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Spruce tops for acoustics need tight grain. To get tight grain you need long winters and short summers. too much summer wood will give a very wide grain. The trees need to grow very slowly, not have a massive growth spurt every summer.
water content in soil directly affects the size the wood cells will grow too. Wood grown in very wet soil will have larger cells, once dry this will be more air in the wood. "Swamp ash" is the perfect example of this. It used to be called Punk Ash because it was useless for all the structural things you would normally use ash for.
now, mahogany. even today, it is still transported by river in some parts of the world. Here is an old pic:
My theory on "old mahogany" is simply that they will have gone for the biggest trees closest to the river when first harvesting the rainforests. As the resource got scarcer prices went up, and it became worth going further inland. the wood got heavier... less water content, more mineral content.
Also, the denser ones they did get just sank... its almost like an inbuilt weight selection right from the forest. Do you think the workers today would let a whole tree just sink without attempting recovery. These days those old ones are being dragged up and sold as sinker wood
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PRS made a feature of this old 'sunken' mahogany on a few limited edition models
A friend also reckons that a lot of the wood used in the 30s-50s for construction (not just of guitars of course) would have been cut down many years earlier, and thus seasoned more slowly. What are your thoughts on this?
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1. All electric guitars sound basically the same - like an electric guitar. (Excluding the Strat in-between settings, which are due to the particular unique spacing of the pickups.)
2. There are large differences in the sounds of different guitars, affected to varying degrees by almost every minor part of the design, construction, materials and hardware.
These are mutually exclusive, but both are true at the same time depending on the viewpoint of the observer - the most extreme examples being a non-musician listening to a finished record, and the player holding the guitar.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Even if it was a skilled player, one of the top session players in the world, it would be almost impossible to get each strum to be consistent.
I'd bet it would be possible to do that kind of video but secretly swap the audio and visual for each one and still have people swearing they hear the maple as brighter and mahogany as warmer.
http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/112703/body-wood-affects-tone/p1
For the record I should probably state that I do think that wood makes a difference to the tone.