Double Bass Is the fingerboard real ebony?

#21
@turf3 while I agree that there are many situations in the bowed string world where things are done the traditional way just because it's tradition, the preference for ebony fingerboards is not really one of them. Ebony is not the hardest commercially available wood, Ipe is harder. What is unique to ebony is it's combination of hardness, durability and workability. A good straight grained piece of ebony can be planed without tear out more easily than many much softer woods. I once made a bass fingerboard out of Ipe and it tore out in both directions, plus it shredded the edge of my plane iron. I had to dress it with a rasp and the dust have me an itchy rash. Never again.

As for synthetic fingerboards, there is quite a lot of interest in finding a viable alternative to ebony in the luthier world. We are motivated sustainability/availability concerns as well as acoustics. There have been a few products on the market, but the synthetics haven't taken off due to issues with glue compatibility and workability. There is a compressed paper product that is ok, but it looks a little funny. The newest thing is called Sonowood which is compressed European beech. It is still a new product and I think they are only making violin fingerboards so far. Perhaps if they get some sales going they will develop boards for the bigger instruments.
 
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#22
My point about ebony was that it was the best wood for the job - the best material for the job - including machinability, as you mention - back in 1700 or whenever it started being avaiable in quantity from African colonies.

In the intervening centuries, the availability of hard yet workable materials that could substitute has exploded - but ebony is still preferred. The only reason people are now trying to find replacements is that the ebony trees are disappearing. If it were discovered that ebony of equivalent quality could be grown commercially in big farms in North Carolina (it can't), the search for alternatives would stop. That's what I mean about the force of tradition. I remain unconvinced that in the year 2024 ebony wood is the very best of all possible materials for this function. It could be the case, but permit me to doubt.
 
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#23
I would not dream of challenging your right to doubt. If you have an idea about an alternative to ebony I would love to hear about it.

The idea that ebony was the first thing that makers stumbled upon and it stuck and better materials be damned is not correct. In 1700 fingerboards we're maple, sometimes with an ebony veneer, usually not. It was not until the late 1700s that the modern set up with ebony fingerboards started to be a thing. Most makers are guided by tradition, not blinded by it. A tangential story: Xavier Tourte discovered that pernambuco is the best material for making bows by going to the docks and looking thru crates and pallets from South America for new woods. He certainly didn't just keep using the same old materials because it's tradition.
 
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#24
I'm not saying that "ebony was the first thing that makers stumbled upon and it stuck". What I'm saying is that in the context of 1800 (no synthetic materials existed, the only adhesives were collagen or resin based, recently opened African colonies offered a wide selection of extremely hard tropical woods) it was the best material on hand.

Since approximately 1950, choices in materials have exploded. Yet ebony remains the preferred choice, and of course some of that is that it's still a darn good fingerboard material. But you mentioned a number of other reasons - for example, can a candidate material be worked and adjusted with existing methods? Well, if you require that the same planes, scrapers, adhesives, neck design, etc., etc., etc. as used for ebony be usable on Candidate Material X, then you've just drastically restricted your possible material choices. Of course economics plays into this too. But something like PEEK, PPS, titanium veneer, etc., might well be suitable if other restrictions were lifted (looks, ability to drop-in without changing anything else on the bass or the luthier's toolbox, etc.)
 
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#25
You make a good point, we certainly are constrained by tools, techniques and materials. Even more by the expectations of players. These constraints are unavoidable. If a material came out that was clearly acoustically superior but required me to learn new ways of fitting shaping and glueing, I would be willing to learn. It would have to be customizable to the instrument and the player in a reasonable amount of time and the adhesive would need to be reversible. More importantly it would need to be accepted by players, which is the biggest challenge. I know a violin maker who used an ebony substitute on his violin. He had a player that loved the instrument and was ready to buy it when the maker pointed out the really cool sustainable fingerboard and the player lost all interest. Wouldn't even let the maker switch the fingerboard to ebony and give that a try.
 
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#26
Good discussion!

I know we're talking different instrument builds, but on my wife's Martin D-16 RGT Micarta fingerboard and bridge, the reason we selected that instrument among almost a dozen other guitars was tone and volume. Even with ugly old strings it is a cannon and has all the tone of much better guitars... And I definitely attribute that primarily to the Micarta bridge, although the Micarta fingerboard may also have something to do with it. That guitar sounded so much better than anything else at the shop that the salespeople reminded us years later that they'd like to buy it back if we were ever interested.

Micarta is a composite laminate though, and when buying this instrument I noted that Martin had decided to bind the fingerboard (like much more expensive models), probably to cover the laminate edges of the Micarta. The bridge shows no edges, but I'm guessing it was either painted or molded such that the edges are underneath.

These are examples of having to do extra work in order to use a synthetic material, based on today's technology. Also, down the road, if this guitar ever needs re-fretting, it will be interesting to see how fretwork has to be done. This is not my wife's main-playing guitar, so she will probably never have to worry about that.

With new CNC and 3-D printer technology, some of these extra-work issues may disappear.

The rest of our fretted instruments have either ebony or painted rosewood fingerboards. My DB has a not-painted Jatoba fingerboard. It sounds good for slapping, it is plenty hard for my synthetic string use and it looks pretty nice too. At 70 now, I expect I'll never need to have it changed.
 
#27
BPM Strings said:
You make a good point, we certainly are constrained by tools, techniques and materials. Even more by the expectations of players. These constraints are unavoidable. If a material came out that was clearly acoustically superior but required me to learn new ways of fitting shaping and glueing, I would be willing to learn. It would have to be customizable to the instrument and the player in a reasonable amount of time and the adhesive would need to be reversible. More importantly it would need to be accepted by players, which is the biggest challenge. I know a violin maker who used an ebony substitute on his violin. He had a player that loved the instrument and was ready to buy it when the maker pointed out the really cool sustainable fingerboard and the player lost all interest. Wouldn't even let the maker switch the fingerboard to ebony and give that a try.
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Oh yes, absolutely players are amongst the biggest drivers of the tradition-based inertia. In fact, I'd suggest their inertia far outweighs that of lutheirs, who probably mostly have an attitude like yours - skeptically open to the idea. Players? Nope, those minds slammed shut decades ago.
 
#28
Micarta can show very little at a well-sanded edge. That depends on exactly which flavor of Micarta it is, as there are multiple versions with different resin and reinforcement materials. The stuff we used at the plasma lab was white epoxy with white cloth in it, (likely white linen which still seems to be a commonly available flavor of Micarta) so it had very little difference between an edge and a face, and machined very nicely. Might even be a tolerable substitute for ivory, come to think of it. Could probably get the same effect with any good color match of epoxy to reinforcement. Or you could indeed paint the edges.

The painted maple board on my bass has no real wear since new, being used for pizz and arco - closest to "slap" I get tends to be unintended thwacking the board when pizzing fingered notes on the E string. There are some visible marks there in the paint, but nothing through it, and you have to go looking to even see them. That's with steel-core steel strings, but with exactly zero interest in playing slap between the owner and the current user. Personally, I'd be fine with non-painted & not-dyed maple, but given the tendency among most players to gravitate to all-black, so modern ebony gets dyed black and older ebony got thrown out if it wasn't all-black, hardly surprising that maple gets painted or dyed black for curb appeal.
 
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#30
The board on my Yamaha SLB 300 is rosewood, dyed black. After three year's playing (and one more year by the original owner), I had the board dressed a few months ago. Dressing removed some of the dye; the luthier offered to re-dye, but I said no. I like the look with the rosewood showing through. Of my two Uptons, one had a full black board, and one had a board with lighter streaks. Both looked great and sounded great.
 
#33
I have two electric basses that are otherwise close to the same, one with an ebony board, one with Indian rosewood. There is a definite difference in feel. It feels, well, harder. I, however prefer the bass with the rosewood board for other reasons (electronics and balance).
 
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