Celery top pine bracing?

[Bob Connor]

Speaking of Australian Tonewoods

Just a reminder of the Australian Tonewoods section of the forum.

As you blokes do use different timbers please add to the threads in that forum with any data or impressions that you have of any of the instruments that you build, particularly any of the tonewoods that have not been traditionally used in guitar building.

I'm sure it will end up a valuable resource.

Bob

[Rick Turner]

I yield to and encourage those who want to try new top woods. I see too much emotion being spent on both trying to prove that they work...just as I see too little information on what would make them work, but that's not my problem.

The point here is discussion. The point away from here is to put your money where your mouths are. Please by all means build your guitars with bunya tops and celery top bracing and prove your points with three dimensional guitars.

You may not like my point of view, but it's firmly based in a particular reality that is the "primordial soup" from whence sprang steel string guitars. If you truly think that bringing in some of these alternative top and bracing timbers is a good thing, then do so and let the guitarists decide if you have viable alternatives to those that have proven to be successful both musically and in the market place.

So let me ask this: What is it about bunya and celery top that makes them good choices for top and brace wood? Other than availability, that is...

[jeffhigh]

Ask a simple question?...
Never realised that it would spark so much controversy.
I guess my question has been answered in the negative in that no one has any experience with using celery top pine as bracing wood.
I see that ALS is selling bunya and Kauri as brace wood as well as spruce.
And LMI has WRC and Mahogany and spanish cedar bracewood too.
I would be reluctant to use something as soft as WRC personally but it seems others disagree.

I am with rick on not being impressed with Bunya as a top, due to my personal aesthetic preferences, just dont care for the look when I have been used to tight, quartered and straight grained spruce

Anyhow, I hope we can continue to exchange ideas without any dummy spits
Jeff

[matthew]

So let me ask this: What is it about bunya and celery top that makes them good choices for top and brace wood? Other than availability, that is...

Aaah, good question! I guess we'll just have to wait until someone who has experience with them chimes in here. In the mean time, those who are interested will have to conduct our own research ...

BTW, bringing the word "emotional" into this discussion as a red herring is just ridiculous.

You ask "why?" and some of us ask "why not?" - which are two perfectly valid approaches. You said it: "The point here is discussion". You've made your point - but I for one am not going to stop discussing it because some Rick Turner guy says discussing it is pointless.

Yes Bob, anything I discover about my sample of celerytop I will post in the tonewoods thread.

Jeff I have used pale tight-grained WRC as bassbars in three basses now with good results. Light, stiff, glues well, works.

[Dominic]

Frankly I am quite happy that Australian woods are not well accepted as tone woods by many. More for us.

But maybe the US makers and the US market are too caught up in the Martin/Gibson legacy of what a steel string 'should' sound like, and not necessarily what it 'can' sound like to try new/different woods.

I saw a show on the ABC about some of the classical guitarists wanting guitars made from King Billy for its dark tone.

Here is what Maton have to say about Bunya.
Bunya
( araucaria bidwilli )

The Bunya Feast was a regular gathering of indigenous people from around the Bunya Mountains in Southern Queensland. They would gather to feast on the ripe nuts from the Bunya tree and to sing, dance and celebrate.
The Bunya tree also yeilds an outstanding soundboard timber - probably the best Australia has to offer.
Maton pioneered the use of this tonewood in the mid 1990's and have made some of our finest guitars from Bunya.
Bunya has an earthy, wild, evocative tone, a change from the conventional - but with the volume, tone and beauty to stand up in its own right. Bunya is also a sustainable guitar making soundboard, reaching maturity in 80 years. Compare that to the 300 plus years it takes to grow Spruce.


When North America has cut down all its big spruce for firewood Australia will still have a sustainable top wood in Bunya.

I've said this in another thread, but there is stuff out there to discover. And that will never happen if we all stick to someone elses plan. Be true to your Aussie roots, thumb your nose at convention and anyone who says it can't be done and prove them wrong.
Dom

[Bob Connor]

There are many woods that are probably suitable for a range of guitar components. The key thing as I see it is TIME! There are benefits to made from testing the full range of tonewoods from aesthetic, financial and constructional points of view. With a standard measure or datum point you could compare a range of tonewoods and over time a trend would occur, be it positive or negative.

If you need a sample of Celery Top Pine to work with let me know.

regards

Tim

OK. I'll bite.

Tim. I'll buy a Celery Top and a Bunya top from you and build two guitars from it and detail the construction in a thread.

They'll be O models unless there's any objections purely because I've been building a lot of them lately and I have a couple of nice ones here for comparison.

Do you blokes want them braced with CTP or Bunya or would it be a better control to use the same Adi stock that I've used on the last ones?

Any suggestions welcome.

Bob

[gratay]

Frankly I am quite happy that Australian woods are not well accepted as tone woods by many. More for us.

apart from blackwood..which is leaving our shores by the boatload daily bound for guitar manufacturing in the US....get it while you still can.

The main reason the Aussie manufacturers we're or are using bunya is the price of it. compared to traditional timbers.
Come to think of it ...I haven't seen any new Matons with bunya tops for quite a while..and on their website all models specs look like sitka spruce ??
Why would you think that would be?
I remember the Bunya prototypes in the 90's ..there was some with bunya faces , some with bunya sides and some all bunya back and sides acoustics..from what I heard with my ears the only vaguely acceptable combination was bunya tops. the all bunya acoustic body was particularly pretty yuk.
I call it a rock and roll timber...thats where it shines in my opinion...
again thats just what I've heard with my ears listening to many acoustics and electrics with bunya...
But I don't discount it..I have heard a few acoustics with bunya faces that I thought we're pretty nice . overall though I feel its a harsh
1-dimensional sound that doesn't quite have the complexity of the traditional timber sounds. On an acoustic I'd probably say it would suit more of a heavy strummer...being quite loud and brash.

Good on you Bob for putting your money where your mouth is...I'm sure you could get some decent results using it...As I know a lot of builders are interested in the prospects of using it.

[Rick Turner]

If you were going to build to an "Aussie sound" as opposed to what we're used to here in the 'States, how would you characterize the sound you desire?

What I'm going for with most of my own guitars is balance and a clear mid-range power supported underneath with some warmth, and I also like harmonic sustain. These tend not to be typical Martin nor Gibson flattop characteristics with (to really paint with broad strokes) Martins, especially dreads being seductively bass heavy, but notoriously difficult to record. Now, of course, the OM and 000 styles are coming more to the forefront and have been the basic jumping off point for what I think I can describe as the modern "fingerstyle" guitar models so popular with my West Coast luthier bretheren like Jeff Traugott, Ed Claxton, Lance McCollum, Kevin Ryan, etc.

[Allen]

I've used Kauri Pine for braces in two guitars after weighing, soaking, and deflection testing. I compared the samples to some Sitka and some Red Spruce that I had left over from previous builds. The Red Spruce was about 15% stiffer than the Sitka, but to my surprise the Kauri was was about 10% stiffer than Sitka.

I've dragged both those guitars around to let people play them, and none of them knew what they were braced with, nor do I think that they care. These people loved the way they sounded and the response of the instrument. Sure, a great deal of it is that they were built much lighter than factory instruments that all these people played. They were genuinely surprised at hearing how good a handmade guitar sounded.

The first guitar that I sold was braced with Kauri, so I guess the musician did choose with his ears.

I've not used Celery Top Pine, but I would test it against a sample of spruce as I did, and if the results are similar, then the only way you will know is to give it a try. Nothing ventured, Nothing Gained.

I use Kauri for linings in all my guitars.

[Rick Turner]

That kind of testing and comparing of a timber prior to just building a guitar with it is exactly what I've been advocating...to the apparent distress of some folks who seem to think we need to build before doing a preliminary assessment. I would expect that anything that came in plus or minus about 10% to 15% of what we know are stiffness and density numbers for spruce would certainly be worth trying. Anything outside that range might get a bit iffy. Many luthiers test their spruce for deflection and won't use material that falls outside of their own very narrowly defined range. That's one way to build guitars with a signature sound and have them be consistent. I know luthiers here who will only use tested Adirondack bracing on German spruce tops, for instance, unless the client specifies otherwise and knows the trade-offs. To just go build a guitar without knowing what the general characteristics of the timbers are is to really put yourself on the line for failure, while testing first will reduce the probability of failure and increase the possibility of a grand success.

It comes back to the question "why?" Why use a particular alternative timber? There are plenty of reasons to try, but understanding the particulars of the wood first will help you get where you want to be a lot quicker than just building this and that willy nilly.

[Dennis Leahy]

... To just go build a guitar without knowing what the general characteristics of the timbers are is to really put yourself on the line for failure, while testing first will reduce the probability of failure and increase the possibility of a grand success.

[newbie opinion] I suspect that the word "failure" is a bit harsh. I agree with your statements that pre-testing materials that are outside the luthier's typical realm is wise, and that sticking with materials that fall within a certain range should narrow the gap between the differences in similarly constructed instruments (i.e., a signature sound.) But, after hearing instruments with extremely different properties than Spruces for soundboards (like Mahogany, Koa, and Monkeypod), my ears tell me that the major contributing factor in the overall timbre of a guitar is the body volume and shape, followed by the soundboard. After those two factors (which I can hear), there are other factors such as back and side wood, neck wood, fingerboard wood, bridge wood, and bracewood that are much more subtle and though I am sure there is an impact on timbre with every change in materials (and even within the range of physical characteristics that individual species have from board to board) I strongly suspect that the vast majority of blindfolded players could not detect the majority of subtle changes.

Let's remove wood species from the equation that are unsuitable for a particular purpose by virtue of their physical characteristics. (For example, flatsawn Zebrawood, which has 11% tangential shrinkage, for the back of a jumbo guitar, or Basswood for a fingerboard.)

I would suggest that rather than "failure", a luthier using materials that are alternatives to species with known range of characteristics can expect "the unknown" which is probably going to manifest in only subtle differences from what could have been expected with species known to that luthier.[/newbie opinion]

Dennis

[Rick Turner]

But Dennis, how could you possibly know that flatsawn zebra wood won't work unless you build a guitar with it?

"Failure" is not a harsh assessment if you're in the business of making a living building and selling guitars and you build something that sells for less than your time is worth or doesn't sell. I'd love to have the amateur's advantage of this being a hobby and thus nothing being on the line when I build. But I didn't read that chapter in "Marrying Well for Luthiers" where it taught how to get the right meal ticket to fall for me...

I have built enough guitars (and other instruments) so that my likelihood of abject failure is pretty low. I just don't take on projects in which I don't feel very confident. I don't think that limits me much, either. I build what I want to build, and though some are not as successful as I'd like, I have to say that I don't build failures. The way I do pull it off is by knowing my materials, knowing a fair amount about the history of lutherie, and by knowing what I really can do.

A recent example of "knowing the history" bit is that a few months ago a potential client emailed me wanting a semi-hollow acoustic-electric mando cello...which I've done...and he wondered if it could also serve, with different nut and saddle...as "lauta". Well, most luthiers wouldn't know what he was talking about, but I did, and we went off on lautas, etc. Short story short...I got the commission as much because I knew what he was talking about as any other reason.

So you can avoid failure with new timbers, new instruments, whatever by doing your homework ahead of time.

[graham mcdonald]

I have used Bunya for a couple of instruments, after some testing by Gerard Gilet suggested its characteristics were very similar to Sitka spuce. Mind you, I have only built bouzoukis with it and they seemed to work OK, not greatly different from a spruce top. I have similarly used kauri and got much the same result. Working with 8 or 10 jangly strings is not the same perhaps as getting a saleable guitar to work as Rick so sensibly points out.

The Bunya is interesting in that it is a native timber, but it is at best boring to look at, and at times downright ugly, and that will I think stop it having any real impact on the market, at least until the last spruce is felled and sold to China. Cole Clark use lots of it, but their method of building guitars has its own problems...

I found a bit of nicely quartered celery top a few years back and glued up in a mandolin soundboard. It was so heavy that I decided not to bother carving it. Maybe just a really heavy piece, but it didn't excite me at the time. It was more like of bit of old oregon (Douglas Fir) that you can sometimes find in demolition years, not the knotty stuff they sell these days. Spruce works, WRC and redwood work, King Billy can work and maybe Australian red cedar would make a decent soundboard, but anything heavier raises more problems that it solves.

cheers

graham

[matthew]

it is at best boring to look at, and at times downright ugly

can you show me what you mean? I thought most soundboard material - except where it has bearclaw or similar - is typically bland and featureless, unlike side/back material. What topwood is exciting to look at?

I'm interested - genuinely - in the concepts of boring and ugly!

[Allen]

Here's one I built with a Australian Red Cedar top. Black wood body, Red Cedar Neck. Not boring in my eyes.




This guitar I gave to a mate that is having a trying time with cancer. He plays the daylights out of it every day, and it's sounding better each time I get to hear it.

I've got another one ready to put strings on that has a Australia Red Cedar top, as well as an identical guitar with an Engelman Spruce top. I wanted to see what the differences in sound would be with the only thing different being the top wood. I should have both guitars complete before the end of the month, so stay tuned for the report.

[graham mcdonald]

I suppose what I like about spruce, or king billy is the elegant plainness of it. More or less the one colour and the regular, book-matched annual lines. As someone suggested before Bunya can look like a bit of formica. Just not very elegant, which is my basic criteria when I am looking at or designing an instrument. They have to good right before anyone even picks them up and Bunya just doesn't do it for me. That is not so say I am never going to use any again, but I would prefer a spruce of some kind

If Maton and Cole Calrk and whoever else can make then and sell them, good luck to 'em.

cheers

graham

[gratay]

it is at best boring to look at, and at times downright ugly

can you show me what you mean? I thought most soundboard material - except where it has bearclaw or similar - is typically bland and featureless, unlike side/back material. What topwood is exciting to look at?

I'm interested - genuinely - in the concepts of boring and ugly!

I guess athstetics is an individual thing..I like seeing nice straight tight grain lines in a face..which bunya doesn't really have.. kinda has a flatsawn look about it . and lots of colour variation which some people may like.

[Kim]

Make no mistake, some do like the look and sound of a Bunya top. I have played a couple of QLD Walnut B/S Bunya topped Matons and loved the sound. Also, as mentioned earlier in this thread, nearly all of the Bunya that is available ATM is re-growth and is still a little too narrow to produce a good clean two piece top. In a few short years however, or if you can bring yourself to use a 3 or 4 piece top now, Bunya will provide an excellent soundboard alternative regardless of what the opinions are of those who hear with their eyes and don't like what they see.

Bunya is strong, stiff, light and resonant, it has all the qualities required for use in this craft as a soundboard and bracing wood and I am confident that Bunya will continue to gain acceptance within the craft, especially when the larger logs begin to make an appearance. Only 80 years to produce a soundboard size tree for Bunya compared to 3 or 4 hundred for the quickly diminishing stocks of spruce tree, sooner or later you will need to embrace the renewable Bunya tree if your going to be around for a while and building guitars in this country.

Cheers

Kim

[jeffhigh]

I guess gratay's pic is an example of why a bunya top does not appeal to me. First one I saw, my immediate reaction was -what is that flatsawn mismatched 4 piece top.
Sure the sound is the critical end result, but it really does have to be pleasing to the eye as well.
Fortunately everyone's take on appearance is different so some will like the bunya top that I dislike, good for them.
Jeff

[matthew]

Ok here's an interesting property of celerytop.

I've been fiddling with finishes and grounds. I was testing the effect of Potassium bichromate, an oxidising agent, on the end of my test strips. This is commonly done, as you may know, to darken the wood, bring out the grain and simulate the look of ageing.

All the strips, pine, cedar, spruce, tas oak, silky oak I tested darkened predictably. The celerytop stayed virtually unaffected, just a slight yellowing , which is probably just the yellow bichromate solution left on the wood.

[sebastiaan56]

Bunya is strong, stiff, light and resonant, it has all the qualities required for use in this craft as a soundboard and bracing wood and I am confident that Bunya will continue to gain acceptance within the craft, especially when the larger logs begin to make an appearance. Only 80 years to produce a soundboard size tree for Bunya compared to 3 or 4 hundred for the quickly diminishing stocks of spruce tree, sooner or later you will need to embrace the renewable Bunya tree if your going to be around for a while and building guitars in this country.

Cheers

Kim

I agree Kim, the other factor that influences me is the environmental impacts of my timber purchases. How much added carbon goes into a top that is cut in the Alaskan wilderness, trucked to a mill, cut, dried, shipped to a vendor and then airmailed across the world to another vendor and then finally to me. Oil is over $90US per barrel and probably wont go down. Its a huge cost impost. Why add to that when there are local timbers that are just as good? Sure they may not sound exactly the same as sprucus expensivata but that does not invalidate their use, it means we make different sounding instruments or compensate to get the sound sought. For the hacker like me its a non issue.

I like the Cole Clark guitars, Ive played some at our local muso shop. I dont have the skill to determiine how much of the sound is the top but I think they are a good offering. They are pretty in the flesh / wood

[Allen]

Were do you get Potassium bichromate Matthew? I've never heard of it used to simulate aging wood, but it does sound interesting. I'd like to give it a go and see what sort of effects I can get with it.

[matthew]

Well I have some from a nefarious source. I can try to post you a bit; orange crystals, PM me your address.

A chemist probably can get you some.

I have to update my previous post, too. The celerytop HAS been affected, though it was a slower process. It has taken on a greenish brown tinge, not really nice. The other woods just look dirty brown , as old wood tends to go. i wouldn't use it under varnish, but to age the inside of an instrument to pass it off as an antique it could be quite good

[Allen]

I was thinking more about a spruce top. Dirty brown doesn't sound that appealing. Perhaps tinted shellacs are more controllable. Thanks for the offer.

[Kim]

On the chemical intervention path, Oxalic Acid could well be worth a try on Bunya to even out the colour for all you wussy wussy girly boys who find the natural form an unappealing match for your big blouses.

Cheers

Kim