Ash or Alder?

[Misdee]

21 minutes ago, binky_bass said:

I think at the end of the day a bass built from the finest woods poorly will sound poor and a bass built from the poorest woods finely will sound fine. 

I noticed the the new Musicman Cliff Williams Stingray ($7000) is made of Poplar, just like a lot of  sub-£200 "starter" basses. Presumably CW's original '79 Stingray is Poplar, too.  I am sure those bass will sound...like a really good Stingray.😯

[BigRedX]

The problem with wood is that every piece is different, and therefore has no uniform sound-making properties. You can see this in the construction of good quality acoustic instruments where the sound-board and bracing of each individual instrument has to be "tuned". If a particular species of wood had a definite "sound" once you'd done this process once you could then apply exactly the same refinements to every top you produced, but as any decent luthier will tell you this is nonsense. Each top has to created and refined individually.

If "ash" (BTW which of the 40+ species of ash do you mean, where was it grown, at what age was it harvested, and how was it stored/treated between being harvested and being turned into a musical instrument?) had a definitely different sound to alder, then you could buy a bass with the "right" woods for you without needing to try it first, and it would sound exactly as you imagined it would.

However so many times I see the same people who believe that a certain species of wood has a certain sound (without taking all the other factors above into account) also spend an entire afternoon in the musical instrument shop going through all the supposedly identical basses to find "the one".

You can't have it both ways.

BTW I don't believe that the body has no affect on the sound of a solid electric instrument. My position is that it is secondary to just every other factor in the instrument's construction, and that it's effect is mostly unpredictable.

 

[thedontcarebear]

The bass is with me, and freezing!  Letting it warm up a bit, brand new Japanese Tokai AJB118, quite rare!

It's really light weight, much lighter than my Sandberg, and probably the same as the basswood Fender.

I need to get some strings on it that I can handle as I am a wimp, but it sounds good so far.

Edited November 23, 2020 by thedontcarebear

[Toby B]

I think a lot of the properties of wood relevant to a luthier building acoustic instruments are of little relevance to electric instruments, where pickups and their positioning dominate the sound. 

However, with a bass (more so than a 6-string, let alone a mandolin, because of the mass of the strings), the stiffness and density of the wood will have an effect on the absorption of vibration ... potentially changing the characteristics of the attack and more significantly the sustain. Ash is often denser, similar to the fruit woods, than alder, and is stiffer