Tonewoods

How we select and pair the woods that make a guitar a voice. Tap tone first. Visual character second.

Tonewood plates curing on the drying rack.

Selection Philosophy

Every tonewood gets tap-tuned and flex-tested before visual evaluation. Consistent grain and density beat dramatic figure. Highly figured wood introduces acoustic unpredictability and ages less consistently than ribbon-grain or straight-grain stock. Plates that fail the tap test are rejected regardless of how they photograph.

Sapwood is avoided — density difference, stability difference, finishing inconsistency. Quartersawn stock is preferred for neck and brace material. The criterion is always: what does this piece of wood actually sound like and how predictably will it age?

Top Woods

Ranked, top to bottom, by stiffness-to-weight.

  1. 1
    Adirondack spruce
    Primary top and bracing wood

    Stiffest of the spruces, highest strength-to-weight. Maximum headroom; rewards thinning.

  2. 2
    Sitka spruce
    Top wood option

    Stiffness somewhat below Adirondack but consistent and predictable. Reliable for dread and 000 voicings.

  3. 3
    Bear claw Sitka
    Top wood — figured

    Stiffness varies with the figure. Tap tuning every stage matters more here than on plain-grain stock.

  4. 4
    Alaskan yellow cedar
    Top wood option

    Pale, tight-grained, and stiff for its weight. Slower to “open up” than spruce, but rewards patience with a focused, almost bell-like clarity once played in — spruce-like headroom with a touch more sweetness.

  5. 5
    Port Orford cedar
    Top wood option — limited supply

    Rare and aromatic, with a stiffness-to-weight ratio that rivals Adirondack. Warmer and more immediately responsive than spruce, without the long break-in period cedar tops are known for. Used selectively.

  6. 6
    Redwood
    Soundboards and tone bars

    More flexible, lower density. Beautiful at moderate volume; pairs especially well with bocote. Not used for necks (learned the hard way).

  7. 7
    Mahogany
    Reference top and back/sides

    Flexible relative to stiffness, on the heavier side. Shows up in honest, midrange-forward voices.

Back & Sides

The character the top is paired against. We keep an inventory wide enough to match a build to a player’s sound, not the other way around.

Bocote

Dark, complex, authoritative. Strong fundamental, complex overtones, beautiful sustain bloom, medium decay. Best paired with Adirondack for articulation and clarity. Excellent with Sitka. Redwood pairing produces extraordinary warmth at moderate volumes. Avoid mahogany top — it wastes bocote's complexity.

Hawaiian koa

Sweet, complex, warm, immediately musical. Distinctive midrange in the best sense. Slightly soft attack — notes develop after pick contact. Bass round and warm rather than extended; treble chimes rather than glares. The 000 body is ideal — large enough to let the full voice develop, small enough to keep the midrange sweetness in focus. Ribbon-grain heartwood performs closer to theoretical best than heavily figured pieces.

Bolivian rosewood (Morado)

Warm, complex, the closest legal alternative to Brazilian. Five-year reference dreadnought built with this wood and a Sitka top remains stable, loud, clear.

Indian rosewood

The industry-standard rosewood since the 1969 export restrictions on Brazilian, and for good reason — dark, dense, and richly overtone-laden, with a low end that stays clear under heavy playing. Fully legal to source and trade with the right paperwork, and the wood behind most guitars people describe as “rosewood-voiced.”

Brazilian rosewood

The historic benchmark for complexity and sustain — a deeper overtone stack than any other rosewood, shimmering across the whole range. Listed under CITES Appendix I since 1992, so every board we use is certified pre-ban or otherwise legally documented stock, paperwork included. Available on request, priced accordingly.

Katalox

Balanced, punchy, underrated. Worth specifying when a builder wants rosewood-adjacent character without sourcing concerns.

Crelicam ebony

Bright and glassy. Demanding to work — narrow tolerance for moisture and movement. Reserved for builds where its character earns the difficulty.

Mahogany

Honest, midrange-forward, harmonically generous. The reference back-and-sides wood for measuring everything else against.

Maple

Bright, articulate, and honest — it doesn't add color so much as get out of the way, which is exactly what some players want. Hard maple (including birdseye) leans clean and percussive; bigleaf maple splits the difference with a bit more warmth and figure. A strong choice for a guitar meant to sit in a mix, or for a player who wants every note to arrive exactly as picked.

Black walnut

Warm and balanced when well-quartered, sitting tonally between mahogany and rosewood — less overtone complexity than rosewood, more low-end weight than mahogany. Handsome, understated grain that doesn't need figure to look finished.

Cherry

Light, bright, and ages beautifully with UV exposure, deepening from pale pink-brown toward amber over its first years in the sun. The set currently in inventory came from a supplier labeling it “Cherry Dream” — best read as a trade name for a nicely figured cherry rather than a distinct species.

Neck Woods

Stability and carvability matter more here than tone — the neck is along for the ride, not driving the voice.

Spanish cedar
Our default neck wood

Light, stable, and easy to carve to a comfortable profile. Paired with a carbon fiber reinforcement tube, it holds its set reliably across seasons — the signature SugarTree neck.

Mahogany
Available by request

Slightly heavier and stiffer than Spanish cedar, with a long track record in steel-string necks.

Maple
Available by request

Denser and stiffer still — favored when a player wants maximum neck rigidity, at some cost in weight.

Fingerboard & Bridge Woods

The same three woods serve both roles — dense, hard, and stable under string tension.

Ebony
Our default

Dense, glassy-smooth under the fingers, and stable across humidity swings. Black or lightly streaked, depending on the board.

Rosewood
Available by request

A more open pore structure than ebony, with a touch of natural give under the fingers that some players prefer.

Osage orange
Available by request

Bright yellow-green when fresh, mellowing to a warm amber-brown with light exposure. Dense and hard — an unusual but excellent alternative to ebony.

Tonal Pairing

Four interactions you can predict before the first cut.

Stiff top + stiff back & sides

Maximum projection, brightness, and note separation.

Stiff top + warm back & sides

Focused fundamental, warmer coloration, direct.

Flexible top + stiff back & sides

Warm and sensitive with good projection.

Flexible top + warm back & sides

Maximum warmth. Limited headroom.

Body shape compounds these choices. A parlor body concentrates and focuses tonal character — bracing decisions have outsized effect on a small body. A 12-fret body join drives the bridge closer to the lower-bout center, where the top is most compliant: fuller bass, more complex bloom, vibrating area more evenly distributed both sides of the bridge.

Forward shifted X bracing and a 12-fret join are acoustically aligned. Both point toward maximum lower-bout vibration. When we choose them together, we’re stacking the deck on purpose.

Build Your Tone

Pick a top, a back & sides wood, a body, and a scale length, and we’ll describe the guitar they’d make together. Not a substitute for playing one — a starting point for a conversation.

What you’d get

Maximum projection, brightness, and note separation. The Adirondack spruce top is articulate with enormous headroom, and overtones that bloom under hard playing. The Bocote back and sides are dark and authoritative, with complex overtones and a beautiful, medium-length sustain bloom. In a 000 / OM, the balanced size lets the full voice of the wood pairing develop without favoring bass or treble. At a long 25.4" scale, expect higher string tension for the same pitch and gauge, adding definition and headroom at some cost to left-hand ease. A modern compound (16"+) fretboard radius is a matter of feel, not tone — flatter and faster under the hand, and far more forgiving of aggressive bends and lead lines.

The wood was never the constraint. The willingness to listen to it was.