff - there's usually nothing visible to differentiate where it came from.

With necks, you have several considerations. The fact that you're guaranteed a certain amount of lamination means that regardless of species, the thing is going to be stiffer than a single piece of wood will ever be. Bare minimum, you're either going to have a stripe down the back of the neck glued in, or you're going to have a fingerboard glued on, or both. Some necks are even glue-ups of several species of wood for aesthetic reasons. In any event, because the neck is under a great deal of tension, it has to be made of a fairly hard/stiff wood to begin with, and fingerboards are often even harder than the neck meat to allow for better wear properties. So, it follows that necks have less effect on tone than is often believed. Not that they don't affect it, but it's not something to lose sleep over.

On an electric builder's forum such as this, we all work really hard at making the most attractive instruments we can, striving as well to make them the easiest to play and maintain as possible. We're not really saving any money, unless you compare what we build to the commercial "custom shop" offerings that rarely can stand up to what we do even at half the price.  Most of us have been playing for some time, and know wood has an effect. But, I suspect that sometimes we worry about it too much. Given something as high-quality as you'll end up with from Warmoth parts, where the huge differences show up is in the pickups and how you play. I'm sure we've all met the guy (if he isn't us) who can pick up a K-Mart special from Deepinahearta China and make it sound heavenly, while we also know at least a dozen guys who could make a Ron Kirn Signature Strat running through a Dumble sound like a bag of cats in a bonfire.

So, build what you want. We'll fix it in post <grin>