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With apologies! Tone from maple board versus tone from rosewood board.....?


Beedster
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I know I'm revisiting a question that has been asked here a few times back in the day so apologies for that, I thought I resurrect it as it has been bugging me a lot recently.

I remember reading quite a few threads in which individual bassists suggest that maple boards sound brighter than rosewood boards, but in which this theory was rejected by clearly quite knowledgable individuals on numerous bases, for example that the string vibrates against the fret and not the board etc. So for many years I've assumed that there is no de facto difference in tone between the two woods on a fretted bass and this seems to be reflected in what I've heard from a few luthiers and techs.

So if this is the case, why is it that all other things being equal, maple boards always sound brighter to my ears, am I projecting it?

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Being softer than rosewood, I'd have thought that maple would be LESS bright than rosewood 😕

This should especially be the case when comparing a one piece maple board to rosewood laminated onto a neck.

There are so many variables however, that even swapping a neck can't be a true controlled experiment

Edited by Roland Rock
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Can of worms is open!

To be honest I'm not sure on this as I don't own a rosewood fingerboard on a bass. However I own some maple and rosewood guitars.

I'm not sure, I've heard varying opinions on this, kinda curious to see what people think about it.

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I own two pairs of basses where I have virtually identical basses but with different fretboards.

Result? None that I can hear. The key is the word "virtually". Slightly different pickups, or strings, or action will have more impact than the fretboard material (IMHO), and that's before you get onto neck construction etc.

If you want maple to sound less bright, fit flats ...

:)

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I have four precisions, two with maple boards, two with rosewood boards.

I know nothing about all the scientific facts etc.. but the maple boards are definitely brighter to my ears, and I have even swapped the necks and tried both necks on the same body and electrics/settings etc..

I'm sure people will tell me I'm wrong though! :huh:

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[quote name='CamdenRob' timestamp='1429259257' post='2749679']
Me neither but that doesn't stop me posting opinion as fact on BC...
[/quote]

Me too, and I have the opinion that a maple board [u]feels harder[/u] (lacquer influence?) than a rosewood board and therefore "must be brighter".

I've definitely noticed a massive difference in feel but very little in sound.

These things should be evaluated acoustically coz as soon as they're plugged in the electricals swamp everything.

My opinion is that the whole bass, particularly neck mass / body mass ratio, neck fit and resonance of the whole sheebang has a much greater effect.

Edited by Jazzneck
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I couldn't risk saying whether the tonal difference is brighter or not but I would certainly say it's different. I think it's more about mass/resonance of the neck materials in general rather than specifically the bit you're pressing the string against/the bit the fret is dug in to - same theory as tone woods in the body really, I've got no idea which woods give which tone but if you took the exact same bass specs & build it with two different woods they'd sound different (though this could be the case with two bits of the same kind of wood but from a different tree).

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The closest I've managed to a controlled experiment was trying two Schecter Model Ts next to each other in the same shop. To be honest, they both sounded pretty similar. The maple board was brighter, and bit 'clackier,' and the rosewood, as many have suggested, was a bit darker. But to be quite honest, the difference was subtle at best - you wouldn't have to roll the tone control too far to make one sound virtually indistinguishable from the other.

Seeing as we're always telling Precision owners to "see how it sounds in the mix," and the Model T is basically a glorified Precision: you'd never hear the difference in the mix!

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smoke and mirrors, people will hear a difference if they're looking for it, bit like £1billion speaker cables on Hi Fi's, but to my eyes nothing looks better than a black body with a maple neck P bass, unfortunately for a leftie like me they're like hens teeth, had a stingray with this set up, looked gorgeous but couldn't get on with the tone :-(

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[quote name='CamdenRob' timestamp='1429260811' post='2749702']
I think some sort of test of this is on the cards for the hearts bash.
[/quote]

This was kinda my thinking in a way (although I am currently trying to decide which of two Precisions to move on and one factor is board material, specifically do I really need to have at least one bass with a rosewood board in my arsenal). So, we have an anechoic chamber at work. We also have some expertise in acoustics and sound measurement. My research area is the placebo effect, and one of the reasons I am interested is that a lot of my work centres on the idea that what we expect is what we get (a paper myself and my research team published a while back was titled 'Beliefs versus reality or beliefs as reality' which sums it up quite well I think).

I'm therefore not so much interested in what is the acoustic reality, but how a player's expectation of tone leads to that player's perception of tone (although of course we have to measure the actual acoustic reality as a control). So, I may set this up as a final year student project, we could use an anechoic chamber to measuring actual frequency response of instruments against perceived frequency response, and specifically interpret the latter as a function of the musicians' expected frequency response (not just tone of board materials, we could look at vintage/expensive versus modern/cheap etc).

Now, where would I find a few bassists :)

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[quote name='Beedster' timestamp='1429262183' post='2749722']
This was kinda my thinking in a way (although I am currently trying to decide which of two Precisions to move on and one factor is board material, specifically do I really need to have at least one bass with a rosewood board in my arsenal). So, we have an anechoic chamber at work. We also have some expertise in acoustics and sound measurement. My research area is the placebo effect, and one of the reasons I am interested is that a lot of my work centres on the idea that what we expect is what we get (a paper myself and my research team published a while back was titled 'Beliefs versus reality or beliefs as reality' which sums it up quite well I think).

I'm therefore not so much interested in what is the acoustic reality, but how a player's expectation of tone leads to that player's perception of tone (although of course we have to measure the actual acoustic reality as a control). So, I may set this up as a final year student project, we could use an anechoic chamber to measuring actual frequency response of instruments against perceived frequency response, and specifically interpret the latter as a function of the musicians' expected frequency response (not just tone of board materials, we could look at vintage/expensive versus modern/cheap etc).

Now, where would I find a few bassists :)
[/quote]

I would be very interested in the outcome of that research.

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As far as P basses go, I've found maple boards... not to be brighter as such, but to be a bit [i]mid-scooped[/i] compared with rosewood, which seem to have more going on in the mids. But of course this could be the effects of slightly different pickups or a hundred other factors, so a proper test would be very interesting. :)

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Hi Chris,

Whilst working in guitar shops I have done neck swap tests many a time...many a time! The best test is when its the same body with two necks, rather than two different basses entirely. In my experience, and with others around me too, we found there is a definite difference, no placebo, no question of what we heard. As a general rule of thumb, I found rosewood to be warmer or with more low mid range, maple has more attack.

We also did body wood swaps...but let's not even go there as I'm sure there are some that already want to lay into this post :)

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