Rethinking fretboard material tropes

C

cdub

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How could kingwood be a ‘warm’ fretboard choice? I have a kingwood board on a VM flame maple warhead neck and it is the spankiest bright thing.

From the Wood Database website:

Kingwood
Average Dried Weight: 75 lbs/ft3 (1,200 kg/m3)
Specific Gravity (Basic, 12% MC): .98, 1.20
Janka Hardness: 3,340 lbf (17,240 N)

Macassar Ebony
Average Dried Weight: 70 lbs/ft3 (1,120 kg/m3)
Specific Gravity (Basic, 12% MC): .89, 1.12
Janka Hardness: 3,220 lbf (14,140 N)

It’s heavier, denser, and harder than macassar ebony, for cryin’ in the sink!

Pau Ferro (listed as brighter than kingwood by a large margin...)
Average Dried Weight: 54 lbs/ft3 (865 kg/m3)
Specific Gravity (Basic, 12% MC): .70, .87
Janka Hardness: 1,960 lbf (8,710 N)

What gives? Anybody else find kingwood to be similar to ebony? And find pau ferro to have a soft ‘mwah’ mushiness in the upper mids?

Probably over-analyzing like my usual self. Obsessed! :laughing11:

That’s what you get for being raised on TV and sugary breakfast cereal. :dontknow:
 
All other things being equal, the various bridge designs, materials and mounting schemes can have a surprisingly dramatic effect on tonal character as well.
 
The aforementioned kingwood/flame maple VM neck in currently bolted on to my first W build, a mahogany/flame maple flat top soloist. The bridge, it’s got a Gotoh/Wilkinson VS100 with GraphTech saddles. Cagey, do you find that part to be any brighter than any other Strat trem? I don’t  remember if you’re a Graph Tech saddle fan or not.

It’s also a standard thin profile, which feels like a child’s toy to me, but as stated it was my first build. Live and learn!
 
I like Graphtech saddles and have used them a number of times. I don't remember them being any "brighter" than anything else. Although, they may be. If you take a handful of them and shake 'em like dice in your hand, you'll get a "tinkling" kind of noise from them that other saddles don't produce. I will also say the Wilkinson bridge seems to lose less than some others, and with a Kingwood over Maple neck on a Maple-topped Soloist body, that guitar should be plenty articulate.
 
There's no such thing as a "warm" fretboard material. Your pickups don't hear the fretboard. If they did, the frets with inlays would sound different from the frets that don't have inlays.

There's simply not enough material there to make any difference.
 
There's so many factors that puts "rules of thumb" to the test more often than never.

You can't really foresee what's going to happen when you put parts together. Sometimes it works - sometimes it work differently.
 
There are other factors including each piece of wood is different, a particular piece of kingwood may have less oil in it than normal, and less porous, hence being spankier.  It's a  range of things.
 
I wonder if, like a lot of things, there are general aspects that may hold much of the time but always there will be exceptions. My "brightest" sounding guitar is a Yamaha HSS strat copy I bought second hand with a rosewood fingerboard on a maple neck. I have one tele (with a roasted maple neck) and I love it but put this Yamaha through a small amp with like a 10 inch speaker and some reverb and its the meanest sounding country guitar, clear and rings for miles. Who would have ever guessed it. It shouldn't be the case but someday I hope to record it on a country song.
 
In my own experience, over many many assembled guitars, swapping necks and pickups between 'em..... aside from pickup selection, neck wood (not the fretboard) makes the biggest tone change, as its the most resonant part of the guitar.  Yes, the fretboard can alter the resonance of the neck, adding stiffness (but not subtracting), but its a minor variable. 

On a solid body, body wood density, to me, makes more of a change than body wood material, and even that is more or less a minor variable.  That is to say, if you take ash, alder and mahogany of the same density, they really don't sound too different, like A/B comparisons on some of those Warmoth videos... you'd never tell unless you really were careful to exactly A/B compare in all other respects. 

But... change that neck wood, and the tone change becomes evident immediately.  Go from maple to mahogany to goncalo... like turning a super midrange/treble/presence knob on an amp.  Everyone has their own tastes, and mine run to warmish toned goncalo.  Ask yourself:  What part of the guitar vibrates the most when the strings are plucked?  Does that vibration selectively absorb certain frequencies?  When frequencies (overtones, harmonics) are absorbed, what happens to the energy level, aka loudness, of those frequencies?
I'll throw in a little pet peeve, which is the misconception that body/neck/hardware "resonance" equals "sustain".  Pick up your acoustic guitar.  The strings make the top resonate.  Does it sustain more than your solid body?  No.  The more energy the strings "give up" to make something else vibrate, the less they have, and the sustain is less.

The recent video about neck "thickness" is interesting, but it tells an incomplete story, as it only deals with maple, which is pretty stiff stuff to begin with.  If you take a more limber wood - say mahogany - thickness may well be more of a factor, as the wood is not as stiff, but will gain some stiffness with more material being present.
 
My opinion after 40 plus years, the tone contributed by the fingerboard is mostly in the attack. Harder woods like ebony have a quick attack, softer stuff like rosewood takes longer to bloom. Some of the sustained part of the note seems darker to my ears on dark wood. More snap and brightness from maple. It's only part of the whole guitar tone, but it is noticeable for those with good ears.
 
Hardness / density aren't proxies for brightness. Rosewood is "darker" than maple, but it's also much denser and harder.

Different woods have distinctly different tap tones, that's it. I'm not sure it's dependent on density and hardness.
 
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