I Wonder If It Is The Top Wood

[William2]

I recently purchased a new Eastman E-20DL. I wanted an Adi top. The instrument is amazingly powerful and for a fingerstyle player I find I can exert less effort for the equivalent amount of sound than on a spruce top instrument. I find that my classical pieces really sound great on this instrument due to its volume and sustain. I have a bigger dynamic pallet and the sustain is unreal. That said, I don't find this instrument ideal for my arrangements of standard chord melody arrangements. They work, but something is missing. There is a lack of warmth or something that I can get with my Larrivee guitars regardless of the tone wood (rosewood or mahogany). I will add that I used to own an Eastman E-10DL. This guitar was also very powerful and had an incredible sustain. This Adi / mahogany instrument lacked that sound you get with that wood (spruce / mahogany) combination. Maybe an Adi top is best for just some sorts of music. I'm keeping the Eastman for classical and the Larrivee for my chord melody tunes.

[B0WIE]

 Having had several guitars with both tops, I think the differences get overblown. Remember that woods don't fall on a scale of Sitka/Engelman/Adi/etc. There's a great variability within a tree and some Sitka will sound more like what we think Adi should sound like and vice versa.

 If anything, I have found that Adi needs to be driven harder and has more headroom on the top end. In other words, I can flat pick hard and it keeps getting louder when Sitka starts to hit a ceiling. But, this really comes down to the guitar, the individual pieces of wood, how they are braced and thicknessed, etc.

[BlueBowman]

William, what's the "DL" mean in that Eastman model number?

[William2]

Dreadnought / Left Hand.

[nobodeuno]

I have to agree...I played a bunch of Eastmans with Adi tops side by side in a store in Nashville...it was hard to tell if they were Adi or backed sitka...I'm sure the old growth Adi tops are different sounding than those we find on new factory guitars using young fast grown Adi trees.  While 4A old growth Adi wood is rare, expensive and reserved.

Picea rubens aka red spruce, Adirondack spruce, yellow spruce, West Virginia spruce, eastern spruce, etc. It grows from the Canada (Quebec) down through the Adirondack mountains in New York/Vermont, continuing down through the Appalachians into Carolina.

[William2]

I've never played a baked Sitka top instrument, but I can sure notice the difference between a Sitka top and an Adirondack top when I play. My point was that I don't notice that woody sound I get from my Larrivee D-40 when I compare it with an Eastman E-10D. It sounds very much like an Eastman E-20D (rosewood back and sides). So maybe one Adi top is enough for me LOL. I wouldn't mind having a mahogany top instrument in my collection. I've listened to Cedar and while I like it on classical guitars, it doesn't do it for me on a steel string instrument.

[teh]

If you trust A.I. and type in "Why doesn't Larrivee use torrified* tops?" you get a clear explanation of the reasons why they don't. The climate in Southern California which is ideal for curing and air drying wood naturally is a key factor. The likelihood that torrified wood becomes brittle, is hard to work with and prone to splitting/cracking is another concern. I also think that trying to rush Mother Nature may cause problems down the road in 15 or 20 years.

*Spell check tried to auto-correct Torrified to Terrified so there's that too.

When I saw the Moonwood spruce used for bracing and the quality of the unfinished mahogany used on the top, back and sides of my 00-24 during a factory tour, I knew a special guitar was on the way and as a result, my 00 gets a lot of playing time. I've also had good luck with Sitka, Moonwood and most recently Englemann Spruce.

[BlueBowman]

With top woods, I align more with Bowie's comment. I've been wrong/fooled so many times now, I just can't predict what the guitar will sound like until it's in my hands. Of course, it doesn't help that I venture between 3-4 different body sizes, which really throws a huge variable into the "what will the top wood sound like" question.

But I'll share a few generalities (and exceptions) I've found in my guitar adventures:

Cedar, for example, almost always makes for a more responsive guitar than spruce. That's in the majority of factory guitars (I always tell budget shoppers to look for a cedar-topped guitar; the odds of it being more lively than its spruce counterpart are very high, since even overbuilt cedar guitars can still sound reasonably well). The lines blur a bit with luthier-built instruments, where cedar can be uber-responsive, but so can Adi and Engelmann and all the others, depending on how they are designed. 

I think of Euro and Engelmann as having more overtone content than Adi and Sitka, and that's generally true...until it isn't. I remember playing one counterexample of an Adi/mahogany 00-12 guitar. Most people would say this combo typically falls on the "drier" side of the tonal spectrum, and I would usually agree with them. That particular 00, which was built in the pre war Martin style, sounded like Euro/super dense rosewood to my ear. Very overtone heavy. Sometimes the generalities break down. Like life, a lot of gray in the guitar world.

That's not the full extent of my thoughts on the topic, just what popped into my head in the moment.

[William2]

Thanks for your thoughts on top woods BlueBowman. I wouldn't mind trying a Cedar topped steel string guitar. When I've listened to comparisons on YouTube, I have always preferred the spruce in demos. This is strange because when I played classical guitar, I always preferred Cedar. And I don't see that many steel string makers using Cedar. I'm only thinking of Furch off hand. I like the looks of Engelmann.

[BlueBowman]

Thanks for your thoughts on top woods BlueBowman. I wouldn't mind trying a Cedar topped steel string guitar. When I've listened to comparisons on YouTube, I have always preferred the spruce in demos. This is strange because when I played classical guitar, I always preferred Cedar. And I don't see that many steel string makers using Cedar. I'm only thinking of Furch off hand. I like the looks of Engelmann.

I think the reason we don't see many cedar-topped guitars, especially from factories, is because cedar is more oily than spruce, and so -- relative to spruce -- lifting bridges can be a plague on these guitars. That's what I've been told by more than one luthier, so I'm taking their word for it. Cedar, being a softer wood than spruce, also dents more easily. More care must be taken in its handling. I get why the big factories don't build with it often.

As for sound, cedar is definitely not spruce. With the spruces, there's so much overlap (like I said above, I've been fooled many times!) between species. With cedar, every guitar I've owned, from $500-$5K, has a hint of the same tonality. That cedar X factor. I think of it as a "crunchy, crisp" sound (the "brown sugar crunch," as I once saw a commenter write on another forum). Dry or overtone heavy, I've heard that characteristic in them all. Cedar is not for everyone. I prefer spruce by a small margin, but cedar guitars are so dynamic when played with fingers. It's just too much fun not to have one.

And, William, you should try to get hands on a good cedar-topped guitar. In person, you might have a very different feeling about it. They tend to be a little darker sounding than an equivalent spruce guitar. Not always, but many times that's been my experience.

[Silence Dogood]

Years ago a good friend had a cedar-topped Seagull 12-string that sounded like a grand piano.  Huge sound!  The top was pretty soft though, and got dinged very easily. 

[William2]

I had never heard that about lifting bridges on Cedar topped instruments. Maybe on classical guitars with their lower string tension that isn't a problem.

[BlueBowman]

Years ago a good friend had a cedar-topped Seagull 12-string that sounded like a grand piano.  Huge sound!  The top was pretty soft though, and got dinged very easily. 

Those older cedar-topped Seagulls are one of the budget brands I always recommend to players shopping in that price range. They are braced with "floor joists," but the dreads can be way more dynamic than most anything else in that price range. The downside, as you point out, is they are usually pretty beat up. The Eastman E2-OM is another one I recommend for such players. Cedar/sapele. I used one as my beach guitar for a few years, and it more than delivered for a guitar costing only $400.

I had never heard that about lifting bridges on Cedar topped instruments. Maybe on classical guitars with their lower string tension that isn't a problem.

Yes, way less string tension, but it can still happen. I had a cedar-topped classical (built with lattice bracing) that showed signs of a lifting bridge after I put on super high tension Knobloch strings. It a was dark sounding guitar, so I was trying for a little more clarity. Whether it was the oily nature of cedar, and/or a deforming top under the increased tension (that top was VERY thin), the bridge certainly started lifting.