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I decided 9 months ago that I wanted to build two guitars with the same back and sides, neck , fingerboard, bridge, bridge plate, brace material, etc. I made sure to use material that was all cut from the same billets to try eliminating possible variables. I know that there obviously going to be differences within a board etc. The only difference between the guitars would be the tops. I used lutz on one and western red cedar on the other. Anyway, I wanted to find some insight on how cedar and lutz respond in similar situations. I must say prior to building these guitars I was not very fond of cedar. My limited experience with cedar was at a guitar center on 500$ guitar, so I thought that this guitar may have not been a great example. Since I hear so many go gaga over cedar, I thought it should be something I should try. After playing both of the guitars that I recently strung up, I am not too sure if I like cedar. This leads me to ponder a few things. Did I do something in constructing the cedar guitar to make it sound unpleasant to my ears? Maybe I didn't do anything wrong and my tone wood selection was a miss. Is cedar and cocobolo back and sides just a bad combo? It could be that cedar is just not exactly my cup of tea. How do you determine the sound is because of you and not the natural tonal characteristics of the wood or wood combination? Do you keep building with the same woods altering your design in order to find ways to make certain materials work with one another. Do you find a guitar made with those materials with a nice sound and shoot for that? If anyone has some clips of what they think a good sounding cedar and rosewood guitar sounds like please forward them, so I can compare with what I have going on. Thank you for reading and I look forward to hearing what you guys think.


Rob

Can't say about yours, but some of the best sounding and even guitars I have built were cedar and coco. It actually is my favorite combonations, with koa or walnut with cedar close. I however just built 2 lutz/walnut that I am very well pleased with. I have 2 on the bench in this batch with 1 Lutz/walnut and 1 lutz/ coco and that in the white I am loving both. I see a long relationship in the making with Lutz as a top wood, but cedar is still a favorite.

(Red) Cedar isn't my cup of tea, but IME it's more about playing style than the material itself. Red Cedar responds nicely to a really light touch, but gets compressed with a heavier attack.
Here's a link to a recording of James Taylor playing his Cedar/Rosewood Olson. http://www.olsonguitars.com/soundbites/jt_lesn.mp3

I've built a few Cedar topped guitars that I thought sounded great, with a light handed player. They didn't sound as good with me playing. I'm more of a chickin' picker. Find a player with a really light touch (possibly someone who plays with bare fingers) and you may like Cedar better.

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http://www.brackettinstruments.com/

I've built many excellent dreads and OM/D with WRC tops, all strung with mediums, and all owned by Bluegrass flatpickers(Blue Highway's Tim Stafford among 'em) and played hard. They're really not that different from my spruce-topped guits. Definitely no problems with headroom, or "breaking up" when played hard, and they're among my loudest. Only issue I've had is keeping a bridge on a few of them...

Sometimes it's not the material, so much as how you work the material.

The very reason I have not used cedar for a long time. Other then that and having to be so carful not to pick up dents,I like the sound.

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A person who has never made a mistake has never made anything!!!

Grumpy wrote:
"Sometimes it's not the material, so much as how you work the material."

Amen!

Cedar tends to be (TENDS to be!) less dense than most of the spruces, with a lower Young's modulus along the grain as a result. Usualy you need to leave a cedar top a bit thicker to end up with the same stiffness, but it will usually end up a little lighter anyway. If you used 'typical' cedar and spruce, and didn't measure the properties and take them into account, you will have skewed the results.

Cedar has lower splitting resistance than spruce, and that's why bridges are harder to keep on a cedar top. If you make the bridge wider along the line of the string pull the max stress along the back edge will be lower, and it will tend to stay down better. That was the idea behind the 'belly' bridge, of course.

Thanks for the clip Woody! That guitar sounded great. The reverb on there kind of throws me off. Aside of the reverb my guitar doesn't sound anything like that one in the clip. My guitar doesn't have the same presence as the guitar recorded does, this would be my number one complaint. The first chords that were played on the clip sound kinda like what my guitar sounds like but lacking the presence. I still have not put on a decent set of strings since I assembled it. I normally use cheap strings to get it all set up and then put on some elixirs. This might help some. I am also a little heavy handed.





I want to say that the guitar doesn't sound horrible by any means. However, I do think it could be better, and I would like to try and figure what I could have done different or what I could do now.

Here is some more info. The cedar I used is very stiff. It was much stiffer across the grain than the lutz and about the same stiffness along the grain as the lutz top. I was still concerned about failure so I thickness it to about .115". I know to some this may be on the thin side, but this cedar was very stiff. I used 1/4 by 1/2 tapered adi x bracing. I also tried one of those behind the bridge plate braces as an extra insurance policy.

Thanks for the responses so far,
Rob