They (CITIES) need to seriously revisit their decision to put ALL species of dalbergia (rosewood) on the endangered list regardless of whether they are endangered or not.
Saturday morning tonewood rambling started. I think this applies to rosewood, ebony or any other hard to find wood and how cosmetics and sound quality interact and affect it's use as a tonewood. If not, hopefully it's at least interesting!
As far as spruce goes, I'm a luthier who also cuts Adirondack Spruce trees, which long ago was the only species of spruce used by the big acoustic builders like Martin and Gibson. They stopped using red spruce some time during the 1940s because there were not enough good trees left. So they switched to Sitka. Sitka was great because the trees were abundant, huge, old and it was very easy to find trees with near perfect, straight, even, 18+ grain per inch.
In general, compared to Sitka, Red Spruce trees are not abundant, are small , and don't grow evenly. So the wood has a different look with wider, less even grain and more color variation. The problem is from 1950-today, people have become accustomed to the "look" of perfect Sitka tops on guitars all guitars, even cheaper ones. So people end up wanting the sound of a red spruce top with the looks of a Sitka top, and as someone that cuts red spruce trees I can tell you, that top is one in a million. I stopped cutting trees to sell the wood a few years back because customers had become ridiculously picky about cosmetic quality, and now I only cut for my own use.
The interesting thing is with red spruce cosmetics (grain per inch, even, straight) make no predictable difference in sound. With Sitka it does. That's because the early growth (light colored rings) on Red Spruce are extremely hard/dense/fibrous/strong compared to the early growth on Sitka. That means Red spruce is strong regardless of how many grain per inch, whereas Sitka depends much more on the late growth (dark rings) for strength, so a top with wide grain usually means a light, weak, floppy top. In fact, the best acoustic guitar I've ever heard in my life was a 1930s Martin D-18 with a red spruce top that had 4 grains per inch, and a huge wave in the grain!
One of the nice parts about cutting trees only for my own use is I stopped being "disappointed" when I cut a tree that was not cosmetically perfect. I began to really appreciate the look of the coarser, uneven grained wood instead of thinking "how the heck am I going to sell that?"
Here's two instruments built with a tree I cut in 2004. Keep in mind, I could hardly give this wood away because it was so "ugly", which may turn out to be a good thing because I ended cutting it into billets for archtop guitars and keeping a lot of it. This is a parlor guitar built by Hans Brentrupp. He was the only builder that could not get enough tops from this tree:
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This is one of three basses I finished recently I call "Double-Bass Guitar":
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but I love mine to bits. And I'm feeling a little guilty now.
