The Truth About Tonewoods in Solid-Body Electric Guitars - Part 2

Few arguments in guitar culture run hotter than tonewood. Does the species of wood in a solid-body's body, neck, or fretboard change how it sounds? One camp treats exotic timber as the soul of the instrument. The other says the pickups and the amp do everything and the wood is just a handle. Both can't be right, and as it turns out, neither is.

This piece works through what controlled research can and can't show. It leans on peer-reviewed acoustics and psychoacoustics, and it keeps three things apart on purpose: what has actually been measured, what is craft tradition or marketing, and where the honest answer is still "we don't fully know." Where a study is weak, that gets said. Where the evidence is strong, that gets said too.

Acoustic and electric are not the same problem

Start with the distinction that most tonewood arguments skip. An acoustic guitar makes its sound by moving air. The top plate, driven through the bridge, radiates almost everything you hear, so the top's stiffness, mass, and damping are central to the instrument's voice. Even there, the picture is more specific than the folklore: the soundboard dominates, while the back and sides matter far less than their price tags suggest. In a controlled build of six steel-strings differing only in back-and-side wood, guitarists in a blind test could barely tell them apart, and the wood's measured effect on the body modes was small (Carcagno et al., 2018).

A solid-body electric works differently. The sound source is the vibrating string, sensed magnetically by the pickup. The body radiates almost no sound by design — solid bodies exist precisely to kill the feedback and resonances that a hollow box produces. So the wood can't color the tone by radiating its own sound the way an acoustic top does. If wood matters in an electric, it matters indirectly: by changing how the string itself vibrates and decays. That is the only channel available, and it is the one worth examining.

How wood could change the string's motion

When a string vibrates, it doesn't only feed the pickup. It also pushes on its end supports — the bridge on the body, the nut and frets on the neck. If those supports flex even slightly, a little of the string's energy leaks into them instead of staying in the string. How much leaks depends on the mechanical conductance at the contact points: how easily the structure can be set in motion at a given frequency. A stiff, massive, low-conductance support holds the string's energy in; a flexible or resonant one drains it faster.

This is real physics, and it sets up a useful prediction. A more rigid termination should let a note ring longer; a more compliant one should damp it sooner. The question is not whether this mechanism exists. It is where it lives in a real guitar, and whether the differences between wood species are large enough to hear.

On the first point, the research is fairly consistent: most of the coupling happens at the neck, not the body. The neck is long, relatively thin, and free to flex; the body is short, thick, and stiff. So the neck's resonances are the ones that line up with played notes and pull energy out of the string.

Dead spots: the clearest case of wood shaping tone

The cleanest demonstration of wood and structure affecting an electric's sound is the dead spot — a note, usually at a particular fret on one string, that dies away noticeably faster than its neighbors. Players know them by feel.

Fleischer's vibration measurements tied dead spots directly to the neck. Where the neck's conductance is locally high at a note's frequency, the neck moves readily, absorbs the string's energy, and the note decays fast. Where conductance is low, the note sustains. The correlation is strong and it runs the way the physics predicts: high neck mobility, short sustain (Fleischer, 1999). A note can lose half its sustain this way, and that is plainly audible.

Dead spots are the proof of concept that the wooden structure — especially the neck — genuinely shapes what the pickup hears. They also locate the effect: in the neck's behavior, tied to its stiffness, mass, and how it's built, rather than in the body's choice of species.

What the pickup adds, and what it doesn't

A common worry is that the pickup's magnets drag on the string and muddy the picture. Careful work has separated the string's own losses from losses into the structure and shown that the magnetic pickup adds no meaningful damping of its own — it senses the string without appreciably slowing it (Paté et al., 2014). The pickup's own physical movement in a solid-body is also negligible, well under a percent of the string signal.

Two consequences follow. The pickup faithfully reports whatever the string is actually doing, including dead spots and uneven decay. And the pickup mainly senses motion perpendicular to the body, so if the structure changes how the string moves in that plane, the output changes with it. The pickup is an honest witness; the question is what there is to witness.

What the measurements actually show

Sustain and the neck

The strongest result in this literature is a model of sustain. Paté and colleagues separated a plucked string's two loss mechanisms — its own internal and air losses, and its coupling to the instrument — and showed they could predict a note's decay time from the string's properties plus the neck's conductance alone. The body did not need to be in the model, and the prediction matched measured sustain across the fretboard, dead spots included. The pickup output carried the same decay pattern (Paté et al., 2014).

This is the firmest ground in the whole subject: the variation in sustain you actually hear, across notes and between instruments, is governed mainly by the strings and the neck.

The body-wood studies, and why they don't settle it

The studies aimed specifically at body wood are weaker, and it's worth being precise about why, because they get cited as if they closed the case.

Ray et al. (2021) compared an ash sample against a walnut sample. But these were rectangular solid slabs, not real guitars, and there was a single sample of each species — walnut being a wood almost never used for bodies. They measured higher damping and shorter decay in the walnut slab, mostly in the higher harmonics of the low strings in one vibration mode, with no significant difference on most fundamentals. The trouble is that with one sample per species and high measurement variability, there is no way to be sure the difference came from the species rather than from something else that differed between two unique objects. Tellingly, the authors frame the mechanism through coupling to the neck and strings — body damping, in their account, shortens decay at coupled notes rather than lengthening it.

Puszyński et al. (2015) used wooden planks fitted with a string, again not real guitars, four per species. Their result is the one most often misread. Wood species did affect the sound picked up by a microphone — the radiated acoustic sound — where denser woods correlated with lower specific loudness. But in the pickup output, the part that matters for an electric, there was no correlation with species at all, and the microphone and pickup signals didn't track each other. Roughness and sharpness showed no significant wood effect either. In other words, the stripped-down rig showed a wood effect in the air, and none in the wire.

Jasiński et al. (2021) recorded a simplified test instrument built with different woods and found differences in spectral envelope and signal level that exceeded the just-noticeable differences reported in the literature; an informal listening test found the sounds distinguishable to average listeners. It's a suggestive result and a fair starting point. But it's a simplified rig and an informal test, not a controlled comparison of complete guitars, so it points toward audibility under ideal conditions rather than demonstrating it in a real instrument.

The pattern across all three is the same: simplified test objects, few or single samples, and effects that are either small, confined to acoustically radiated sound, or hard to separate from ordinary sample-to-sample variation. They are a beginning, not a verdict. Body wood may yet be shown to matter audibly in real guitars — but these studies don't show it, and the language around them should match that.

Fingerboard wood

The fretboard is part of the neck, so it sits where the coupling actually happens, and it has been tested directly. Paté et al. built guitars identical except for the fingerboard — ebony versus rosewood — and ran two experiments. In the listening test, where guitarists sorted recordings, players heard differences but did not group the guitars into ebony and rosewood: the wood difference was real but didn't organize what they heard. Discrimination appeared only in the playing test, where guitarists handled the instruments themselves, and the cue that distinguished the woods was "precision" — how cleanly each note stood out — not, as folklore would have it, sustain (Paté et al., 2015; 2013).

The honest reading is narrow and interesting: fingerboard wood produces differences a player can pick up when playing, located in the neck system, surfacing as articulation rather than as a tonal "color."

Can you actually hear it?

Measuring a difference and hearing one are different claims. A few perceptual yardsticks help.

For loudness, the just-noticeable difference is around 1 dB. For timbre, a spectral change has to be large enough in some band to register. If a wood change shifts a few harmonics by 2–3 dB, that is above threshold and can be heard on an isolated, clean note by someone listening for it. Spread thinly across the spectrum, the same total change vanishes.

Sustain perception is coarse unless the difference is large. A dead spot that halves a note's ring is obvious. A five or ten percent difference in decay time, in normal playing, generally is not. And context buries small differences fast: add a band, distortion, or a room, and subtle spectral or decay differences get masked. This is why a player can be certain in a quiet room and unable to repeat the feat in a mix — and why blind tests of electric tonewood so often come back inconclusive once pickups, strings, and setup are held constant. Expectation does real work here; knowing a guitar is made of a prized wood is enough to make someone hear a richer tone.

Myths against the evidence

"Wood doesn't matter at all — it's all electronics." False as stated, but so is its mirror image. The neck demonstrably shapes how a note decays, dead spots being the proof. Saying the body's wood species hasn't been shown to audibly matter is not the same as saying electronics do everything; plenty of other parts of the instrument move the sound too. Both slogans are false dichotomies.

"Heavier or stiffer woods sustain longer." True as a principle about terminations, and well evidenced at the neck — a stiffer, lower-conductance support drains less string energy. As a claim about body-wood species in real guitars, it isn't established; the controlled comparisons are slabs and single samples, and at least one of them describes body damping shortening decay through neck coupling, not extending it.

"Each species has an inherent tonal color — mahogany warm, maple bright." For an acoustic top, descriptions like these have some footing. For a solid-body, two same-model guitars of different body woods can sound a little different, but there is no good evidence the difference is caused by the body species rather than by the ordinary variation between any two instruments. The marketing error is one of magnitude: nothing in the controlled data approaches the change you get from swapping a pickup or moving a tone control.

"Exotic tropical woods are necessary for good tone." Not supported. What governs the mechanics is stiffness, density, and damping, not the name on the species. Match those properties and a domestic or non-traditional wood can do the same job — a useful conclusion as the traditional tropical timbers grow scarce and protected.

"Bolt-on necks sustain less than set-necks." Joint construction does produce measurable mechanical differences, and it can shift where the dead spots fall. But blinded perceptual studies haven't found a consistent audible difference attributable to the joint type itself (Mottola, 2007; Paté et al., 2012). The neck joint is worth its own discussion, and gets one elsewhere in this series; for here, the short version is that the wiring of the lore — joint type as a sustain dial — runs ahead of the evidence.

"Pickups only sense the string, so wood is irrelevant." The pickup does only sense the string. But the neck — which is mostly wood — changes what the string does, and the pickup reports that faithfully. So wood isn't irrelevant; the demonstrated path runs through the neck, not the body.

Where this leaves a builder

The defensible position is narrower than either camp's, and more useful for it.

What's measured: the strings and the neck dominate the sustain and the dead-spot behavior you hear, and the pickup reports it without adding losses of its own. Fingerboard wood produces small differences a player can detect while playing, surfacing as articulation. Neck stiffness, mass, and construction are real tone-and-feel variables.

What's tradition or marketing: the idea that body-wood species imparts a fixed tonal color, or that a rare timber is required for good tone. Same-model guitars of different body woods can differ, but the controlled evidence does not pin that on the species, and the claimed magnitudes are not supported.

What's still open: whether body-wood species has any audible effect in a real, complete guitar. The honest answer is that no one has shown it cleanly, partly because the perfect test — the same guitar twice with only the wood changed — is almost impossible to build. That difficulty cuts both ways: it limits confident "yes" answers and confident "no" answers alike. What's left is a spectrum of evidence, strongest at the neck, thin and contested at the body.

For building, the practical reading is steady. If sustain is the goal, control the neck and the terminations — stiffness, mass, a clean nut and bridge, a sound joint — because that is where the energy actually goes. Choose body wood for weight, balance, stability, and looks, which are real and which the player feels every time the instrument is picked up. And when a traditional timber is scarce, match the mechanical properties rather than chasing the name; the sound will not betray the substitution.

References

• Ahvenainen, P. (2019). Anatomy and mechanical properties of woods used in electric guitars. IAWA Journal, 40(1), 106–S6. https://doi.org/10.1163/22941932-40190218
• Carcagno, S., Bucknall, R., Woodhouse, J., Fritz, C., & Plack, C. J. (2018). Effect of back wood choice on the perceived quality of steel-string acoustic guitars. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 144(6), 3533–3547. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5084735
• Fleischer, H. (1999). Dead spots of electric guitars and basses (popular version of paper 5aMUb6).
• Jasiński, J., Oleś, S., Tokarczyk, D., & Pluta, M. (2021). On the audibility of electric guitar tonewood. Archives of Acoustics, 46(4), 571–578. https://doi.org/10.24425/aoa.2021.138150
• Mottola, R. M. (2007). Sustain and electric guitar neck joint type. American Lutherie, #91. https://www.liutaiomottola.com/PrevPubs/Sustain/Sustain.htm
• Paté, A., Le Carrou, J.-L., & Fabre, B. (2013). Ebony vs. rosewood: experimental investigation of the influence of the fingerboard on the sound of a solid-body electric guitar. Proceedings of SMAC 2013, 182–187.
• Paté, A., Le Carrou, J.-L., Navarret, B., Dubois, D., & Fabre, B. (2012). A vibro-acoustical and perceptive study of the neck-to-body junction of a solid-body electric guitar. Acoustics 2012, Nantes.
• Paté, A., Le Carrou, J.-L., & Fabre, B. (2014). Predicting the decay time of solid body electric guitar tones. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 135(5), 3045–3055.
• Paté, A., Le Carrou, J.-L., Navarret, B., Dubois, D., & Fabre, B. (2015). Influence of the electric guitar's fingerboard wood on guitarists' perception. Acta Acustica united with Acustica, 101(2), 347–359. https://doi.org/10.3813/AAA.918831
• Puszyński, J., Moliński, W., & Preis, A. (2015). The effect of wood on the sound quality of electric string instruments. Acta Physica Polonica A, 127(1), 114–116. https://doi.org/10.12693/APhysPolA.127.114
• Ray, T., et al. (2021). [Ash vs. walnut solid-body study]. Materials, 14(18), 5281. https://doi.org/10.3390/ma14185281
• Zorič, A., Kaljun, J., Žveplan, E., & Straže, A. (2019). Selection of wood based on acoustic properties for the solid body of electric guitar. Archives of Acoustics, 44(1), 51–58. https://doi.org/10.24425/aoa.2019.126351