Query about pauferro fingerboards

distressed

Gassage said:

Lemon Oil has a solvent in it, so whilst initially it'll look good, afterwards it'll dry out even more.

It's cool for the first quick and dirty intervention. After that, fretboard will be moisturized simply by playing regularly. 

elstoof

I love the Pau Ferro on this amp head, there’s some spectacular boards out there

As for Laurel, this came on a £150 Squier mini bass and I can’t fault it, feels great, nice colour, just perfectly good fretboard wood in its own right rather than a cheap rosewood substitute

Offset

ICBM

All snobbery and personal taste regarding appearance. It’s actually a higher quality fingerboard wood than most rosewood - as already said, it sits midway between rosewood and ebony in terms of hardness, and in the past it’s been a premium spec on some guitars.

With all woods, the devil is in the detail - quality of the blank, grain direction and run-out, and how well it’s chosen, prepared and finished. A lot of rosewood currently used is dry and fibrous-looking. You can have a terrible-looking Brazilian rosewood board - particular as most of the easily obtainable stuff left is stump wood. Gibson were notorious for using up streaky ebony on 90s Les Paul Studios, but it was perfectly good. They were also slated for using Granadillo for a bit when they couldn’t get enough rosewood - again, it’s an equally excellent fingerboard wood that looks a bit different. There’s enough variation in rosewood itself to make any value judgement based on wood species meaningless anyway.

Blueingreen

The guitar I’ve owned for the longest time is Suhr Hollow Classic with a Pau Ferro board. It was a premium option and I’ve always liked it. It feels close to ebony. It was lighter than most rosewoods at first, but I’ve never really understood the aesthetic preference for darker boards so that never bothered me. With time and use the most frequently played bits of the board have got really quite dark. Discolouration from use can look dirty on some boards but somehow doesn’t on the Suhr, it just looks like a pattern of lighter and darker wood showing how the instrument has been used and it’s a very pleasing, characterful effect.

stickyfiddle

I have PF on my Atkin 47. It's a little lighter than rosewood but it looks good, feels great and sounds brilliant. 

WindmillGuitars

Montys Montypresso is your friend on this  ...

StuartMac290

ICBM said:

All snobbery and personal taste regarding appearance. It’s actually a higher quality fingerboard wood than most rosewood - as already said, it sits midway between rosewood and ebony in terms of hardness, and in the past it’s been a premium spec on some guitars.

With all woods, the devil is in the detail - quality of the blank, grain direction and run-out, and how well it’s chosen, prepared and finished. A lot of rosewood currently used is dry and fibrous-looking. You can have a terrible-looking Brazilian rosewood board - particular as most of the easily obtainable stuff left is stump wood. Gibson were notorious for using up streaky ebony on 90s Les Paul Studios, but it was perfectly good. They were also slated for using Granadillo for a bit when they couldn’t get enough rosewood - again, it’s an equally excellent fingerboard wood that looks a bit different. There’s enough variation in rosewood itself to make any value judgement based on wood species meaningless anyway.

My favourite guitar has a Granadillo board and it feels fantastic, very ebony-like. Looks lovely too.

OilCityPickups

I enjoy nice possessions, I enjoy making music, and I enjoy getting out into the outdoors and have a massive fondness for forests ... having one pretty much on my doorstep. 
Every forest is on someone's doorstep ... maybe they are foreign, but we're foreign to them.  Unfortunately35% of forests have been lost in the past 300 years, and of those left  82 % have been compromised by human activity. We have to stop regarding ebony and rosewood as some sort of god given 'right' to own. There are great alternatives ... let's use them and not moan like butt hurt toddlers if guitar companies use something less exotic than 'the big two'. :-)
I believe I only have one genuine rosewood boarded guitar these days - and that's a vintage one - am I sad about that? No. 

Svartmetall

OilCityPickups said:

I enjoy nice possessions, I enjoy making music, and I enjoy getting out into the outdoors and have a massive fondness for forests ... having one pretty much on my doorstep. 
Every forest is on someone's doorstep ... maybe they are foreign, but we're foreign to them.  Unfortunately35% of forests have been lost in the past 300 years, and of those left  82 % have been compromised by human activity. We have to stop regarding ebony and rosewood as some sort of god given 'right' to own. There are great alternatives ... let's use them and not moan like butt hurt toddlers if guitar companies use something less exotic than 'the big two'. :-)
I believe I only have one genuine rosewood boarded guitar these days - and that's a vintage one - am I sad about that? No. 

Couldn't agree more. We should all be planting a hell of a lot more trees, wherever we can fit them.

stonevibe

My old '90s Fender SRV has a Pau Ferro board and it was fine

WezV

stonevibe said:

My old '90s Fender SRV has a Pau Ferro board and it was fine

it was seen as a significant upgrade over Indian RW when they made those.  Fender's alternative to Braz RW for those models

CavemanGrogg

fretfinder said:

CavemanGrogg said:

I really really hate paufero, laural, and all ''paper'' fretboards - like Richlite and what Hagstorm uses on their guitars.

Why, got any reasoning for that?

I'm classically trained, I had 4 years of classical guitar lessons and was already at LRCM grade 5, before I started to take electric guitar seriously, and I've actually gone back to uni to study classical guitar at The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.  So I'm not used to, don't like, and am very sensitive to feeling wood grain underneath strings or fake wood grain no matter it's direction - the worst fretboard that I've ever played on is made out of carbon fiber and textured carbon fiber, especially underneath strings as thin as steel string acoustic guitar string of even thinner electric guitar strings.  So I really don't want to feel any wood grain under the strings, it really puts me off of guitars, so for Fender and Suoerstrat style guitars my reference by far is for a maple fretboard, for Gibson style guitars since the end of the Niorlin era, I'm only interested in ebony boards - though saying that the best 2 Gibson Les Pauls that I own are a 1976 Gibson Les Paul Custom that came stock with a maple fretboard and a 1977 Gibson Les Paul Custom that also a came stock with a maple fretboard that cost me less than US$300 to buy in the mid 90's incidentally when the Girlfriend, my kid, their partner and I visited the Gibson Garage they actually tried to convince me to get a Custom Les Paul made with a maple fretboard once I asked for as rough price estimate to have it done.  Rose wood is very much a wood that I will use, but it is by far my least favourite fretboard woods to use, and in my opinion the best of al the other bad alternatives, due to the fact that especially on electric guitars and to a big extent steel string acoustic guitar, you can feel the wood grain underneath the strings, even catching on the string, and more so when strings are being bent.  I'm even extremely sensitive to neck carve, string spacing as well as nut width, if a guitar doesn't feel right to me in my fretting hand while it's still hanging on the rack, I instantly know it's a guitar I'll never play, and therefore won't waste salesmen time buy asking for it to either be brought done for me to try or even plugged in for me to try, salesmen actually love me, as they know if I'm asking for a guitar to be taken off a rack for me - I rarely if ever plug them in to try guitars, it generally means more often than not that they just made their easiest sale of perhaps the month.

BillDL

CavemanGrogg said:

Rose wood is very much a wood that I will use, but it is by far my least favourite fretboard woods to use, and in my opinion the best of al the other bad alternatives, due to the fact that especially on electric guitars and to a big extent steel string acoustic guitar, you can feel the wood grain underneath the strings, even catching on the string, and more so when strings are being bent.

Maybe I have a tremendously light touch, but I would have to press down deliberately and with a lot of presure for the actual strings to be making contact with the wood of the fretboard, and if I played like that consistently the fretboard (and my fingers muscles/tendons) would become very worn in a short space of time.

I assume you mean that you can feel the grain of the wood with your fingertips?  That's understandable, but what people have been saying here, including me, is that a good piece of Pau Ferro that's been well finished can feel as dense, smooth, and grain free as a finely sanded and buffed good quality ebony fretboard.  I have examples of this.  Unfortunately there are bad examples of all kinds of wood, and sub-standard finishing jobs, and experiences with those examples can be enough to put people off that kind of wood.

WezV

CavemanGrogg said:

fretfinder said:

CavemanGrogg said:

I really really hate paufero, laural, and all ''paper'' fretboards - like Richlite and what Hagstorm uses on their guitars.

Why, got any reasoning for that?

...So I'm not used to, don't like, and am very sensitive to feeling wood grain underneath strings or fake wood grain no matter it's direction - the worst fretboard that I've ever played on is made out of carbon fiber and textured carbon fiber, especially underneath strings as thin as steel string acoustic guitar string of even thinner electric guitar strings.  So I really don't want to feel any wood grain under the strings, it really puts me off of guitars ...

I do understand this, especially if we were talking about laurel, or even more premium options like Wenge.   They both have deeper pores and can feel more textured no matter what you do. 

It does not apply to Pau Ferro. Indian, or even Brazilian rosewood can have a much coarser texture to the grain.   I'm not saying rough examples don't exist. They certainly do,  but a decent bit will be comparable to ebony or maple in its smoothness

Svartmetall

"a decent bit will be comparable to ebony or maple in its smoothness"

Definitely - the grain on this Fender neck is at least as tight as maple.

pluckbuddy

CavemanGrogg said:

fretfinder said:

CavemanGrogg said:

I really really hate paufero, laural, and all ''paper'' fretboards - like Richlite and what Hagstorm uses on their guitars.

Why, got any reasoning for that?

I'm classically trained, I had 4 years of classical guitar lessons and was already at LRCM grade 5, before I started to take electric guitar seriously, and I've actually gone back to uni to study classical guitar at The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.  So I'm not used to, don't like, and am very sensitive to feeling wood grain underneath strings or fake wood grain no matter it's direction - the worst fretboard that I've ever played on is made out of carbon fiber and textured carbon fiber, especially underneath strings as thin as steel string acoustic guitar string of even thinner electric guitar strings.  So I really don't want to feel any wood grain under the strings, it really puts me off of guitars, so for Fender and Suoerstrat style guitars my reference by far is for a maple fretboard, for Gibson style guitars since the end of the Niorlin era, I'm only interested in ebony boards - though saying that the best 2 Gibson Les Pauls that I own are a 1976 Gibson Les Paul Custom that came stock with a maple fretboard and a 1977 Gibson Les Paul Custom that also a came stock with a maple fretboard that cost me less than US$300 to buy in the mid 90's incidentally when the Girlfriend, my kid, their partner and I visited the Gibson Garage they actually tried to convince me to get a Custom Les Paul made with a maple fretboard once I asked for as rough price estimate to have it done.  Rose wood is very much a wood that I will use, but it is by far my least favourite fretboard woods to use, and in my opinion the best of al the other bad alternatives, due to the fact that especially on electric guitars and to a big extent steel string acoustic guitar, you can feel the wood grain underneath the strings, even catching on the string, and more so when strings are being bent.  I'm even extremely sensitive to neck carve, string spacing as well as nut width, if a guitar doesn't feel right to me in my fretting hand while it's still hanging on the rack, I instantly know it's a guitar I'll never play, and therefore won't waste salesmen time buy asking for it to either be brought done for me to try or even plugged in for me to try, salesmen actually love me, as they know if I'm asking for a guitar to be taken off a rack for me - I rarely if ever plug them in to try guitars, it generally means more often than not that they just made their easiest sale of perhaps the month.

Just wondering if guitar is the right instrument for you?

Just kidding. I've learnt recently to stop chasing perfect and be better at adapting to playing different guitars. I'm not the best guitar player in the world but having guitars that sound and feel completely different has increased my enjoyment of playing many times over.  

hotpickups

I think some people go on about the colour of Pau Ferro I.e. being not as dark as other woods. However, there is absolutely nothing with it and I had a guitar which had it and I loved it. Probably regret moving that in one day tbh. 

Some seem to get bogged down with cosmetics I feel sometimes when it comes to guitars. Some I can understand why but not when it comes to Pau Ferro tbh 

BillDL

The opposite is true for me also.  I have an Ibanez semi-acoustic with an ebony fretboard that is pretty light in colour for ebony and is more like a light pau ferro in colour.  It's nice and dense and without a lot of grain pits, but for some people it would look slightly out of place on a guitar that traditionally has a very dark fretboard.  The Ibanez is a natural finish and it looks perfect.

Offset

pluckbuddy said:

I've learnt recently to stop chasing perfect and be better at adapting to playing different guitars. I'm not the best guitar player in the world but having guitars that sound and feel completely different has increased my enjoyment of playing many times over.  

Exceptionally well expressed and you've summed up my thoughts on having a variety of different instruments, although I've weeded out most of the features I don't like in a guitar within my nine.