Tonewood Selection

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Selecting Tonewoods for your Breedlove

Whether you're talking about tonewoods with us at the Breedlove Extraordinary Experience, or discussing options with your Breedlove dealer, tonewood selection is a very important part of your custom instrument design process. To help you choose woods best suited to your playing style and tonal desires, here is some information about the aesthetic and tonal properties of the tonewoods we use most frequently.

Top Woods

Top woods are usually softwoods coming from Gymnosperms, or conifers. Gymnosperms grow tall and straight, and have external seeds. The best top woods are very light, strong and stiff. Occasionally, a harder wood species (Mahogany, Koa, Walnut) might be employed for a guitar top.

This diagram places topwoods on a horizontal axis according to general tonal characteristics.



Here's some more detailed information about our topwood selections.

	Bear Claw Sitka Spruce This spruce has genetic attributes that produce a figuring suggestive of a bear clawing his way across the grain. Lateral figuring makes this wood the stiffest of our top woods. Highly sought after for its unique figuring. Very stiff and punchy. Good for heavy playing styles - retains clarity when pushed. Pacific Northwest tone wood.
	Red Spruce Adirondack responds well to a firm touch, but is quite versatile. Relative rarity, combined with a reputation for fine tone, especially as used on pre-war/vintage instruments, have elevated it to premium tonewood status for new instruments. Interesting grain color variations make this aesthetically desirable. From the Northeastern United States.
	Sitka Spruce Sitka spruce has become an industry standard top wood, renowned for high quality and excellent tonality. It is a very versatile top that works well for all styles of playing. Present abundance makes it arguably under appreciated, but it remains a classic. The color is fairly light when new, and becomes golden over time. A Pacific Northwest wood.
	Engelmann Spruce Generally for a lighter touch, this wood vibrates with developed overtones and is “ringier” than Sitka Spruce. Warm bass response and very light in color. From Northwest Montana and Canada.
	German Spruce The “ringiest” of all spruce species. Extremely clear and bell like. Exceptional choice for light fingerstyle and medium strumming techniques. Heavier fingerstyle techniques yield abundant overtones and chords become a choir. Very white in color.
	Port Orford Cedar or White Cedar Durable, stiff and strong, with warm resonance. Tonally, a versatile combination of Sitka Spruce and Western Red Cedar. Light Amber in color, and also quite aromatic, like eucalyptus. Another fine Oregon tonewood.
	Western Red Cedar Balanced, warm and rich, with bright trebles - sounds broken in even when new. A favorite among fingerstyle players. Great warmth and full chording for light rhythm players. Coloration runs from light to very dark reddish-brown. From the Pacific Northwest.
	Redwood Rare and beautiful, Redwood is tonally warm, rich and complex. Responds dynamically to a light touch. A phenomenal choice for fingerstyle. It is darker than Red Cedar with a reddish hue. From Northern California.

Back and Side Woods

Back and side woods generally come from Angiosperms - broad-leafed trees that bear seeds (fruits or legumes) in ovaries. These trees tend to be broad, with shorter trunks, yielding wood that is very strong and extremely heavy. Various hardwoods resonate at different frequencies. Some hardwoods vibrate and resonate for longer than others. Beauty, frequency range, and energy release characteristics make different back and side woods suitable for achieving a particular tonal goal.

This diagram places back/side woods on an x-y graph according to general tonal characteristics.



Here's some detailed information about our back and side wood selections.

	Walnut With the textured woodiness of Mahogany and the rich depth of Rosewood, Walnut is an excellent all-purpose back wood. Breedlove's bracing scheme gives our Walnut guitars a unique warmth and tonal depth. Dark brown, highly figured. Obtained from salvage operations in Oregon's Willamette Valley.
	East Indian Rosewood Deep, warm yet punchy, very piano-like. Powerful rich sound. Clean mid and treble. A good all-around player's choice. One of the more deeply resonating hardwoods.
	Striped Ebony The richness of Rosewood with a bit more volume, and a specific gravity matching Brazilian Rosewood. It has a striking figuring, distinctive dark and light brown, with black and green variegation. Full, beautiful and stripy. It makes for a truly exceptional twelve string. Controlled by the government of New Guinea, but not an endangered species.
	Brazilian Rosewood Punchy and full, with a bell-like chime. This wood is found on many pre-war and vintage instruments. Dark reddish-brown to chocolate color, with interesting grain patterns. Exceptionally rare and becoming scarce. This highly sought-after wood has become one of the most revered of all tonewoods.
	Ziricote Clear, punchy, and balanced, similar in tone to Brazilian rosewood. Well-defined grain pattern, with an appearance resembling a spider web. Always visually stunning, and a Ziricote Breedlove will always sound as wonderful as it looks. From Mexico.
	Koa Woody and bright when new, Koa’s voice sweetens and deepens over time. We keep AA grade (with straighter grain) and Master Grade (highly figured), with a rich honey color. This Hawaiian wood is highly sought after for its three dimensional curl and flame, as well as for its tonal characteristics. Rare, and continues to climb in price.
	Myrtlewood The powerful voice of Rosewood combined with the clarity, brightness and balance of Maple. Breedlove introduced this wood to the industry over a decade ago. Highly consistent tone, while coloration varies, from an elegant whitish/straight grained appearance, to a striated pattern of yellow, green, caramel and cocoa, with flame and curl. One of the best recording tone woods available. From the coast of Oregon.
	Mahogany Bright and woody, a great all-around tonewood and an exceptional value. Breedlove Mahogany guitars are both warm and bright, and very responsive. Many blues bottleneck players love the way it “whines”. Our mahogany is from Central America.
	Maple A Breedlove Maple guitar is unlike any other. Our Maple guitars retain the great balance, clarity, and string-to-string separation that Maple is known for, but with the added dimension of a rich, warm low end response. We use Big Leaf Maple from the Pacific Northwest.

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