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I've been doing a lot of reading lately... trying to get myself familiar with all of the different types of wood and their properties. Obviously, Brazilian Rosewood is a very famous and historically significant wood in lutherie. I'm sort've sad that I'm just starting out in a time where this wood isn't abundant... But my feelings aside, there definitely is BRW out there being sold today at a premium price and there seems to be quite a bit of discussion in regards to whether or not it's actually worth it to build with this wood today.

From what I can gather, most of the BRW available today is flat sawn or of poor quality. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) So is it really worth it to pay the premium that you do for inferior pieces of wood?

For those that have built with it, how did you feel about the pieces you built with and the end result?

Also, is there any source that supplies high quality BRW?

Thank God that you didnt mention BRW and eBay in the same paragraph

I have several sets of it, but I havent built anything with it yet. There are those that I am sure will chime in who have built some excellent guitars with BRW and the wood is the king of woods. Whether or not it is actually worth the added expense is something that the listener will have to answer. I'm sure that there are those that will tell you that their brand of car is the best and all of the reasons for their belief. Belief that BRW is the best follows those traits.

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Reguards,

Ken H

^^;; I was mainly curious because I've heard so many people say that all the BRW left is what 50 years ago would have been called junk that nobody would ever think of building with.

if you can find it quarter sawn with straight grain .. you might be o.k. but your still breaking the law ! Jody

it is basically the same tonally as indian rosewood. Individual pieces may vary.

there are people who swear it is the best stuff out there..but i've never seen anyone willing to id ANY woods in a blind test....much less tell the difference between brw and eirw.

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http://www.PeakeGuitars.com

Warning: Be prepared to be red-faced surprised any time you do the blind listening test.

...But it's a great learning experience and I highly recommend it!

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JJ
Napa, CA
http://www.DonohueGuitars.com

That depends entirely on when it was cut, where it was cut, when it was imported, and whether you have the proper paperwork if you're bringing it across national borders. Under specific circumstances, it *can* be entirely legal to bring BRW into the US from another country (even ones that are CITES signatories....).

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The member formerly known as erikbojerik....

Brazilian Rosewood is an excellent tonewood. Compared to your typical Indian Rosewood set, the tap tone is much more resonant and "glassy". Good quality Brazilian can still be found - although, I have seen a bunch of poor quality sets out there - especially on places like eBay. The guy in charge of the stumpwood project in Brazil supplies places like Allied Lutherie with sets periodically and it is legal and good quality wood. Occasionally, you will see some sets for sale that were logged many years ago and are similar to what was used ages ago by Martin. I have a small stockpile of some of the old quality Brazilian and it is darn near impossible to find at a moment's notice - so you have to keep your eyes open.

The stumpwood Brazilian that you see being used by reputable builders today is still very nice wood. It has more figure than the straight-grained old stuff but it is often well-quartersawn and my experience with it has been that the taptone is identical. I do feel that the highly-figured stumpwood Brazilian will have more possibility for developing cracks - so I would advise to have those sets acclimate in your shop for a couple years to see how stable they are before building with them.

I personally prefer Brazilian rosewood over Indian Rosewood. In particular, Adirondack - Brazilian is just a wonderful wood combination. But then again, so is Cedar - Walnut or Cedar - Mahogany. While one certainly can't say one wood is better - I have definitely noticed a difference.

There are a few other much more affordable rosewoods that sound IDENTICAL to Brazilian. Amazon Rosewood and Honduran Rosewood come to mind. My experience has been that these woods are some of the most "musical" woods in raw form. They just respond and make noise effortlessly and this is the reason Brazilian is so highly regarded.

But the bottom-line is you can still make a great sounding guitar with something different. But in my opinion, it is without question the king of tonewoods. Honduran and Amazon would be right up there but just don't have the visual appeal of Brazilian.

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Simon

It isn't all gone.. it is just hard to find and expensive. There are some good sets around. You just have to be diligent about finding them.

I think Simon is right though... dollar for dollar I think Amazon (or Madagascar) are very close substitutes at a fraction of the cost.

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Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

I recently bought two sets of BRZ from a friend of mine. He's had them in his shop for 20 years & never used them because each set had "issues"
One set was nicely quartered but very small. (I had to build a three piece back to fit a parlour guitar pattern) I didn't have any trouble with bending or stability of the back.
The other set is slab sawn in places & it has been a real challenge to try turn it into a guitar. The sides were really cranky to bend (SJ venecian cutaway) & cracked along the grain in a couple of places. There is some cupping in the sides that *should* sand out... The back pieces tried to emulate a couple of Pringles as they adjusted to my shop environment. I had to thin the sides & then soak them in Supersoft II & weigh them down for a few days to get them to lay reasonably flat. I also had to X brace the back & put in an extra brace across the lower section of the X to get an even arch. This baby isn't gonna be light.
So, the bottom line is... Slab sawn wood can present challenges which are time consuming & frustrating. It also seems that wood that has been cut for many years can be pretty brittle.
I did get some satisfaction out of pulling the cat out of the fire, but I'm not sure it was worth the extra effort. Next time, I'll try talk the customer into a nice Cocobolo set!
On the other hand... The wood is really pretty & i have found that I love the smell of Brazilian Rosewood.

You may have to strike Allied off that list. I called them about 3 weeks ago inquiring about some other wood, and asked them if they were still carrying Brazilian, and they said no, that it was getting "too dicey" fooling with it.

I've made 1 out of the stumpwood, with an adi top. It sounded good, and the owner has had many compliments on it's sound. The sides were flat sawn, and warpage in the lower bouts after the bending was an issue. I've been cruising the net off and on trying to find out where to get some if the need arises, and at least for me it is very difficult to obtain

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Brad Tucker

I have to agree with Simon's excellent post too.

Not all BRW is not leagal to buy or own - lots of pre-ban wood is still in country and there are reputable sellers. And more turns up from time to time as well.

The tone is glassy and the resulting guitar can have excellent projection and clarity. Also as Simon indicated a BRW/Adi guitar is pretty hard to beat if well designed and constructed.

Remember too that if you were young enough at the time, 30 years or so ago, most Martins and even cheaper guitars that your picked up in the music store were BRW and it was a tone that we took for granted back then. Personally I would compare EIRW to BRW as like comparing beer to scotch..........

In this months AG there are some quotes by Kevin Ryan where he says that he is building with BRW more than anything else these days. He also says that Coco, Madrose, and African Blackwood compare very favorably and may be superior in his opinion. I would add HRW to that list too and consider it a great value as well.

My BRW/Adi guitar is my personal favorite and other then the Valium that I had to take when I bent it it was fun to build with too......

I do want to mention because I greatly respect folks like Paul Woolson that there is a very good argument to not contribute to the BRW market by participating in purchasing BRW because it encourages poaching the rain forest. So everyone needs to make a personal judgment as to what your own values will be in respect to BRW.

And I will add that I have two identical OMs, one BRW/Adi and one Koa/Carpathian that some cannot tell the difference in the tone of these two guitars.

"My BRW/Adi guitar is my personal favorite and other then the Valium that I had to take when I bent it it was fun to build with too......"



Hesh I know EXACTLY how you felt!!!

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Brad Tucker

GAL has an ad each month from a Brazilian exporter who claims to be licensed to harvest and export stump BRW and that he provides CITES certification with the sets. You will first have to be a skilled builder before you could hope to benefit from the BRW tone, if there is indeed any benefit. Expensive wood will be wasted if you are not first able to build a top notch guitar. Many people believe that IRW is fine. It is also relatively inexpensive, easy to work with, and less prone to later cracking. Fine guitars are also made with mahogany, which is harder to work with that IRW. If you are willing to pay for BRW, you could spend about the same amount or a little less and get African Blackwood, which many builders believe is superior to BRW.

Hesh - Is this kind of like using Super Soft II???

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Steve Walden
Aspiring Builder,
Bartlesville, OK

Personally I think that the folks in charge of marketing for Super Soft should be fired....... Clearly the demographic group of targeted customers for this product are middle aged to older males and naming a product for this prospective market "Super Soft" was nuts.............. Instead perhaps "Blue Pill Power" would have sold better..........

Kevin's in a special place where a lot of collectors are after his guitars for investment value, and those customers all want BRW for that reason. That's definitely gotta skew the ratios! I think the gist of what you're saying is true, and he'd be using a lot less BRW if he was choosing what he thought would work best rather than being driven by customer demand.

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

Yep Bob I completely agree.

He also mentioned that recently African Blackwood is harder to get then BRW.........

Most notable to me was that he really likes coco and it was his second choice to BRW.

But you are right I believe that when polling the world's top builders we are going to see clients that want to shoot the lock off so-to-speak and use BRW.

Brazilian sounds like Brazilian. And yes, within my guitars, I can certainly hear the difference blindfolded. There may be other dense, low-damping woods that sound similar but certainly BRW is distinguishable from IRW or mahogany or koa or maple. It's not just marketing that has made it so valued.

And figured stumpwood BRW sounds like BRW, at least as much as figured mahogany sounds like straight grained mahogany....which is a lot.

And there is some stumpwood that is straight grained and quarter sawn.

And I personally would not use stumpwood without setting it in a heat press first. After that, most all of the stuff I've seen is quite stable.

And all BRW is brittle and prone to splitting and it's certainly conceivable that the irregular grain of figured stumpwood makes it less prone to splitting than nice quartered straight grain.

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http://www.chassonguitars.com

I've got a couple of sets of BRW from a board that was bought at a gun show back in 1966 or 1967. Very nice ring to it. I might be willing to give up a set for the right price. PM me if you're interested.

Vince

That's a totally refreshing post. I agree 100%. I feel like I can hear the difference too, and I wholeheartedly agree with the last statement about splitting.

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"I want to know what kind of pickups Vince Gill uses in his Tele, because if I had those, as good of a player as I am, I'm sure I could make it sound like that.
Only badly."

I think the reason most of us feel the highly figured Brazilian is less stable is because of where it comes from - the very base of the tree. It just makes sense to me to think that the entire weight of the tree could produce tiny fractures in the wood grain that might open up later on. I wouldn't feel that figured wood in general is any less stable than normal wood.

I could very well be wrong tho'. However, I would recommend to anyone to hold on to your Brazilian sets a couple years before building - I do the same thing with Ziricote and other crack-prone woods and it makes me feel a little better about the long-term stability.

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Simon

That would be Luciano Faria. Great guy and the only one authorized by IBAMA to legally export this wood.

Nice to see a BRW discussion stay objective and on the rails!

I have never built with BRW so I can't compare from personal experience. I think JJ and Hesh nailed it as to whether you can hear a difference in sound between a BRW guitar and another tonewood even when comparing the same body style and crafted by the same builder. I have played and compared BRW guitars built by three different builders and in a blind listening test I could not tell which was the BRW guitar.

I think the best piece of advice I have read on this forum was that posted by our esteemed Grumpy "choose your top to please your ears and the backs and sides to please your eyes".

Funny in that speaking to some very good builders and asking their opinion on BRW, a few in answering the question have shrugged their shoulders and with a grin said..."well it makes a little bit of a difference".

So I suggest that all you fellows hoarding BRW sell it to me for 50 cents on the dollar

BRW and IRW have somewhat different properties on the average, although there is some overlap if you try enough samples. I have not tested very much BRW, and most of what I've looked at has been 'old' stock, so my results may not have much bearing on what you'd see with 'newer' wood.

The properties that seem to be most important from a mecahnical and acoustic standpoint are the density, stiffness along and across the grain, and the 'damping factor'; how fast the wood 'soaks up' energy as it vibrates and dissipates it as heat. There is room for some difference of opinion as to how important each of these things is, and why, depending on your ideas about how the guitar works. Still, unless you're going to start talking about leprechauns, I think most of us would agree that these are a good place to start.

On the average the IRW I've tested has had a density of 815 kilograms/cubic meter (you can convert that easily to specific gravity, since water has a density of 1000 kg/m^3, and then convert to #.cubic foot if you remember that a cubic foot of water weighs 62.5#). The range of density for IRW was from 749-906 kg.m^3. The few BRW samples I've tested averaged about 850 kg.m^3, denser than the average IRW, but the heaviest IRW was a bit higher than that.

Stiffness along the grain varies less than cross grain stiffness, as we all know. Young's modulus (E) is a way to compare the potential stiffness of materials: two pieces the same size with the same E values will have the same stiffness. My IRW samples had an average E of about 13,000 megaPascals along the grain, where the BRW samples averaged around 15,600 mPa. Offhand I don't know the conversion factor into English units.

The 'clear glassy ring' of BRW is the sign of low damping. The pitch of the tone is more tightly defined, and the sound lasts longer. We usually express damping in terms of Q ('Quality factor') values, with a high Q equalling low damping. The average Q for the IRW samples was about 84, while the BRW saples had an average Q value over 150; a clear advantage for the BRW. One IRW sample had a somewhat higher Q than the average for BRW, but some of the BRW samples beat it.

Again, you'll have to put this all in the context of how _you_ think the guitar works. My observations lead me to think that low damping does have some more or less direct benefit in adding to the high frequency output of the instrument. This can enhance 'clarity', 'brightness', 'projection' and perhaps even 'warmth' or 'fullness' in the tone, IMO. Since it's harder to get some of these in nylon string guitars than in steel strings, I tend to feel that BRW gives more of an advantage on the Classical instruments. YMMV.

Of course, it is distressingly easy to make high-Q wood into a low-Q structure. We've all seen bad 'muddy' guitars made out of good wood. As has been said, it's probably a good idea to put off using your stash of BRW until you're sure you can get the best out of it. Most of us, alas, are more limited by our skill than our materials.

It is indeed possible for the internal stresses in a tree to pile up at the root to the extent that the structure is damaged on a microscopic level, particularly toward the center of the tree. One sign of this is 'brash fracture'; the wood breaks cleanly across the grain as soon as you try to bend it. Sadly, there's no way to know whether the wood you've got will do this except to try to bend it. I will say that I've found the 'old' BRW to be pretty easy to bend on the whole, and I have to wonder if some of the reputation BRW has got as a difficult wood to work might come from the use of 'stump' wood.

To sum up: the average properties of BRW as compared to IRW do suggest that it might be a 'better' guitar wood. However, there is a lot of overlap, and it's likely that a good piece of IRW will be 'better' than a bad piece of BRW. Since it's usually easier to get good IRW than good BRW, in terms of 'bang for the buck' I'd say go with IRW unless you have the wood, the chops, and the need, to use Brazilian.