Identifying Quartersawn Wood (or, Medullary Ray Explained)

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There was an interesting thread on MyLesPaul today about quartersawn wood…

There are a number of views on how much it matters that guitar necks be quartersawn. Personally I would use quartered or flatsawn only, nothing with distinctly angled grain. However some say it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s stable.

It came up in conversation, however, that often saw marks or end grain sealer at the lumber yard covers up the end grain of the wood, making it difficult to identify the grain direction while you are there. So I thought I would share this.

This is widely known by acoustic builders, but I think electric guitar builders tend to pay less attention to the structure of wood to some degree. I wanted this to be posted here so that it gets archived along with the other tips and techniques…that way it’s here for anyone just getting started in guitar building to learn about.

So here it is, a piece of basic lutherie knowledge that everyone should be aware of: How to identify quartersawn wood, without looking at the endgrain (or, a brief lesson in the anatomy of wood).

It’s actually very simple. I must note that you’ll rarely come across wood that is perfectly quartered so as to display this in a regular lumber yard (unless they have wood marked as quartered, or a section for instrument woods), but if you bring a finger plane with you, you can find out the grain direction of rough sawn lumber quickly and easily by looking for this characteristic. In addition, in the opinion of many, this should be the standard by which you assess whether wood is considered quartersawn for the purposes of lutherie.

In many woods, medullary ray is visible in perfectly quartered blocks. It is visible on the face of the wood that is perpendicular to the vertical grain. However, when the wood is off quarter by more than about 10 degrees, the ray disappears. So it is only visible in perfectly quartered wood. The ray is visible running sideways across the grain (at a 90 degree angle to the normal grain direction). Below is an example of medullary ray, here seen in a piece of African Mahogany:

However, here is a piece from the same block of mahogany, but this piece is slightly off quarter. Notice that the medullary ray is not visible in this piece. This means it is not perfectly quartersawn.

So, there you have it – the easy way to tell exactly which way the grain is running, without looking at the end grain. If you plane on the edge of a square block and the ray becomes visible, it’s rift sawn at about 45 degrees. If the ray is visible on the wide face, it’s quartersawn. If it’s visible on the narrow face, it’s flat sawn.

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Animusic – Resonant Chamber

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3d, animusic, box, chamber, guitar, music, resonant, sound, stringed

This post is not related to instrument building…but I thought people would appreciate it. This is just awesome! Somebody posted it on the luthiers forum (luthiersforum.com) a few months ago and I forgot about it until now. Well worth a watch.

Sound of Old vs. New Instruments: José Romanillos

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affects, age, change, classical guitar, effects, flamenca, flamenco, how, instrument, jose, new, old, ramirez, romanillos, sound, spanish, spruce, violin, wood

I watched this today and found it very interesting – this video is by José Romanillos on how the sound of Spanish/Classical guitars changes with age – he talks about what he considers a good sounding guitar and how the age of the instrument relates to these desirable qualities.

Very interesting! Have a look:

La Patrie Etude: Guitar Review

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ami, and, art, cedar, cherry, etude, guitar, la, lutherie, mahogany, norman, nylon, patrie, red, review, sample, sound, spruce, test, wester

So I thought I’d take this opportunity to share some insights on this guitar I just got – I’ll be posting a few instrument reviews on here over the next year so let this be the first.

Sound: 8/10 – This sounds great; this is a really good sounding instrument. 9 and 10 are reserved for exceptionality, which I would be very surprised to get out of a guitar that I paid $200 for. However, this is really a nice sounding instrument.

Intonation: 7/10 – Intonation is actually the only issue I have with this instrument. It sounds great, but the intonation suffers a bit at higher frets. Not badly enough for me to rate this below a 7, though.

Construction: 8/10 – Given the price of this instrument, the construction is great – solid cedar top, solid back and sides. The finish is matte; neck looks like laminated mahogany. I am very impressed by the quality of construction and materials on instruments built by Godin and their sub-companies (La Patrie, Art & Lutherie, Seagull, and Norman). This guitar immediately felt like my Art & Lutherie Ami when I first held it, the similarities in construction. I would suspect they are made at the same factory, or at least all designed to fit the same contruction process. The only reason I did not rate this high is because I have an older dreadnought made by Norman with the same bolt-on neck construction, and the heel has cracked on it where one of the bolts is (which might indicate a long-term problem with the way these neck are attached, and it doesn’t seem to have been updated between the time my Norman was built and the time this newer La Parie Etude was built).

Cost: 9/10 – I would give this 10/10 for the price that I paid, but this instrument is a bit more if you buy it new.

Overall: 8/10 – Great value for this instrument; I would highly recommend it for somebody who is learning to play classical guitar. If you are well experienced with classical guitar you will probably want a little more, but this is a really great instrument. I also love that they are made right here in Canada.

See the test recording below!

EDIT: As of November 23rd (2015), I have removed the old sound test and updated it with a new one (See below). This sound sample was recorded with an AT2020 USB Microphone, with a bit of fx-reverb added in Cakewalk.

Soundbaord Material – Does it Matter?

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difference, does, hard, it, koa, mahogany, material, matter, rosewood, soft, sound, soundboard, spruce, stiff, stiffness, tone, tonewood, top, wood

So I was reading through “A Review of Ancient and Modern Violin Making” (W.W. Oakes, 1899) for my previous post and came across more interesting material. Also…slightly controversial? I don’t know what the general consensus is on soundboard material for guitars regarding softness/hardness (I know all Koa and Mahogany guitars are accepted now – but hey, why not Rosewood or Bubinga? Or Ebony? Softwood tops are the tradition but why not hardwoods generally?), but I want to share the Author’s opinion regardless.

Oakes, W.W. (1899). A Review of Ancient and Modern Violin Making. Seattle, WA: Metropolitan Printing and Binding Co.

This statement was made after the author built many violins using woods from all corners of the globe, with the conclusion being that it is the way the violin is worked and shaped by a skillful maker (rather than the wood used) which makes the tone of a violin – as he puts it, poor wood is a scapegoat used to justify the lack of good tone in a poorly crafted instrument.

Now, does this apply also to guitars? Given the great differences in size and construction, it may be questionable. However, I have often heard in my research online that the sides of a guitar must be hard and dense, and the top light and stiff.  Yet this is in fact the only reference I have found from a builder who built several (more than ten) instruments (although violins, not guitars) before drawing a conclusion opposite to the traditional perspective. This suggests that old growth wood with finer grain is useful not because of its tonal properties, but simply because (as per the last post) it will have less strain under the tension of the strings (because of stiffness – see last post).

An interesting thing to think about! That’s all for now.

Fine vs. Coarse Grained Wood

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a, ancient, and, coarse, effect, fine, grain, maker, making, modern, of, review, sound, stiffness, structure, tone, violin, wood

This is an interesting piece of information I found; nothing exceptionally new or unknown, but interesting. Also potentially useful, so I thought I’d share it. I spend a lot of my time doing research and stuff like this comes up…which is the stuff I’ll be posting in this blog frequently!

So this is an excerpt from a book entitled “A Review of Ancient and Modern Violin Making”, published in 1899 by Author W.W. Oakes (for those interested in details the excerpt is from page 71 I believe). Have a look at the clipping below and then I’ll go over it:

Oakes, W.W. (1899). A Review of Ancient and Modern Violin Making. Seattle, WA: Metropolitan Printing and Binding Co.

Basically the significance of this is that coarse grained wood is less stiff than fine grained wood because there is a higher percentage of the softer, summer growth wood. As a tree grows, the amount it grows each year during the warmer months slows considerably, so the summer growth rings get narrower toward the later years (the dark rings being winter growth, which is slowed as the tree remains more dormant while the weather is cold). This explains why old growth wood is desirable – it is stiffer (which, in the case of guitar soundboards, is generally speaking a desirable characteristic).

More importantly though, it also means that you need to treat fine grained braces etc. differently than the ones which are coarse grained (since it is likely that some of your braces etc. will be more coarse or fine grained than others – they will not be identical, and must be treated differently when tuning your soundboard). So next time you go to carve some soundboard braces maybe this will be useful to you!