Method
The back and sides are a filter, not a voice.
The wood in an electric guitar does less than most catalogues claim. The pickups read string movement; they do not read the body. What a body changes is how the string loses energy, and that is a second-order effect next to pickup position and scale length.
On an acoustic instrument the material matters more, because the top is the soundboard. Stiffness and mass set the resonance; the species is a shorthand for those two properties, not a character in itself.
Density, as a proxy
Janka hardness is the usual shorthand. It is a denting measurement, not a tonal one — but it correlates loosely with density, and density is what a builder actually works with.
| Basswood | ~410 lbf · light, soft, even; common in high-output solid bodies |
|---|---|
| Alder | ~590 lbf · medium; the default solid-body choice since the 1950s |
| Mahogany | ~800 lbf · dense, open grain; set-neck bodies, necks |
| Ash | ~1,320 lbf · hard, pronounced grain; bright and quick |
| Maple | ~1,450 lbf · very hard; necks, caps, fretboards |
| Rosewood | ~2,440 lbf · dense, oily; fretboards |
| Ebony | ~3,220 lbf · hardest common fretboard; tight and bright |
What changes the sound, in order
Pickup type and position. Scale length. String gauge. Nut and bridge material. Body mass. Neck joint. Species — useful mainly as a description of mass and stiffness.
A heavy body with light strings and a low-output single coil will sound like a light body with the same electrical chain, far more often than a spec sheet admits.
