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I've never built a guitar with Adirondack spruce before and I have a question for those that have: Is it at its best with hard flatpicking? It seems like the stiffness and weight of it would require more input from the player to get it moving. Does Adirondack also work well for lighter style picking, strumming, and fingerstyle with flesh only, i.e. no finger or thumb picks?

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Nobody has piped up here so I will take a stab at your question.

In my experience with Adi spruce it tends to be less stiff than sitka at any given thickness, but lighter in weight for the same stiffness. A sitka top at .120" is almost always stiffer (slightly) than an Adi spruce top at .120", but the Adi top weighs less than the sitka.

With that in mind I would say that it would take less energy to get the top going than a Sitka top. Is a sitka top just good for flatpicking? I don't think so. It is all in how you build it.

Hopefully someone with more experience will chime in here, but this is what I think I know.

Homeboy

[QUOTE=TRein] Is it at its best with hard flatpicking?[/QUOTE] I wouldn't say that. I would say that it is very good for flat picking.

[QUOTE=TRein]It seems like the stiffness and weight of it would require more input from the player to get it moving.[/QUOTE] No, just the opposite. Because it is lighter, it takes less energy to get it moving. I find it to be much more responsive than sitka.

[QUOTE=TRein]   Does Adirondack also work well for lighter style picking, strumming, and fingerstyle with flesh only, i.e. no finger or thumb picks?[/QUOTE] Yes it does. It doesn't require as much energy to get it moving as sitka. Because of that, it is quite responsive at low volume/input levels. It is a lot like cedar in the respect, maybe a bit better than cedar. It might be my favorite for fingerstyle, except it lacks the lush overtones of cedar. It doesnt get over-driven as easily, a potential problem for cedar, in fact it is very hard to overdrive Adirondack.

My opinions here are generalities that I find to be true for well built guitars.

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"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered." G. K. Chesterton.

From what I understand, it would depend entirely on the particular piece of Adi, but I read that in the right hands, Adi is supposed to be the most versatile spruce.

I cannot recall exactly who, but one of the very many whose opinion I value highly on this forum posted a while back that some Adi is not so stiff and can be as dead as a piece of cardboard, but this is not normally the case.

I get the feeling that each top should be judged on it's own merit rather than it's species and then, after careful evaluation, one builds a style of guitar, and then braces it to conform best with the properties of THAT top.

Cheers

Kim

I've never built with Adi, mainly because I have access over here to very good European spruce. However, I do have four vinatge Martins that all have Adi tops and they fingerpick very well indeed, I think that Adi takes some time to open up, but makes a great guitar for the fingerpicker.

As a generalisation I would certainly pick it over sitka, but of the spruces, if I couldn't have European, I'd go for some of Shane's Lutz, it's the nearest to Euro I've seen in a US spruce.

Colin

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I don't believe in anything, I simply make use of a set of reasonable working hypotheses.

I too have some of Shane's Lutz. Absolutely gorgeous wood. Yep, it's a shame most of the old growth Adirondack became airplanes.

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Ah, poor Canada...it hasn't been annexed by the U.S. yet...

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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."

Thanks Don!

Thanks for all the comments. I have a nice Adirondack top that is planned for a mahogany body. I just needed a little push to get it started.

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Stay with the happy people.
--Reynolds Large