Ash vs. Alder Jazzmaster

[armensguitars]

I have a vintage jazzmaster with an alder body, and I recently stumbled into a 1961 ash body Jazzmaster (originally blonde) with a swapped neck. Trying to restore the '61 as at least I could justify having another jazzmaster if its somehow different, right? Wondering if people have compared the two woods, especially vintage ones, and what the tonal or other differences might be. So far, the ash body is the lightest JM body I have held.

[ainm]

I’ve an ash Strat. 90’s, so nowhere near vintage unless you live on Reddit. I’m surprised the Jazzmaster is light as I thought ash was the heaviest of the woods Fender typically use. I’m sure there’s massive variance in all the wood types though. Anyway, the Strat is heavy.

I think it’s the best sounding electric guitar I have acoustically. Whatever I describe will sound different to another set of ears, but for what it’s worth, it sounds very sweet when I I’m gentle with my chords. It has a real ringing quality for me. Maybe a bit thin picking out individual notes on the higher strings; maybe a bit gritty digging in on the wounds, but I like that.

Good over tones. Good scratch on it for rhythm work. I tend to play punk stuff on it with a little flick here and there to higher strings. If I had to describe it (unplugged), You Know You’re Right. I’ve currently got it strung fairly heavy for a 25.5 inch. Can’t remember what. And it has a maple board.

I’ve a set of hot rails that I’ve been meaning to try in it because plugged in it’s a bit useless for me. Kinda like a Strat? ‍♂️

Doubt any of that was useful to you, but there it is.

[armensguitars]

I’ve an ash Strat. 90’s, so nowhere near vintage unless you live on Reddit. I’m surprised the Jazzmaster is light as I thought ash was the heaviest of the woods Fender typically use. I’m sure there’s massive variance in all the wood types though. Anyway, the Strat is heavy.

I think it’s the best sounding electric guitar I have acoustically. Whatever I describe will sound different to another set of ears, but for what it’s worth, it sounds very sweet when I I’m gentle with my chords. It has a real ringing quality for me. Maybe a bit thin picking out individual notes on the higher strings; maybe a bit gritty digging in on the wounds, but I like that.

Good over tones. Good scratch on it for rhythm work. I tend to play punk stuff on it with a little flick here and there to higher strings. If I had to describe it (unplugged), You Know You’re Right. I’ve currently got it strung fairly heavy for a 25.5 inch. Can’t remember what. And it has a maple board.

I’ve a set of hot rails that I’ve been meaning to try in it because plugged in it’s a bit useless for me. Kinda like a Strat? ‍♂️

Doubt any of that was useful to you, but there it is.

I have heard the weight has been attributed to the use of southern swamp ash vs. northern ash, but I am no expert in woods. My general experience with ash guitars lines up with what you have said, maybe a bit grittier or something when going hard. Most of the differences must be pickups despite me associating them with woods. Anyway, great post!

[SashaB]

Can't say much about vintage guitars from ash. To my knowledge in late 70s Fender indeed switched to another ash producing very heavy specimens. But before ~75 and after ~95 they were using swamp ash, which is light.

As for the sound, to me ash is sounding brighter and with more attack, while alder has a rounder sound.

I just posted a video comparison of two Custom Shop Stratocasters I have now to my Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3A-MWoM ... BiNWFlZA==

[armensguitars]

Can't say much about vintage guitars from ash. To my knowledge in late 70s Fender indeed switched to another ash producing very heavy specimens. But before ~75 and after ~95 they were using swamp ash, which is light.

As for the sound, to me ash is sounding brighter and with more attack, while alder has a rounder sound.

I just posted a video comparison of two Custom Shop Stratocasters I have now to my Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3A-MWoM ... BiNWFlZA==

Sounds about like what I have experienced and read about. Thanks!

[Kinx]

I have an alder 72 (left) and an ash 78 (right).


The 78 is a bit more midrange-focused, has a bit more sustain and sounds a tiny bit less aggresive than the 72. I think some of it may be actually attributed to the pickups, since the 78 has hotter output.

[zhivago]

My '61 Jazzmaster originally came to me with a stripped/70s-refin Ash body, that I later on swapped to a '61 Alder body as I wanted a colour other than Blonde on my Jazzmaster.

This was a loooong time ago, but I essentially did what most people don't get to do: experience the exact same guitar, same pickups and neck and pots with the only thing changing being the body.

The weights were very similar, and of course they vary anyway from guitar to guitar. The sound of the Ash body was a bit "airier" for a lack of a better word...maybe it ha d bit more chime to it...the alder was more focused and I liked that, especially at the time.

My view is that a lot of the sound in a Fender is in the neck. It may be a touch controversial, but swapping the bodies really wasn't that much of a night and day difference in that instance.

This, of course is out of a sample of only two bodies, and others may have had different experiences...I just thought I'd chime in with mine.

[timtam]

My view is that a lot of the sound in a Fender is in the neck. It may be a touch controversial, but swapping the bodies really wasn't that much of a night and day difference in that instance.

That's not really controversial any more. The published physics measured from real guitars over the last several decades consistently show multiple examples of sonic effects due to the long, thin, flexible, composite neck. Mostly mediated via its resonant modal frequencies, which determine which frequencies are lost to the neck, flowing from the strings via the nut/frets to vibrate the neck at those frequencies. There is also objective measurement evidence of some sonic effects due to the fretboard wood. And also due to string-fret micro-damping (hard to equate when swapping necks or body across two guitars). The bridge is also a common source of string vibration losses at particular frequencies.

In contrast, there is little evidence of sonic effects due to the big chunk of solid-body wood. Bridge admittance is much lower than neck admittance, so minimal string vibration energy flows from the strings to the body compared to the neck. The measurements of real guitars have shown that previous notions about body "tonewood" - often associated with the simplistic dichotomy "if it's not the pickups it must be the wood" - reflected a failure to appreciate the many places that sonic differences can come from. And which are significant and which are not. See especially the work of Fleischer, Zollner, and Pate for examples of all of those. Fortunately or unfortunately , you don't need to fully understand guitar physics to build great guitars. Hence we still get the same science-challenged marketing drivel from Fender and others - ash sound like 'this', alder sounds like 'that'. The big guitar companies do not employ guitar scientists, and show no evidence of even having read the last two decades of published scientific work measuring the guitars their companies made, by independent scientists (mostly in Europe, and some only available in English in recent years).

[zhivago]

[SashaB]

That's not really controversial any more. The published physics measured from real guitars over the last several decades consistently show multiple examples of sonic effects due to the long, thin, flexible, composite neck. Mostly mediated via its resonant modal frequencies, which determine which frequencies are lost to the neck, flowing from the strings via the nut/frets to vibrate the neck at those frequencies. There is also objective measurement evidence of some sonic effects due to the fretboard wood. And also due to string-fret micro-damping (hard to equate when swapping necks or body across two guitars). The bridge is also a common source of string vibration losses at particular frequencies.

In contrast, there is little evidence of sonic effects due to the big chunk of solid-body wood. Bridge admittance is much lower than neck admittance, so minimal string vibration energy flows from the strings to the body compared to the neck. The measurements of real guitars have shown that previous notions about body "tonewood" - often associated with the simplistic dichotomy "if it's not the pickups it must be the wood" - reflected a failure to appreciate the many places that sonic differences can come from. And which are significant and which are not. See especially the work of Fleischer, Zollner, and Pate for examples of all of those. Fortunately or unfortunately , you don't need to fully understand guitar physics to build great guitars. Hence we still get the same science-challenged marketing drivel from Fender and others - ash sound like 'this', alder sounds like 'that'. The big guitar companies do not employ guitar scientists, and show no evidence of even having read the last two decades of published scientific work measuring the guitars their companies made, by independent scientists (mostly in Europe, and some only available in English in recent years).

Good to see the exact references next time
I am a physicist, although in another area, but what can I say on the topic is the following:
When I play a good solid body guitar, I do feel with my belly how the body resonates. This is actually a bit controversial to the statement that minimal string vibrations flow to the body, and I do not need any device to prove it if I can just feel it.
At the same time I never really felt the neck to resonate as much, I would assume from my naive point of view that the truss rod could play a negative role here.

[sal paradise]

When I play a good solid body guitar, I do feel with my belly how the body resonates.

As a physicist, do you feel this statement is unquantifiable?

[SashaB]

It is quantifiable, indeed.
What I rather meant is that sometimes we need a complex apparatus only to prove a phenomena and not even to measure, while here it is not needed

[armensguitars]

All interesting responses. Seems there is some controversy around it which is expected, so I am curious what I find to be true anecdotally when I get this guitar together.

[timtam]

...

Good to see the exact references next time
I am a physicist, although in another area, but what can I say on the topic is the following:
When I play a good solid body guitar, I do feel with my belly how the body resonates. This is actually a bit controversial to the statement that minimal string vibrations flow to the body, and I do not need any device to prove it if I can just feel it.
At the same time I never really felt the neck to resonate as much, I would assume from my naive point of view that the truss rod could play a negative role here.

Turns out that being a physicist is not quite enough. You'd also need to be a sensory neurophysiologist to make such judgments from what you feel, with the appropriate measurement objectivity (my professional area of scientific research just happens to span particular domains in the physical and human biological sciences that use many of the same techniques as the physicists, engineers, and other scientists doing guitar science work). The frequency response of your skin mechanoreceptors - the sense organs in your skin that you feel with - is not flat. In fact it's about as far from flat as you can get (it's also dependent on the skin surface area exposed to vibration). Skin mechanoreceptors are acutely sensitive only to a relatively narrow band of vibration frequencies. Outside that range, they are almost 'deaf' to vibration. So what you feel will tend to over-estimate vibrations at some frequencies, and ignore others.

Verrillo, R. T., & Bolanowski, S. J. (2008). Tactile responses to vibration. In D. Havelock, S. Kuwano, & M. Vorländer (Eds.), Handbook of Signal Processing in Acoustics (pp. 1185–1213). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30441-0_62

So while you say you don't feel the neck vibrating as much as the body, you'd actually need to objectively measure the frequencies at which the two are vibrating; otherwise you're likely to mislead yourself. Vibration energy only flows from the strings to the guitar's structure at the frequencies for which the interface mechanical impedances (nut/frets/bridge) are low / admittance (conductance) is high - that is, at the structure's resonant modal frequencies. So even with sensitive measurements (like the accelerometry and laser vibrometry that have been used in guitar science research) , the vibration flows will only be high when the string is vibrating at those frequencies. When you feel the neck vibrating, it will typically feel as if it is vibrating a lot when some strings/notes are played, and much less for others. But it is impossible to objectively state, solely on the basis of those feelings, if you are feeling the variation due to differing resonant frequencies (eg less vibration when string vibrations do not match a neck modal frequency), or due to different mechanoreceptor sensitivity to the frequencies that are actually present in the neck. You need to measure the neck's vibrations to make those judgements. Pate's chart below shows those significant vibration flows from the strings to the neck at particular resonant frequencies corresponding to notes on particular frets (and their harmonics). The flows to the body via the bridge (top line) are almost invisible in comparison. Similar findings are consistent across the guitar science literature.

Paté, A., Le Carrou, J.-L., & Fabre, B. (2014). Predicting the decay time of solid body electric guitar tones. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 135(5), 3045–3055. www.researchgate.net/publication/262226 ... itar_tones

Within the sonically influential neck, the truss rod (mass tension stiffness) is indeed likely an influence. The physics of different truss rod designs have been studied to some extent, but likely variations within a given design have not really been investigated. Perhaps because it is difficult to measure the truss rod in situ. The neck is obviously a long, thin, flexible, and composite structure - neck wood, fretboard wood, headstock, frets, tuners, truss rod. There is at least some objective measurement evidence from real guitars that all those elements can contribute to the neck's sonic performance. Studies tracking the evolution of modal frequencies as guitars are constructed have shown a range of variation about the characteristic modal frequencies at each stage of construction. Exactly what elements of the neck are responsible for that variation has not been elucidated. It may be that variations in the neck wood are responsible, but it may also be that the exact truss rod tension/stiffness is important too. Resonant modal frequencies are nominally proportional to stiffness and inversely proportional to mass - so a stiffer truss rod would be expected to shift the resonant frequency upwards.
Paté, A., Le Carrou, J.-L., & Fabre, B. (2015). Modal parameter variability in industrial electric guitar making: Manufacturing process, wood variability, and lutherie decisions. Applied Acoustics, 96, 118–131. https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1016/j.ap ... 015.03.023
Paté, A., Le Carrou, J.-L., Teissier, F., & Fabre, B. (2015). Evolution of the modal behaviour of nominally identical electric guitars during the making process. Acta Acustica United with Acustica, 101(3), 567–580. https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... ng_Process

Objective measurements of a guitar's resonant modal frequencies are now used in acoustic guitar building by those who take the (increasingly common) scientific approach (eg Trevor Gore, Giuliano Nicoletti); which is arguably the only way to consistently get results that accord with a particular sonic design objective. However they focus almost entirely on adjusting the 'thin plate' wood of the acoustic body, which drives those resonant frequencies in an acoustic guitar. In a solid-body electric, as I have indicated, the neck's modal frequencies are dominant. But even so, only one major (non-US) electric guitar manufacturer has routinely measured the neck in that way (notwithstanding a comical youtube video where a Fender CS salesman taps 'knowingly' on necks and bodies). The reason why no manufacturer/builder really measures the physics of the solid body during construction would seem to be simply that the science shows that properties of the solid body don't matter much.

I have not seen any objective evidence (guitar measurements or blinded listening tests) to support the Fender marketing dept's notions of how alder and ash are 'supposed' to sound. As I said earlier in the thread, they would appear to be simplistic conclusions drawn from the pre-scientific age of guitars. Although when you summarize their adjective soup it is actually hard to see where those supposed differences lie. One guitar scientist has referred to this marketing cynically as "you get more of everything !" ... regardless of the wood species.

https://www.fender.com/articles/behind- ... s-the-diff

And some reports suggest that inside Fender the viewpoint is rather different (see link below). As I said earlier, Fender does not objectively measure any guitar physics - you don't need that to make good guitars ... especially if you build to 50-year old recipes that just 'work'. But you do need to measure to explain how they work. So if you don't do that, you shouldn't be making fundamentally scientific assertions like the above which suggest that you do.
http://www.guitarattack.com/opinion/mythbusters.htm

Other reading:
Zollner, M. (2010). The Physics of E-Guitars: Vibration—Voltage—Sound wave—Timbre. 26th Tonmeistertagung – VDT International Convention, Leipzig, Germany. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/s ... 1.348.6822
Zollner, M. (2014). Physics of the Electric Guitar. https://www.gitec-forum-eng.de/the-book/

[s_mcsleazy]

i have an ash and an alder jazzmaster. the ash jazzmaster is heavier by a bit but they also have similar pickups and the same bridge. so i think this is a fair comparison.

i often call the ash jazzmaster more balanced and the alder one is more lively. like the ash one sounds like it's got a light compressor on it at all times where as the alder one has a lot more overtones.