Reconciliation: Spruce top

I'm not a fan of spruce soundboards. Despite being the preferred wood for beautiful resonance by many luthiers, spruce sounds too bright & prickly to me. You have the right to disagree & state the fact that spruce top acoustic guitars had been the most successful formula for an appealing chime. 

However, there are others like yours truly here who simply can't come to terms with excessive top end. We prefer a warmer sounding acoustic, something that manifests good midrange, sufficient treble for presence & a healthy dollop of lower frequencies because we do basslines on our acoustics sometimes & we need a good punch from the low end. Impossible- this is the simple truth. We simply can't get a 'balance' in this aspect because the acoustic guitar per se is an instrument that inclines towards a certain frequency; it's all about that empty space, that hollowness in there. If you can't live with this, then the acoustic guitar isn't for you.

I've come to understand acoustic soundboards through 3 wood types that arguably give off tones representative of the pedigree they are in- spruce, cedar & mahogany. Spruce is the brightest of the lot, cedar has a throaty response but not as bright & mahogany is the industry's gloom merchant. We have others out there but they sound like the accentuation of one of the three mentioned here so this is a broad category of acoustic tones out there. 

The guitar depicted in this entry sports a spruce top but it isn't as prickly at the upper frequencies. The offset factor here is the fact that it sports a smaller body, a parlour-type dimension to be precise. This very much truncates the excessive treble response from the instrument. The other contributing factor is its neck. We tend to forget the fact that much of the guitar's tones come from the neck resonance as well. Much of this oversight is due to our excessive time with solid body instruments; we can't really hear the wood dynamics due to amplification & effects processing. So after much careful listening & comparison, I have no qualms accepting this guitar to be, first & foremost, a good-sounding guitar. It also sounds a little different from its other spruce top siblings due to its dimensions.

To be continued :-)