If it is your desire to have a gorgeous wood top adorn your dream guitar here are a few characteristics to keep in mind:
• Maple can have the most dramatic figuring in either Flame or Quilt and because it is light in color it enhances and blends with almost every transparent color available. Maple is by far the most popular and satisfying choice for these reasons.
• Koa and Walnut are dark in color and can only demonstrate their character with a natural finish. So these two woods are only available as a Natural finish or as a Natural finish with a darker burst edge. No transparent colors are available for these darker woods.
• Rosewood is a beautiful wood that is only seen as a top on traditional slab body T-style guitars (a body without body contours)—usually the T-Icon or T-Classic. The wood is very dark in color and can only be finished as Natural.
Sonically, the incorporation of a beautiful wood top to a Tone Wood Body Back adds clarity and pronunciation to the intrinsic tonal character of the tone wood body. They are all all very similar in the way they do this:
• Maple adds slightly more highs than Koa or Walnut but those highs are basically soft and sweet and quite pleasing. Again the most chosen top wood option.
• Koa and Walnut add a very similar upper midrange pronunciation to one another with Walnut perhaps presenting a minuscule amount less upper mid range. But again, they are so similar that we usually suggest you choose based on look and availability.
*All our tops are 5A quality, but if you prefer a very specific look for your Maple top, we also offer:
• Special Wood Selection: which gives you the option to select from a list of grain types.
• Personal Selection: which gives you the option to personally select your top based on photos.
In-depth info:
Alder Top on Hollow Alder Back
This combination certainly produces a big sound. Again, it has very similar tonal characteristics to the solid alder body which is a strong, full low midrange with enough upper mids to be clear and articulate but with added harmonic content. For our Hollow T Classic style guitars, it produces a full, strong, thick yet articulate sound giving up just the smallest amount of mid focus, a guitar that has us in tone heaven every time we hear one. With the double cutaway body style the band width is more spread out than the solid version and it does not possess quite as much mid focus or articulation. There is also a bit of highs added, not usually characteristic with this wood. Alder is medium tan in color with little to no pronounced grain pattern. It seems to look best with opaque colors or a select few transparent colors, such as Transparent Forest Green, 6120 Orange, 3 Color Burst, Tobacco Burst, Transparent Red, Transparent Amber, Transparent Cherry and Transparent Blue.
Koa Top on Basswood
Koa is a beautiful Hawaiian wood that we offer when it is available. It is deep reddish brown or golden orangish brown in color with a flame grain pattern. We offer two finish choices that show off the wood's natural color, Tobacco Shaded Edge and Cherry Shaded Edge. Koa's influence on the sound of the backing wood is similar to that of maple but its contribution to the overall sound is not as soft and delicate. It has a harder, more focused upper-mid crispness. This wood is especially amazing sounding on Hollow Drop Top guitars.
Koa Top on Mahogany
The Koa gives a beautiful, rich, clarity to the guitar's sound. Because of this clarity we recommend its use with hollow chambered guitars. It makes these guitars sound so clear and full that it almost has a solid body character to the sound but with the rich fullness of hollow chambers.
Maple Top on Alder
This combination produces a bit less middle in its frequency response than does Maple Top with Basswood Back. It can sound similar to Ash but without the complexity in overtones.
Maple Top on Basswood
This is by far the most popular body wood combination for all of our Drop Top models. Basswood/Maple produces a very rich, full sound with great low, middle and high end. Its timbre is a bit more of a fundamental tone with fewer overtones than the more traditional body woods. It is extremely popular for many styles of music because of the wide tonal spectrum that it produces. This combination is rather light in weight and looks beautiful with almost all transparent colors.
Maple Top on Hollow Basswood
The sonic character of this combination is similar to that of its solid body counterpart in that it creates a very full rich sound with great low, middle and high end. The hollow body does produce richer and more abundant overtones which give this combination a whole new character - perhaps moving closer to the traditional wood tones without losing its own personality. It is very light weight and looks great with almost all transparent colors.
Maple Top on Mahogany
This is the only body wood combination offered on all of our Cobra guitar models. The Cobra is a 24 3/4" scale length guitar. With this format, the tone is a thick, powerful mid range sound with plenty of clarity, but with no stabbing high or low lows. All of our Drop Top models offer, as an option. the Mahogany/Maple body wood combination in a 25 1/2" scale length. The sound of that format is a hard, clear, concentrated mid range that is a bit more spread out over the tonal spectrum than the Cobra. This is a very popular instrument with harder edged players and those seeking a bit more of a modern tone. Due to Mahogany's natural reddish. brown color, this mid to mid-heavy weight wood combination looks fantastic with darker and earth tone transparent colors.
Swamp Ash Top on Hollow Alder Back
Would you be surprised if we said that this combination sort of produces the sonic characteristics of both Ash and Alder? What it really has is the tighter bottom and fuller low mids of alder without losing some of those beautiful sparkling highs inherent in ash. Of course the weight is very light but the color selection is a bit more limited, than the ash/ash combination, only because the backing wood can look darker than the top wood with lighter transparent shades.
Swamp Ash Top on Hollow Ash Back
This Swamp Ash combination has very similar sound characteristics to that of the solid Swamp Ash body. The differences include greater harmonic content with softer but still pronounced sparkling highs, rich low lows and a slightly softer pick (midrange) attack. This configuration is very light weight, light blonde in color and highlighted by a darker brown elongated grain pattern. Most transparent colors look great on this wood.
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