Doing Things Wrong

"Tonewood"

This really puts a dent in the whole tonewood argument.

I doubt there is anything very special about those piezos. My experience is that you need the right mounting and electronics to make a piezo sound good, and it has very little to do with the sensor itself, which is just a little bit of semiconductor.

To sound good, a piezo needs to be incorporated directly in the physical support of the strings. And it requires a very high output impedance, otherwise, it turns into a high-pass filter. Both of these are especially true on a bass.

I have to wonder where he got such a great-sounding brick. Home Depot, or Lowes? Or do you have to get your rock-tone from some specialty loothery supplier?

When I run out of plywood and masonite, I'm going down to Loothery Depot and pick up a 50-pound bag of ToneCrete. I will experiment with different mixes, aggregates, and colors, always testing in the most subjective and un-repeatable manner possible, as is luthiery tradition. As always, I will report my results here in Luthier's Corner.

I'll save you some time ... they all sound the same.

I want to see a comparison of different shirt materials, straps, belt buckles, and beer guts.

Either you believe in tonewood, or you don't.

Tonewood is marketing nonsense.


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This body is maple plywood over a hollow pine core, double-bound. It came out very lightweight, too light to balance even a guitar neck. This was originally going to be the 12-string, but I realized that it would never balance. So I shuffled parts and bodies between some other projects - a planned six-string got canceled and became the twelver. That left this body free. I thought about it a while and decided it would make a good mandolin.