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http://www.acousticguitarforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=124474

I found this thread interesting from the standpoint that the author seems to contradict some of the commonly held beliefs that have been discussed here...the idea that Red, White and Black Spruces have been used in guitar building interchangeably and that they are indistinguishable from each other. From the AGF records, the author, B. Woods is a retired National Park Service Ranger from North Carolina.

It's always enlightening to hear the facts and nudge the body of knowledge and truth further down the road. I'll be interested in seeing how this issue develops.

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

I don't know...

He seems to have the forestry part of it down, but the original article which made the claim that they most likely used White, Black and Red without regard to which was based on an inverview with Chris Martin III ... I find it pretty tough to refute Martin about what Martin did.

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

JJ,

An interesting read. Looks llike he knows his stuff (but as it's April the name B.Woods still has me wondering a little) I would be interested to hear him list the botanical "keys" that differentiate red, black and white spruce - i.e how a botanist/taxonomist would do an identification - as he says they are so different. But then in the Adirondacks he seems to imply the red is dominant and the white and blacks are scrawny specimens in comparison. Also when the spruces have been cut and billeted are they still as easy to distinguish?

One of the links from the wikpedia he links to says of white spruce (red is rubens and black mariana):

"Observations
It is difficult to pick out a single, or even a few, locations to view such a widely distributed species. However, I will particularly recommend Baxter State Park in Maine because there it grows with Picea mariana and Picea rubens, allowing ready comparison of the species; and it grows at timberline with Picea mariana; and it forms "spruce waves," an extraordinary vegetation formation described (for Abies balsamea, thus "fir waves") by Sprugel (1976) . . ."

Would CF Martin have been buying wood from Maine? If so would he have been going into the forests and telling the suppliers which trees to cut having identified them as red spruce? Would the lumberjacks have passed over suitable guitar wood trees of black and white spruce and just felled the red ones in an area like this to sell to C.F Martin? I don't know.


An interesting "factual" statement B.Wood makes:

"Additionally, neither white nor black spruce is reckoned to be a useful wood for guitars, so would be routinely avoided by instrument makers. Given that they are easy to identify, they almost certainly were never intentionally used."

Depends on how you interpret "routinely avoided" I suppose. If they bought in billets this would be hard to do but easier if the instrument makers cut their own trees. Also I thought that Grant Golz and Ron Steiger use white spruce a lot and rate it as a tonewood. Again - maybe he means the Adirndock ones are too small/scrawny.

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Dave White
De Faoite Stringed Instruments
". . . the one thing a machine just can't do is give you character and personalities and sometimes that comes with flaws, but it always comes with humanity" Monty Don talking about hand weaving, "Mastercrafts", Weaving, BBC March 2010

Sorry - tried to edit and created a double post.

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Dave White
De Faoite Stringed Instruments
". . . the one thing a machine just can't do is give you character and personalities and sometimes that comes with flaws, but it always comes with humanity" Monty Don talking about hand weaving, "Mastercrafts", Weaving, BBC March 2010

Also, the nature and size of America's forests has changed dramatically over the last 100 years or so. Just a couple of quotes (my notes in square brackets) from Romeyn Beck Hough's "The American Woods":

"The forests that less than 100 years earlier [late 19th century as now] had been regarded as inexhaustible had been reduced so drastically through exploitation, above all by giant logging companies such as Weyerhauser, that calls were made to save the forests by planting trees."

"Mayr [a forestry botanist] travelled through North America at a relatively late stage, a fact that moved him to make the following comment in 1906: "In America the second generation of trees is growing up on an area reduced by three-quarters; the forests are less dense, the number of species is much reduced and the trees themselves are in many cases of poorer quality. Unspoiled ancient forests are rapidly disappearing"".

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Dave White
De Faoite Stringed Instruments
". . . the one thing a machine just can't do is give you character and personalities and sometimes that comes with flaws, but it always comes with humanity" Monty Don talking about hand weaving, "Mastercrafts", Weaving, BBC March 2010

No doubt, Brock...a great source indeed! I honestly believe that cellular analysis or biochemical analysis would settle this debate once and for all.

I believe Mario said the same thing as Martin III and if i remember correctly, once the bark is removed, it's impossible to tell one species from another. He'll certainly set us straight if I misquoted him.

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

My understanding is that it's very difficult, even by microscopic analysis, to tell samples of the various spruces apart. I'm not sure if these are chemical tests. DNA might not help, either: most of the wood in even a standing a tree is long dead anyway.

I can tell you that mechanical and acoustic testing of wood samples doesn't get you very far, either. It's possible to generalize about a species based on a large number of samples, but there is so much overlap that you can't say anything for certain about the species of any given piece on that basis. For example, Englemann spruce is generally less dense and less stiff along the grain than Red spruce, but I have samples of Englemann that are as dense and stiff as any other piece of spruce I have. To look at them, you might well think they were particularly white pieces of Red spruce, or, for that matter, Sitka.

In short, I think there's a heck of a lot of 'romance' and 'legend' involved in this stuff. I suspect that will continue to be the case as long as some folks can make lots of money from big upcharges for a wood that is reasonably available and not really much more expensive than any other.

Oh, I dunno about that. He wasn't alive pre-war. Lots of folks have had the opportunity to study this with access to as much information as Chris has. Considering that Eric Schoenberg had to teach them how to build a pre-war style OM [OK, a bit of hyperbole], I don't see any reason to think Chris has the final word about this.

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Howard Klepper
http://www.klepperguitars.com

When all else fails, clean the shop.

Howard...the Chris that Brock was referring to was Chris III, not the current Chris IV. Chris III was born in the 1890's and was a pre-war contemporary of both WWI as well as WWII.

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

"In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, on the trail of the lonesome . . ." - no that's not right

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Dave White
De Faoite Stringed Instruments
". . . the one thing a machine just can't do is give you character and personalities and sometimes that comes with flaws, but it always comes with humanity" Monty Don talking about hand weaving, "Mastercrafts", Weaving, BBC March 2010

I haven't read that whole thread, and won't bother, but here's what I know...

I've built both guitars and mandolins with white and black spruce, as well as red spruce, of course. Tonally, and visually, forget it. No telling them apart. I used to work in a pulp lab, and all the books I studied said they were indistinguishable, even at the cellular level. Yes, in tree form, they're easy to tell apart, but once the needles and cones are gone, even with the bark in place, it can be tricky at best. And no, loggers wouldn't have bothered skipping one for the other; to them, a tree is a tree, and they get paid by tonnage, not species. For milling into lumber or grinding int pulp, spruce is spruce. Since we know that Martin was buying logs in log yards, it's safe to assume that if a log had the right grain count, right size, and had minimal twist, it was a go.

Now, I haven't traveled the forest in question, but everything I've read is that the 3 species overlap greatly. Hell, in my own little 5/8 acre yard here, I have white and black spruces, as well as one that seems to be a hybrid of each). And knowing loggers as well as I do, and knowing log yards as I do(spent 17 years in saw mills and paper mills), logs come from near and from far away, yet they all get lumped together in the yards. the handlers couldn't care less about species, and most don't even know. All they know is unload truck, pile here. Unload other truck, pile here. Unload, pile... Collect pay check.

Plus, I am sure they probably have some procurement records from the time. IIRC I remember reading somewhere they put purchase orders in for "spruce".

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

Hey Brock,

Thanks for the kind words on the other forum!!! Interesting how some of this information about wood gets immortalized!

Shane

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Canada

Very interesting and informative. How do these three types of spruce differ from Sitka? My limited experience with something as simple as brace stock is that there is distinct diffence in sound. One only has to drop a piece of each on the cast iron of a table saw to hear how differently they ring.

I've been testing the mechanical and acoustic properties of my top woods for a while now. I actually don't have a lot of samples of either one: I have not bought a lot of Sitka since I started testing, and a lot of the 'Red' spruce I have is in odd shaped pieces that are hard to test with the methods I use. Still, FWIW....

In terms of density and stiffness along the grain, Red and Sitka are pretty comperable. It's hard to say much about stiffness across the grain, since that is so sensitive to grain angle and varies so much. My impression is that Red is somewhat stiffer across the grain, all else equal. The main difference seems to be in the damping: the amount of energy the woods dissipate as they vibrate. The Sitka samples I've tested have somewhat lower damping along the grain than Red, but the average difference is not large, and is much smaller than the normal spread. However, the Red spruce has lower damping across the grain, and the difference looks significant. Since low damping is associated with a long 'ring' time, this seems to fit well with the general impression people have of the two.

Slightly OT, but the tissue does not have to be living to pull a DNA fingerprint as long as it's been reasonably well preserved. A trip through the kiln is a walk in the park for DNA, barely touches it.

Carry on...

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The member formerly known as erikbojerik....

From a practical standpoint, how big of a sample is required to do a DNA analysis?...and cost?

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

Hey JJ,

I don't really know the answers to your questions but I don't think you need a large piece of material to run its DNA. The issues is more on building the data base with which to compare the sample too. So if you want to determine the "mix" of sub-species in your spruce top you need to ensure that the lab you sent the sample too has access to the "fingerprints" that determine if the various sub-species are present. Does this make sense? Brian Burns may have done and had done some of this work.

Shane

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Canada