The Future of Tonewood: A look at the changing state of wood supplies and how the guitar community is adapting and exploring alternatives.

By Andy Ellis
February 2008

Acoustic Guitar

For decades, guitar players and builders counted on several classic tonewoods as a first step in the quest for the perfect acoustic guitar tone. But these traditional and revered tonewoods--spruce, rosewood, cedar, mahogany, and ebony--are all becoming scarce, and seasoned, old-growth specimens of some species are skyrocketing in price.

Some guitarists are tempted to dismiss the issue of vanishing wood as hysteria and marketing hype. "That would be a mistake," says Bob Taylor, founder of Taylor Guitars. "In our generation, we'll see the disappearance of some well-loved species. Even if they don't become extinct, they'll become extinct commercially."

The good news is luthiers and guitar companies will continue to build fine acoustic guitars, and musicians will continue to play them. But we will need to change our expectations of how solid-wood guitars should look and educate ourselves about the potential of less familiar species. Like it or not, an evolution of the acoustic guitar is underway, and all of us--players, independent luthiers, large manufacturers, and suppliers--have a role in the process and a stake in its success.

Classic Tonewood's Role in the Sonic Equation

What part does wood play in a complex tone equation that includes bracing patterns, headstock angle, bridge design, scale length, and finish? "It's ultimately important," Taylor says. "The next species of wood I'd want to use is more like the species I use now than any synthetic I'll ever be able to come up with."

There are, of course, two principal groups of classic woods that concern players and guitar builders: topwoods, which are principally of North American or European origin, and include spruce and cedar; and woods for backs and sides, which tend to originate in the tropics, or in North America and Europe, and include Indian and Brazilian rosewood, mahogany, and maple.

For more than a century (and even farther back in the case of many classical guitar and violin builders), these woods have been the backbone of the luthier's art and trade--and for good reason. They possess the unique properties of rigidity, reflectiveness, and response to string vibration that have colored and made magical everything from Hank Williams's locomotive strumming to Segovia's ornate finger acrobatics.

Steel-string players value rosewood for its almost incomparable balance of rich bass response and clear trebles when used for backs and sides. Mahogany, meanwhile, is favored for its brightness, clarity, and quick response--particularly on larger, inherently bassier guitars.

Spruce and cedar are similarly regarded as the standard for topwoods. Spruce--which includes Sitka, Engelmann, and European varieties, and the Holy Grail, Adirondack or eastern red spruce--are treasured for full-spectrum tonal response, definition, and resistance to distortion under heavy strumming and flatpicking. Cedar is prized for its uncommonly quick response, while mahogany tops are favored by some players for their warm, rich tonal palette.

Certain combinations of these tonewoods are considered essential to achieving perfect tone by many players. Prewar Martin D-28s, coveted by flatpickers fortheir volume, projection, and expansive tonal range, embody the magic that can happen when an Adirondack spruce top is mated to Brazilian rosewood back and sides. Midcentury Ramírez classicals, which epitomize the ideal classical tone for many, achieve their signature growl and high responsiveness through a marriage of cedar top and rosewood back and sides.

"Wood shares this wonderful characteristic from one species to another," Taylor says. "There are some that sound better or worse--of course, that's subjective--and at the end of the bell curve, there's wood you wouldn't want to use because it's too weak, too heavy, too brittle, and so on. But that doesn't mean there isn't this gigantic variety of wood in the middle that can work well for making guitars."

What Are the Alternatives?

Guitar building is not the principal reason for the depletion of tonewoods. In fact, musical instrument production accounts for less than one percent of the spruce and rosewood that's harvested annually, according to Greenpeace. Trees used for guitars are also used for home construction, furniture building, and paper products, all of which have substantially more impact on supplies. But many classic species of tonewoods need 70–100 years just to become mature timber, and hundreds more to become optimal age for musical instruments. With just 20 percent of the world's intact native forests remaining (and just 5 percent in the United States), the oldest trees that produce the best tonewoods are vanishing fast.

The overall depletion of these species--much of which can be avoided by using alternative materials for construction and paper products--may place the cost of many guitars out of reach. And few guitarists or guitar builders want any part in driving old-growth forests to extinction. This convergence of social responsibility, adaptive thinking, and market forces finds the guitar builders of the world working with some very interesting alternatives.

Though North American and European spruce are the reigning kings of topwoods, some builders have already begun to tinker successfully with other sources and trees. Even so, no one species represents a truly sustainable alternative. "Suppliers are starting to look at forests in other parts of the world," reports Chris Herrod, sales manager at Luthiers Mercantile International (LMI), a leading wood supplier. "Some builders say Ukrainian spruce is a decent substitute for Adirondack, but it's too soon to know how much of that wood is available. Redwood is a cedar alternative that looks and sounds beautiful, and we can use fallen and sustainably harvested trees. There's not a huge demand for it yet, though."

Many alternative woods for backs and sides have already proven themselves in the marketplace. "Take sapele and ovangkol, for example, which are mahogany and rosewood alternatives," Taylor says. "They're both widely used in guitar building now, though 15 years ago you never saw them in a guitar. We make 80 guitars a day with sapele and ovangkol, and people accept them readily."

Other luthiers successfully dip into an even wider range of alternative hardwoods. "Tonewise, there are some very good performers with unique visual qualities that aren't on everyone's radar yet," Herrod says. "For example, machiche, which comes from Central America, has a rosewood-like appearance with tight grain lines. Another wood from that region, granadillo, has lots of visual character and it's plentiful. African woods including zebrawood, which has a nice density, and bubinga are great too."

Construction Alternatives.

Seeking alternative species isn't the only means of conserving classic tonewoods. Existing supplies can be more efficiently used through application of new guitar-making methods, and some of the biggest names in the business are embracing them already. Taylor's NT (New Technology) neck, for instance, grafts the headstock and neck using a complex finger joint, rather than cutting the neck and headstock from a single blank. The process enables Taylor to create three necks and three heel blocks from the same 4-by-4 billet that once yielded just two neck blanks, and the minimal waste adds up to little more than sawdust.

Spruce supplies, meanwhile, can be extended through new approaches to soundboard construction. Currently, spruce tops are made from a pair of bookmatched pieces, requiring a relatively large log approximately 35 to 40 inches in diameter. "At some point we're going to have to accept a four-piece Sitka spruce top simply because the available trees are smaller, says Chris Martin IV of C.F. Martin and Co. "A skilled builder will be able to make a four-piece top look beautiful, and it will perform structurally and sonically as well as a two-piece top. The only significant difference is the player will know it's a four-piece top, and that's the hurdle we have to jump."

"There's nothing that says the aesthetic of the guitar can't change," Taylor says. "Twenty years from now guitars will look different, and 100 years from now they'll look different again. You'll see guitars made of plantation rosewood--perhaps a tree that's 40 years old, rather than several hundred--with wide grain and maybe less variegation. Still, that piece of rosewood is going to be so much more like the piece we use now than anything else you could come up with. Things change, but guitars will still be great because guitar makers are creative. The worst that will happen is your rosewood will be farmed, your spruce top might be made of four pieces, and maybe your fretboard is stained walnut rather than ebony. But I can live with that."

Herrod suggests that a convergence of new construction methods and new woods looms large in the future of lutherie--prompting the best guitar builders to innovations that will ultimately reward the player. "To successfully build guitars from different woods is a matter of the luthier making some adjustments," he says. "For example, if you have a low-density wood like kauri from New Zealand, it will absorb some of the low end, so you make sure the top is resonating well on the bass side to get a good tonal balance. Even though I'm in the wood business, I'll be the first to tell you that a guitar's design, construction, and body shape have a greater impact on tone than the wood it's made from. The builder is number one and the materials come in second."

The Part of the Player--Great Expectations

As consumers drive demand, players can affect wood supplies by thinking differently about aesthetics and the association between what a guitar sounds like and what it looks like. "People associate thin, straight grain with the best Sitka spruce tops," Herrod says. "But you'd be surprised at how wonderful a top can sound when made with wider-grain Sitka. There's sufficient stiffness, which is one of the main components of a good top. People have become more open-minded and willing to accept dark winter grain and open spacing in Adirondack spruce, because they know it has that classic flatpicking sound. I'd like to see that open-mindedness transfer to Sitka--it would ease the pressure on the market."

"In my experience, which is based on personally handling probably a half-million guitar tops," Taylor says, "when the grain is wider, the guitar is a little less stiff, but a lot lighter. And it sounds better. You can corroborate that by looking at great-sounding vintage guitars--they almost all have terribly wide-grained, ugly tops."

Martin concurs on that point: "We have great old Martins, and the topwood has lots of character, not just perfectly straight grain. Though we've gotten used to seeing wood look like that, and associate it with a good-sounding guitar, we'll need to accept spruce tops that have uneven grain and bearclaw, and yet are structurally and sonically excellent."

Harvesting and Management Alternatives

At the end of the day, one indisputable truth is that neither alternative species nor construction methods are a panacea for the wood woes that affect builders and players. Ultimately, effective, ethical forest management that preserves the ecosystem from which trees are taken is the best way to conserve endangered woods. "There's no easy answer to the question of which woods can be used sustainably," says Scott Paul of Greenpeace. "The best specimens of just about any wood are old growth or from ancient forests, and that exists in finite amounts. But when you look at maple, which may be the closest thing to truly sustainable, you can see how far effective management and enforcement of harvesting laws, like we have in the United States, Canada, and Europe, can go."

Fortunately, incentives for forest management are becoming increasingly consumer driven--largely by the market appeal of certifications that guarantee ethical material sourcing for products. In the timber industry, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification is recognized as the best assurance of wood that's been sourced from ethically managed forests. And guitar giants like Gibson, Martin, Fender, and Taylor are all striving to build guitars that are made entirely from FSC-certified wood, despite the inherent challenges. Gibson has come close with their Les Paul SmartWood electric (which features a body made from entirely FSC-certified muira piranga and mahogany) and Martin's Sustainable Wood Series dreadnought and OM are constructed entirely from certified or rescued wood. "A 100 percent FSC-certified guitar is a very difficult thing to do," says Paul. "Because ultimately, most guitars are made from materials sourced from all over the globe. And in the case of a lot of woods--Sitka spruce, for instance--certification has not yet happened. But the consumer demand that can make that happen is definitely growing."

The potential marketing value of ethical forest management--as well as the hands-on involvement of guitar industry leaders in tree-harvesting communities--is already prompting positive changes in harvesting techniques. Alaskan lumber giant Sealaska is considering setting aside a dedicated swath of old-growth forest to be harvested by FSC-certifiable means after working closely with Greenpeace and the MusicWood Coalition (www.musicwood.org), which includes Taylor, Fender, Martin, and Gibson. And Taylor has worked extensively with a community in Honduras to facilitate low-impact, selective harvesting that actually yields more profit for the community. Some wood suppliers are now looking in places other than standing forests for their old-growth woods, too. "In Brazil, we're taking rosewood that's essentially debris wood from pastures," says Todd Taggart, founder of Allied Lutherie. "It's much harder to identify, because it doesn't have telltale leaves and bark, but it's permitted and legal to take. By harvesting successfully in that manner, we take some pressure off the local populations to cut trees. And a lot of that wood is actually prettier than the wood you see from less mature trees."

Embracing the Future

Anyone involved with the acoustic guitar--whether as a picker or builder--can actively participate in the instrument's transition into the brave new world of alternative woods and construction. "My advice for anyone buying a guitar is to not go into this with a preconceived notion about how a certain wood sounds based on what you read or people tell you," Herrod says. "Play the guitars and hear for yourself."

"We should all be trying to do this collectively," Martin says. "The more people who are willing to say, 'Hey, there are viable alternatives to traditional woods,' and build, buy, and play guitars made with these materials, the better off we're all going to be."