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Are plywood bodies necessarily a bad thing


Guest MoJo

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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. 

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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 by DubDelay
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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?

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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. 

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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.

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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:

1804437628_K-2T(3).thumb.JPG.ddaba48ff57579e4cf18ac5f3098961d.JPGK-2T.thumb.jpg.a149b577751f5217415c3e6f6b9e977b.jpg1158063553_K-2T(2).thumb.JPG.8659f236fd98a84ca494c4d3507ee7e8.JPG

 

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

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