Are plywood bodies necessarily a bad thing

[Cuzzie]

3 hours ago, NancyJohnson said:

Nice try.  Best of five?

ToneWould?

[Beer of the Bass]

I don't know if they're all the same, but the foto flame strat I've seen with the trem backplate off was a light coloured, plain grained hardwood under the printed outer veneer. Likely alder or basswood, so very much in the range of materials usually used for a Fender with a painted finish.

[ead]

I had an Antonia  J bass that was essentially two bits of butchers block with a thin veneer of something-or-other in the top, middle & bottom.  Sounded great but was a bit hefty.

[Doctor J]

There are enough 70's Les Pauls, Gibson ones, which were made like that, too. Play authentic, play a pancake Les Paul.

Edited February 22, 2021 by Doctor J

[Stub Mandrel]

My Maya fretless has a blockboard body, my squier tele is plywood.

This has hideously cheap pickups with terrible microphony. It's a Kay and a cheap as you can imagine a guitar could be constructed. It sounds amazing:

 

[PlungerModerno]

I posted this over here:

Couldn't resist posting it here!

[Dan Dare]

On 22/02/2021 at 14:57, Cuzzie said:

Tonewood

Treewood.

[Cuzzie]

1 minute ago, Dan Dare said:

Treewood.

It looked more like 4 pieces.....

[Dan Dare]

2 minutes ago, Cuzzie said:

It looked more like 4 pieces.....

I bet they were all trees, though 😊

[grandad]

My Tanglewood violin bass is ply. Hollow & 5.5 lbs weight. It does sustain but less than my solids & gives more mids. Quite a clear voice to it. 

[Cuzzie]

1 hour ago, Dan Dare said:

I bet they were all trees, though 😊

Tree trees it is then

[ezbass]

3 minutes ago, Cuzzie said:

Tree trees it is then

9!

 

 

or 27 if using 3 cubed.

Edited February 24, 2021 by ezbass

[Cuzzie]

And Twelve Trees is Thirty Six, or a half decent rugby player 

[ezbass]

1 minute ago, Cuzzie said:

And Twelve Trees is Thirty Six, or a half decent rugby player 

This is what prompted me with my post, I even accidentally typed 36 to start with.

[Cuzzie]

5 minutes ago, ezbass said:

This is what prompted me with my post, I even accidentally typed 36 to start with.

Good lad - 36 was his nickname at Leicester from Geordan Murphy if I remember right

[Stub Mandrel]

On 24/02/2021 at 14:04, Cuzzie said:

And Twelve Trees is Thirty Six, or a half decent rugby player 

@skankdelvar may take a dim view of you comparing the immaculate Dorothy to a rugby player...

[Dan Dare]

3 hours ago, Stub Mandrel said:

@skankdelvar may take a dim view of you comparing the immaculate Dorothy to a rugby player...

is he a friend of Dorothy then?

[tom skool]

On 19/02/2021 at 12:01, Cato said:

I'm very much a believer that in terms of tone, pickup position is the number 1 factor, followed by pickup type and electronics.

Everything else, including body and neck materials has far less impact on overall tone than those three.

I strongly suspect that you could mold a P bass out of concrete and as long as it had the split P pickup in the correct place and the usual passive tone and volume it would still sound very much like a P Bass.

Might weigh less than plywood too.

I would add scale length to that list. 

[DubDelay]

My Arbour Les Paul weighs a ton and sounds amazing. The specs on a Hohner spreadsheet of models online says it’s laminated Baltic Birch. Pretty chunky boards cross laminated as far as I can tell. The pickups aren’t original someone changed them but it’s sounds amazing and plays nice too. 
 

most of my guitars get upgraded sooner rather than later but whenever I think about selling the Arbor I have a go of it and decide it sounds too good. The body doesn’t resonate much when you strum it hard so I think the kinetic energy stays more focused?

for context I had a loan of a 90s standard sg for a couple of years when I started playing guitar about five years ago so I have been hands on with a great guitar. Usually the guitars I like most resonate like crazy but not the arbor. 
 

so I would agree with the comments here stating it’s the construction. I think people think of chipboard when they hear the word ply. I would imagine chipboard makes a fairly poor guitar or bass.

Some instruments have mojo and other don’t. The better the manufacturing process the better the  guitar usually I’d say from having obsessively bought and sold 40+ cheap and mid priced guitars in the last five years.

I have an Vester strat with an Alder body and it’s so good I’d buy pretty much any Vester I could get my hands on but you don’t see them much in Ireland. There’s a nice minty looking Vester jazz bass on Adverts.ie right now if anyone was after one. The wife would hang me if I bought it in the next few weeks. 

 

 

Edited February 28, 2021 by DubDelay

[NancyJohnson]

Last night I fleetingly skipped through one of Ben Crowe's Crimson build videos on the tube of you. 

He made an off the cuff remark (along with a wry look on his face), that if you could tell the difference between two or three different woods you had a better ear than he does.

[itu]

One thing we haven't covered well is the plywood vs. wood in speaker cabinets. Baltic birch is one very good material in plywood and cabinets: stable and stiff. Last time I saw a wood cabinet, was my friend's Mesa/Boogie g-word amp. Is any bass amp company using wood?

[Maude]

17 hours ago, itu said:

One thing we haven't covered well is the plywood vs. wood in speaker cabinets. Baltic birch is one very good material in plywood and cabinets: stable and stiff. Last time I saw a wood cabinet, was my friend's Mesa/Boogie g-word amp. Is any bass amp company using wood?

I guess that's because speaker cabinets need to be as stiff as possible, ply is stiffer than normal wood. If thinner ply is used it's usually braced to add stiffness. It's a balance between stiffness and weight. For the same weight of wood, ply is normally stiffer. 

[BreadBin]

46 minutes ago, Maude said:

I guess that's because speaker cabinets need to be as stiff as possible, ply is stiffer than normal wood. If thinner ply is used it's usually braced to add stiffness. It's a balance between stiffness and weight. For the same weight of wood, ply is normally stiffer. 

Ply also resists natural resonance.

[meterman]

On 22/02/2021 at 23:39, Stub Mandrel said:

My Maya fretless has a blockboard body, my squier tele is plywood.

This has hideously cheap pickups with terrible microphony. It's a Kay and a cheap as you can imagine a guitar could be constructed. It sounds amazing:

 

Looking at this yet again... I would rock the heck out of it, might need to add more stickers though 👍

[Dad3353]

2 hours ago, meterman said:

Looking at this yet again... I would rock the heck out of it, might need to add more stickers though 👍

But wouldn't that alter the tone..? 

...