Plywood....your thoughts please.

[songofthewind]

Crikey, that Ritter is striking. But you’d think he would take the trouble to put the pickups on straight, for goodness sake!

[Skybone]

There's also that company in America that makes guitars from recycled skateboards.

[BassTractor]

9 minutes ago, Skybone said:

There's also that company in America that makes guitars from recycled skateboards.

That's fantastic! The wheels work as pancake plug protectors!

BC done it again: we've solved @nuno1959's problem. Pat on the back, guys. 😉 🙂

(Just kidding, Nuno! The mind demanded to link the skateboard to your question, and I let it do so.)

[Shaggy]

Even expensive top end acoustic guitars are frequently constructed with laminated woods (ie ply) and semi-acoustics almost invariably are - eg the Gibson ES-335 which most players wouldn't regard as cheap.   For flat thin sections ply is stiffer and more stable than wood, stronger in most dimensions (though wood is stronger in compression along the grain), and also formable into convex shapes.

As said above there's ply and there's ply - I'm sure the body constrruction of that Ritter is tonally superior to anything other than a slab of really premium tone wood.     The ply in 'a 70's Columbus Jazz bass copy is cheap nasty crumbly stuff, as I found out when replacing  the neck pickup on mine with a Gibson mudbucker in around 1978 - of all the basses I've had it's the only one I found nothing endearing about whatsoever, other than it being my first long scale bass.   I swapped it for a bike.   

Hopefully the OP's is a good one - one of my favourite basses was my old Kalamazoo KB-1 which had an MDF body made by a manufacturer of toilet seats.....

[grandad]

The Hofner Violin bass is ply. It's a favourite of mine because of the lovely hi-fi-ish tone. Yup, my most expensive bass, (the HCT model), and my favourite noodling bass to pick up.

[Daz39]

I have a Columbus P-Bass. It sounds just fine, but the neck appears to be granite, painted in maple and is the shape of a baseball bat - so it'll have to go!

[BigRedX]

2 hours ago, Shaggy said:

As said above there's ply and there's ply - I'm sure the body constrruction of that Ritter is tonally superior to anything other than a slab of really premium tone wood.

But is it? Jens might have hand picked all the sections that go to make up that body and glued each of them perfectly to the others, But that's essentially the only difference between that multi-laminate body and the one on the Baz Extravaganza Bass.

Tone wood makes sense on an acoustic instrument where the vibrations of the strings are being amplified and enhanced by being transferred through the top back and sides, and where each is made up of a single piece of wood, optimally chosen and shaped, and glued to the others with just enough glue and contact to hold the instrument together. Compare that with the typical solid bodied electric instrument where huge slabs of wood are slathered in glue and assembled in way that priorities getting the largest number of bodies out of the fewest number of planks. 

"Tone Wood" in solid electric instruments is a myth, perpetuated by those with a vested interest in preserving the mystique. 

[Bridgehouse]

Don’t forget, every Gibson ES series (335,336,330 etc) guitars are all “laminate” and probably count as ply. Well, they are ply, but the description will be laminate

You can spend many many thousands on one of those and they sound glorious. Ply isn’t a bad thing - it can be a very good thing.

 

Cheap nasty ply is a bad thing - in the same way cheap nasty solid wood can be a bad thing too

[Shaggy]

1 hour ago, BigRedX said:

 

"Tone Wood" in solid electric instruments is a myth, perpetuated by those with a vested interest in preserving the mystique. 

I entirely disagree with the first part of that, whilst agreeing that a great deal of mumbo-jumbo IS "perpetuated by those with a vested interest."

All solid electric instruments have a acoustic tone, which you can hear by holding your ear against the body whilst playing (how I used to tune-up pre-gig before electric tuners!), and that acoustic tone underpins the amplified tone - in my experience a solid bass that sounds dead acoustically will sound lacklustre amplified, whatever its construction happens to be.    Most of my basses are Gibson, and leaving aside the major variations due to pickups and active / passive EQ etc; a mahogany-bodied solid bass will tend to sound warm and harmonically rich whereas a maple body will sound more "brittle" with less harmonics.  

However, no reason at all why resonant woods regarded as "cheap" like basswood and Carolina can't sound as good as or even better than expensive boutique hardwoods, and I'm sure the crap tone on my old Columbus was far more to do with the pickups that had the magnetic strength equivalent to the arm-wrestling strength of a gnat than the ply body.

 

[mcnach]

On 27/08/2018 at 08:41, thebigyin said:

Morning Folks, I have an old Japanese Columbus P Bass early 70s I have had it many years....its made of plywood but sounds and plays well enough...I was a tad disappointed when I found out it was plywood....but recently I have just had one of my Acoustics a Yamaha FG180 (Nickon Gakki) red label serial number dates it 1970 so another vintage model....I took it to John Le Voi a great luthier for a re-fret and minor cosmetic repairs and found out this was laminate too...but sounds great....just wondering what your thoughts are on plywood......John told me there is nothing wrong with plywood and if the laminates are slightly off from each other and the grains not running in same directions they will never split....he told me they sound just as good as solid tops.....think I was just surprised after owning these instruments so long to find out they are ply especially been made in Japan in the early 70s....but apparently this is quite common...cheers Bob.

 

If it sounds good... I don't care what wood the body is made of. My favourite Jazz bass has a plywood body, as it turns out. Considering that the purpose of the body on an electric instrument is largely structural (you need to mount the bridge and pickups somewhere)... I find it difficult to believe that one material is inherently better or worse than other. We get too precious at times about certain woods being used, when the truth is those woods were traditionally used simply because they were easily obtained and at a reasonable price, nothing else.