Plywood Guitars

rossi

My Avon  pre lawsuit "les paul" custom type is pure plywood  with a  pressure moulded  ply top .As a Les Paul it sucks .As a nice guitar its fine.Not a huge believer in all this tonewood crap to be honest .A good set up and some decent pickups plus a good amp is 99.9 % of the mix.

NelsonP

ES330s and Casinos are made from laminated plywood

....and they sound great

Funkfingers

@ICBM Were Squier Affinity guitar and bass bodies ever made from ply? Were they always a spread of solid wood sections? If the material has changed, was there a year/date when that happened?

vale

Simon_M said:

Well, I didn't expect GAS to come from this thread but here we are:

i think when they are contoured 'face on' it looks much better than the skateboards guitars (which are 'edge on'). especially on the sgs. that one (in pic) is particularly fabulous.

i honestly dont think you could make a non-ply sg look as pretty as this one. and it's structural deep pretty, like seaside rock or stromatolites (a random thing i'm fond of).

https://ak.picdn.net/offset/photos/52e2bf3982359b9a6c405acf/medium/photo.jpg

i suspect as long as you use decent glassy-resonant ply, not dull shuttering ply, it wouldn't sound dramatically different from solid in any typical mix.

Sporky

ICBM said:

The 90s Ibanez Talman was made from MDF (or probably more correctly HDF)

[snip]

They don't sound exactly *like* all-wood guitars, but the Talman in particular has quite a lot of fans, including some pro endorsements. Both the Talman and the Sonex are quite heavy though.

I have a 90s Talman with the "resoncast" body. It's my favourite guitar. I'd say it sounds exactly like a solid wood guitar, given how much they vary. 

Henrytwang

proggy said:

My first guitar was a Satellite Precision copy which was plywood.

It was also a piece of crap.

I bought a very old Satellite Stratocaster type for £5 at a car boot sale some years ago, it’s made of plywood and is very heavy. Everything about it is cheap and nasty but it has aged beautifully and is amazingly good for playing Hound Dog Taylor type slide, the cheap pickups really nail that raucous tone. Wouldn’t be without it.