en:vok:klangholz:ahorn

LEXIS


Acer spp

A tonewood used for Ukuleles. Like rosewood, it is also used for deep sounding woodwind instruments. It is characterized by brilliance and precision in trebles and softness in basses and is considered to be tight. Its sound is clear and brilliant. Maple is often offered in flamed, spalted or quilted varities.

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Maple
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Flamed maple
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Quilted maple
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Bird's-eye maple

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Appraisal

For centuries, sycamore maple (acer pseudoplatanus) was the preferred wood for sides and backs of string and plucked instruments in Europe. Particularly famous is the sycamore maple from the heights of Bosnia, where the climatic conditions are favorable and the soil is meager, resulting in slow growth of the trees. Almost all the great violin makers of the Renaissance built with maple from this region. Good maple is what I personally consider to be the most suitable sounding wood; it still seems to give the lyrical treble of my guitar a warm glow and more fullness.

Sebastian Stenzel: Tonhölzer

The makers of other instruments are probably glad that not many flattop guitars are made of maple, which leaves the supply of good stuff for them. Maple sort of proves my point about tonewood. Quilted maple is soft and floppy. Bird's-eye maple is very hard and stiff. Flame maple can cover the whole gamut. Yet guitarists believe that all maple sounds the same, which goes against the rules they have set up for rosewood and mahogany. Go figure. Figured maple can put up a fight when bent and might ripple badly across the grain. It's also very abrasion-resistant, which makes it difficult to sand out scratches. Blond guitars can be hard to sell if they aren't shaped like a Gibson jumbo. Pretty maple can often by found at the lumberyard, which makes it a bargain guitar wood if you have the means to resaw it.

John Calkin: The Heretic's Guide to Alternative Lutherie Woods

I have used it unamplified in a small auditorium and while it doesn’t 'feel' like it has the low-end support that rosewood provides, it fills the room nicely across the frequency spectrum. Amplified, it puts out a clean precise tone.

Laurence Juber

Maples … tend to make passive backs in that they don’t ring, sustain, or further the vibrational activity of the face very much. In fact, they help to absorb the vibrational energies of the face and kill them. As an extreme example, consider the sound you’d get in tapping a guitar back made of cardboard. This is not necessarily a bad thing, however. Besides being beautiful, maples help to create a sound which is damped and short-lived and which is perfect for Jazz style playing. The jazz musician will play many notes, and the music is such that it is not desirable for any of the notes to linger in the air. Such music does not need the sustain of Brazilian rosewood. For jazz, one wants quick notes that come out and then disappear — because there are many more notes coming. This quality is also desirable for certain parts of the modern classical guitar repertoire, which has at this point somewhat abandoned the lush, dark and expressive tonalities so much appreciated in the Romantic classical repertoire.

Ervin Somogyi