Yeah, I personally prefer mahogany topped acoustics. First, they usually can take more abuse. Second, they often have all of the acoustic qualities that WordMan describes above. The larger bodies definitely work better with a mahogany top. The low end they provide works really well with the plunk/boom that it tends to have. Wonderful bodies to play slide on.
“Better” always depends on your purposes and preference, of course.
You mean Aceplace? He said he has a D18, and didn’t know the wood, and a collection of vintage acoustic guitars. It sounded like he was looking for a simple explanation of woods.
You have to go in and play them though. Then say whether it’s the bracing or the wood. I know what I think.
If I was going to buy rosewood I wouldn’t go cheap. (I never noticed any budget rosewood guitars anyway though. Maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough.) But I agree the scooped mids is a factor that many of us don’t take seriously enough.
I’m learning a lot from this discussion on woods used in guitars. It’s an area that I knew very little about. Thank you for your insights.
It makes me appreciate my D18 more. I enjoy playing it and knew nothing about its construction. Glad now that I bought it (used) instead of a D28.
I have noticed the D18 is lighter than my Rosewood Larrivee dreadnought.
Most of the time Rosewood has a dark brown grain if you look inside the body.
On Maple guitars the finish is part of the feature: Flame or beautiful patterns, in a blondish wood. There are a lot of Maple custom guitars that are from non maple models in my searches lately.
I want to get a rosewood guitar but I’m so conservative. I need a martin. I’ll take a look at Larrivee though.
My local guitar tech sold Larrivee for awhile. I was able to play a couple models in his shop. I eventually ran across a D09 used on eBay at a good price. I can’t afford a new high end guitar. 
I’d recommend giving Larrivee a try, if you see one in the store.
Sure, happy to help. Weight is relative. Rosewood can be dense and therefore heavier but some mahogany can be heavy too. I tend to favor lighter guitars because they tend to be more lightly built and therefore more resonant. But you have to buy a well made brand or a lightly built one can buckle under string tension.
Maple is a faster growing, non endangered wood you can source in the US. Makers would love maple to be more popular for those reasons and they will market maple versions of models typically made with other woods. Makers are using walnut a lot more for the same reason. Gibsons newer dreads like the J-29 and J-15 are walnut I believe. Maple has less overtones than even mahogany - that is why it is popular for jazz archtops; you can make complex jazz chords and the overtones don’t clash. Walnut is between rosewood and mahogany.
This must be my week to learn about guitar construction.
I really like cutaways. I’ve only seen it done one way.
Turns out there are two, Venetian and Florentine. Geez, you could hurt yourself with that pointy Florentine style. I can see why it never caught on.
http://www2.fender.com/experience/tech-talk/florentine-and-venetian-cutaways-which-is-which/
You should look at both the GAL website(I’m a member) and here. All you ever wanted to know and if you have any more questions wrt construction or wood I’ll be happy to answer questions or refer you to a source that knows if I don’t.
I don’t follow. Sharp cutaways are reasonably common, certainly on electrics.
I was only thinking of Acoustics.
The Florentine comes to a sharp edge. I guess it wouldn’t literally stab your wrist. It looks weird to me. I don’t recall seeing one in a store. I see the curved cutaway all the time.
I’ll know to look for them in the future.
You don’t see them on flattops much but it’s popular on archtops, which are acoustic, but most of which are also electric. Most notably the massively popular Gibson ES-175.
The Gibson SG is real pointy. 
Did someone say pointy?
Damn, I forgot about the Warlock. 
A little reflection on the cognitive psychology of playing music. I just got a Roland GR-55 guitar synthesizer this week. Time will tell if it’s a real artistic tool or just a toy. But I started playing using the Vibraphone model. And I realized that I was playing differently than I usually do. I’m still playing a guitar, but my phrasing and lines were different than what I would normally play. My theory is that my brain has a concept of what vibes should sound like, and so I was playing like that. (I’m talking about improvised lines, not tone or articulation.)
For those of you who play more than one instrument, do you find that the music that comes out of each instrument is different because you conceptualize them differently?
If so, how I can I reprogram my brain to reconceptualize what a guitar sounds like? I think if I can do that I would get out of a rut I feel that I’ve been in for years. I think it’s guys with their own unique conceptualization that allow people to innovate and break the mold, like Sco, or local D.C.-area guitarists Paul Pieper and John Lee. We have to find the happy medium between listening and learning from what came before vs. bringing something new.
CWG, congrats!!
Didn’t you kind of bury the lede there? You got a guitar synth! What led to that decision, and what musical space are you exploring with it? Same music you normally play, just with a diff voice? Or new?
As for your post - well that kind of answers my question, in part. By playing a vibes voice over a son you know, you played different. Makes total sense. How much is the voice, and how much is the feel and the responsiveness of that tool? When I play a guitar with a very different feel, I can’t help but play differently, with the voice being a whole 'nother factor.
To be clear, the old dictum “you always sound like yourself” holds. It just stretches your phrasing, and helps you hear new phrases and approaches to your sound that you can add to your repertoire. Is that what you feel you are experiencing?
ETA: when I was figuring ways to expand my playing, I tried slide, jazz and fingerstyle and got guitars suited to each. As I played the Jazz archtop (terribly), I couldn’t bend as much I as tend to, so started doing “1-fret slide in’s” to the note I wanted. Start one fret below and slide immediately into the note I want, just for a bit of voicing on the note where I might bend up. Sounded fun and well jazzy ;).
I ended up incorporating it into my playing, and more importantly, it got me much more comfortable using my pinky, which led to much better slide playing (I put my slide on my pinky).
Too late to edit: “over a sonG you know…”
Thanks! I got a used one on Reverb including the GK-3 pickup for $567. (I still needed to buy a 13-pin cord–what an overpriced piece of gear.)
I’ve toyed with the idea for years and I finally decided to spring for it. Initially I am using it to add colors to the same space I’m in but I’m starting to see other possibilities. People seem to use it to get different guitar sounds more than anything else, great if you’re main gig is a cover band. But I’m looking for ways to branch out of the traditional jazz guitar sound to other things, like what Metheny did. I like the traditional synth, strings, flute, vibes, piano sounds, although the sax and trumpet sounds aren’t terribly realistic. I guess these are pure synthesized sounds rather than sampled.
I think so. Obviously, every note is still coming out of my hands and head, but what my head wants to hear when the instrument is vibes is just different than what it wants to hear from a guitar. And my hands are happy to oblige.
I am still working through some technical issues. On guitar-like voices, the machine does very well, and follows attack, bends, and pinch harmonics. On quantized voices, like piano and vibes, it will quantize a bend (that’s a good thing) so if you do a big bend, it will play individual semitones to sound like the modeled instrument. But it also has some tracking trouble on those if I play faster. I get several stray notes come out that I didn’t play, and it misses notes. That is probably some combination of pickup adjustment, technical settings, my technique, and the guitar. I need to do a little more setup on the guitar because I am getting a little buzzing on 5 and 6 and I think that throws it off. It’s a PRS 22 and I am hunting around for a hex wrench that fits the bridge pieces.
On my archtop I play flat 13’s and bending is very limited (I use round 10’s on my solid bodies). I do a lot of those 1-fret grace notes, which a lot of instruments do in jazz. I have a slide and used it occasionally when I played in a blues band but was never happy with how I played slide. There’s a lot more to it than meets the eye.
Ah, all good. Enjoy it and I hope it opens new spaces for you.
Yeah, with slide, heck with all guitar, there’s so much going on, but in very different ways for each variety. Like I say: I spend 50% of my technique making the sounds I want to hear and 50% of my effort keeping unwanted sounds out and using that same muting activity to affect the tone of the strings that do sound.
It’s taken me years to get comfortable with my below-the-surface technique with slide, controlling squeal and unwanted notes.
OMG! This thread is still going!!!
Well, I’ve been busy. As you may (or may not) know, I quit smoking about 5 years ago. All that freed up money went to good use…
In addition to the Les Paul, I now also have a Stratocaster, a Telecaster, an Epiphone 12 string, a Takamine acoustic, a Dean bass, and a classical.
The lessons are still going and I have a nice little repertoire now (classical and contemporary fingerstyle).
