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Talk to a professional drummer or guitarist about instruments, and you’ll soon realize he knows a thing or two about wood: where it comes from, whether it’s endangered, and most of
Juber with his Martin signature model, OM28LJ, made of Madagascar rosewood. Photo courtesy of Hope Juber.
all, how different species sound when air vibrates against them in a hollow chamber.
Take Laurence Juber, for instance. Originally from London, Juber played lead guitar in Paul McCartney’s Wings from 1978 to 1981, and has since picked up a couple of Grammys and amassed an extensive recording resume. Not only has he recorded guitar tracks for solo artists like Carly Simon, Kimberly Lock, and Lou Rawls, he has also plucked for TV’s Seventh Heaven and movies like Good Will Hunting, plus composed music for the big and small screens. “Over the years, I’ve developed a pretty keen interest in the sonic properties of wood,” says Juber, who primarily plays Martin Guitars. Standing in his home studio in front of a computer that has a music keyboard where most people have a typing keyboard, he picks up a Martin guitar of Madagascar rosewood. “There’s not a particularly wide range of choices [of wood species], but varieties of spruce and rosewood are different enough to have an impact on tone.” Different enough for Juber to have about fifty acoustic and electric guitars, each with its own distinct sound, and to know the virtues of each.
The gold standard for a guitar body has always been Brazilian rosewood. Juber compares its sound to a Cabernet, saying it has a greater complexity and deeper throat than Indian Rosewood, which he describes as Merlot-like, chocolatey, and muffled; since he plays with his flesh (rather than with his fingernails or a pick), he has to work harder to break through the Indian rosewood’s muffled quality, though he admits it can be a very satisfying wood for a non-professional. Though the highly figured exotic woods are
This rare Martin guitar, made of Brazilian rosewood, sold for $37,500 at Christies last fall. Photo courtesy of Martin Guitar.
aesthetically pleasing, Juber, as a working artist, prefers guitar bodies constructed of a straight grain, which is more reliable and doesn’t tend to warp or move during travels to different climates. In actuality, he plays mahogany guitars more when he’s in the studio and puts them in a separate class, comparing them to white wines.
The problem, however, is that it’s 2009, and Brazilian rosewood (Dalbergia nigra) is neither an ethical nor legal choice. If you’re brave enough to be so frank, mahogany is also close to being endangered and exploits more than just forests; Juber says mahogany is to South America as blood diamonds are to Africa. Deforestation has made extinction a real possibility for these species. According to Dick Boak, Director of Artist Relations at Martin Guitars, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) Treaty of 1992 made it subsequently illegal to harvest Brazilian rosewood. So while there are still Brazilian rosewood guitars around, the price for them has skyrocketed: a limited edition Martin of solid Brazilian rosewood recently sold at Christie’s for $37,500. Even if such a guitar is within reach, that doesn’t mean a professional musician is free to play it wherever s/he likes—they can’t be exported or played in world tours because customs forms to most countries require a declaration that you’re not transporting an endangered species.
Boak wants to get musicians on board with changing their surprisingly rigid traditional beliefs about which wood is best. “You’d think musicians would be pretty green-oriented,” he remarks, “but when it comes to their instruments . . .” He trails off. It’s hard to break with tradition. Even at Martin, where inlaying mother-of-pearl on every seam can require up to a thousand hours of human labor, the quality of a high-end guitar still comes down to tone. That’s why Martin has an aggressive certified wood program that shows their guitar woods are responsibly harvested, and is developing alternatives, like American cherry and catalosh, to replace Brazilian rosewood. Juber has commissioned Martin to make him a maple guitar, which is much more sustainable, and has partnered with a division of Greenpeace called Music Wood to raise awareness of endangered wood in the music industry.
As it turns out, there are quite a few creative advances made by musicians and instrument makers in recent years that not only replace the “best” woods, but move beyond them.
At DW Drums in Oxnard, California, John Good, Senior Executive Vice President of Research and Development, is in a loft overlooking the factory floor, timbre-matching drum shells himself, a job that requires little technology but years of experience. To ensure the shells of a kit match in tone and grain, he inspects them and then thumps them with his fist. The bass drum and toms must relate in progression tonally. Typically, shells are made of several plies of maple or birch veneer, maple having a timbre drummers call “warm,” and birch sounding “bright.” Good’s hands-on work has resulted in several technologies that change drum tone, earning him and DW the respect of world-class musicians like Abe Laboriel, Jr., who is currently touring with Eric Clapton.
Laboriel, e-mailing from a plane between Tokyo and Auckland, says “There are many factors after the choice of wood that affect the drum sound, like hardware, drumheads, tuning, and finally, the individual touch of the drummer.” He plays a DW set called a “classic,” which is made of mahogany and poplar and that he describes as having a full-bodied, punchy tone and sonic weight. The kit has been with him since 2005, has accompanied him on tours with Paul McCartney and Sting, and can be heard on recordings by Sheryl Crow, Queen Latifah, Celine Dion, Miley Cyrus, and Jessica Simpson, to name a few. He lauds DW for their creativity and inventiveness, much of which stems from Good’s close involvement with his factory and the musicians who play DW kits.
Abe Laboriel Jr. with his custom DW kit. Photo courtesy of Rob Shanahan.
From Timber to Timbre 1- Sheets of veneer in the DW drum factory, 2- Veneer is selected, 3-Glued, 4-Pressed flat into plywood, 5-then the plies are compressed in hot and cold to form and maintain the shell's shape, 6-John Good holds the formed shell of rainbow wood, 7- Finished lacquer shells.
Back in Good’s office, it’s easy to see he’s given a great deal of thought to wood: he sits below a poster of exotic woods, providing the background for stacks of exotic veneer in a rainbow of gold, brown, blond, red, and black; there are shells for products under development, along with twisted coils of solid wood and snares in every size, color, and finish imaginable lined up on a shelf just like the acclaimed CDs above them. He rests a sheet of wood veneer several feet long that measures 1/36” thick over one hand. The veneer is cut horizontally, and it barely bends, outstretched like an albatross’s wingspan. With one finger, he taps it lightly. “Hear that?” he asks. Not surprisingly, it sounds like someone’s tapping a long, thick piece of paper as the tapping reverberates along its length. He sets the veneer aside and picks up one that’s identical except for its vertical grain orientation, which drapes much more easily over his hand, and taps it, too. “Hear the difference?” he asks. It sounds a little deeper, the echo a little more authoritative. His face is impish; it’s the look of someone with a trick up his sleeve. Eyes twinkling, he sets it down and picks up a third veneer, this one cut with a 45-degree diagonal grain orientation, causing it to angle a little instead of draping easily over his hand. “Now listen to this.”
It’s noticeably lower in pitch. He goes through the demonstration again, and it becomes more obvious: tap, tap, TAP. Ri, me, do. This discovery was the basis for the thirty-seven-year-old company’s newest development, shells made from veneer cut on a 45-degree angle, called the X series because the direction of the angle alternates from one ply to the next for structural strength. Good is emphatic: “Grain orientation is the number-one factor affecting tone,” he declares. With a technology like that, a greener alternative (even bamboo, which DW has begun using) matches the quality of tradition.
Another pioneer in the movement toward exploring new routes to high-quality sound is Ken Wilcox, Sales and Marketing Director for GL Veneer in Huntington Park, California. GL Veneer’s factory is a huge, noisy building housing tractor-sized machines that cut exotic wood from around the world into veneer in what Wilcox describes as a conservative way of using precious wood. (Veneer yields more surface area and wastes less than solid wood by cutting usable pieces that are as thin as 1/42”, instead of taking a ½” piece of wood and machining it down to 1/8”.) The factory houses over $8 million of veneer, from ho-hum pine to macassar ebony, an eight-inch-thick stack of which is worth around $150,000. Wilcox names one species after another by sight as he leads the way through the factory, stopping to show off the highly prized blistered figuring of sapele pommele by wiping a sheet of veneer with a damp paper towel to demonstrate how it will look once it’s finished. Wilcox, originally from Oregon, is ahands-on adventurer and music enthusiast who supplies veneer to DW. He, too, is concerned about deforestation and changing the stiff tradition in the music industry. He believes that there are several species that can be used interchangeably for guitars and drums to give optimum sound.
8- Completed Red Gum Drum, 9- 1st Century Sound, an Eco X Bamboo Tom. Photos courtesy of Jesse J. Rutherford.
Do musicians agree? On one music website, an aspiring musician asks some more experienced musicians what difference a species makes. “Not shit if you can tune,” is the response. Javier Calderon, a double-platinum music producer in Latin America who got his start playing guitar for top Latin acts like Aleks Syntek, argues that even on an electric guitar, the type of wood does make a difference. “Electric guitars depend on everything,” he says. “An electric guitar doesn’t live for itself.” In other words, it’s not just the wood; there are such a myriad of factors that determine the sound that it’s no wonder each electric guitarist has a unique sound. He cautions that expensive guitars are not necessarily better, and prefers his standard Mike Stern Signature model made of ash that he got as part of his endorsement with Yamaha, to an expensive relic with an exotic veneer worth twice as much that he rescued from a secondhand instrument store. Like Juber, he values a guitar that doesn’t expand or contract much with heat while on tour, which would result in it needing to be re-calibrated for every different climate. Juber says of the difference between species, “It’s a subtle change. Is it a huge change? No, but you’re talking to guitarists who can gauge 1/1000th of an inch on their guitar strings.”
In a blind test of a finished recording, where so many different factors affect the sound, Wilcox insists that even a world-class musician would be hard pressed to distinguish between an endangered gold standard and its environmentally-friendly alternative. “Eric Clapton couldn’t tell the difference,” he scoffs. He’s been involved with the development of several new veneer technologies to better utilize natural resources, maximizing tone and even visual aesthetic.
An instrument can be wrapped in a veneer with designs like flames or photographs printed directly onto the wood, or it can be wrapped in a sustainable wood veneer printed with an exotic burl image. Now it’s Wilcox’s turn to show the tricks he keeps up his sleeve as he lays out several sheets of veneer printed to look like bird’s eye maple inlaid with vavona burl and vice versa. He also describes recomposed veneer, a process of layering plies of non-descript, sustainable wood veneer in a form to create a new log and then cutting it in such a way that you make a completely new grain of your own design, copying nature or going beyond it, and getting a consistent figure that can be mass-produced. Logs can even be bleached and impregnated with dye, so you can have a guitar that’s made of sustainable yet highly figured wood, and also happens to be blue. (For a look at the breathtaking dye technology, Wilcox recommends visiting the website of Legno Quattro, a wood dyeing company, at www.legnoquattro.it.) The technology is available to make instruments that satisfy a wild imagination and a discriminating ear. “It’s our job to try to change the direction of thought to better utilize the beautiful natural resources,” he concludes.
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