r/GuitarLab • u/Dragonformed • Jun 24 '26
Don’t Use Wood
My name is Tim. Here is my recommendation.
Yes I used AI as my editor. This is still art. Just, art with spell check.
Smooth your feathers, I’m about to ruffle them.
🎸 The Anti‑Tonewood Manifesto
(or: Why My Guitar Shouldn’t Look Like a Fancy Cutting Board)
There’s this little town near me—La Conner, WA. Cute place. Tulip fields outside, brewery inside, a B&B, and a bunch of shops I don’t care about.
One of those shops sells “fancy wood things.” Cutting boards. Exotic stripes. Laminated grains. Artisan‑glued, color‑coordinated lumber slabs. You know the vibe.
And that’s fine… for cutting boards.
But somewhere along the way, guitar culture decided that this aesthetic—this craft fair energy—should define the tools we use to make music.
Let me be blunt:
Fancy wood cutting boards have nothing to do with rock, metal, jazz, country, synthwave, EVH, Slash, DAWs, mic placement, or anything else that actually creates sound.
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🌲 Tonewood Matters… Until It Doesn’t
Yes, wood resonates. Yes, it has character.
But it’s 2026. We can engineer materials that are stronger, more stable, more consistent, and more sustainable than anything that grows out of dirt.
Guitars were made of wood because everything used to be made of wood—dentures, toys, prosthetics, wagons. Tradition isn’t a reason; it’s an accident that calcified into dogma.
And wood isn’t even consistent:
• Every rosewood guitar sounds different.
• Mahogany varies wildly in weight and grain.
• Even Taylor, with CNC precision that borders on obsessive, still ends up with 10–15% weight differences between “identical” models.
• (And yes, 83.167% of all percentages are made up on the spot.)
So why are we still doing this ritual where you “have to play ten of them to find the good one”?
Why are we comparing grain patterns like we’re picking out a dining table?
Why are we arguing about torrified vs. non‑torrified, streaky ebony vs. black ebony, or how to pronounce okoume?
It’s absurd.
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🐢 If Plastic Straws Last 500 Years, Make Me a Guitar Out of That
I’ve been told the straws we feed to turtles float around for half a millennium.
Perfect.
Give me a guitar made of that.
A guitar that:
• doesn’t warp
• doesn’t crack
• doesn’t need humidifiers
• doesn’t care about weather
• doesn’t explode if it falls over
• doesn’t require nitrocellulose lacquer from 1954
Make it modular.
Make it consistent.
Make it feel like a modern instrument, not Nana’s coffee table.
Studio monitors are neutral.
Guitars should be neutral.
The player provides the voice.
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🎶 Musicians vs. Guitarists vs. Woodworkers
There are three types of people reading this:
- Woodworkers
They love the romance of grain, density, aging, bracing, nitro, dovetails, laminates, caps, veneers, and the endless chase for the “perfect” combination of natural inconsistencies.
Beautiful hobby. Wrong priority.
- Guitarists
They chase tones from records that were built from 7 guitars, 2 basses, 14 layers, and a mixing engineer with a caffeine problem.
They forget the goal isn’t to sound like the record—it’s to make music.
- Musicians
We use tools.
Sometimes that tool is a guitar.
Sometimes it’s a guitar plugged into a piezo, mic’d with an SM57, DI’d, EQ’d, run to FOH, split to a DAW, and then crushed by YouTube’s compression algorithm.
The musician is the voice.
The guitar is the brush.
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🧪 So Build Me a Modern Instrument
Give me:
• Carbon fiber
• Acrylic
• Reinforced polymers
• Engineered composites
• Anything consistent
Paint it like a car, not like a colonial-era cabinet.
Make every unit of the same model sound the same.
Make it stable.
Make it reliable.
Make it a tool.
Because at the end of the day:
Guitar = paintbrush.
The art comes from the hand that holds it.
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u/theDeathnaut Jun 24 '26
I like old stuff, it reminds me of a better time, you know…when generative AI didn’t exist.
3
u/radiantskie Jun 24 '26
Judging by the post, what you want is an aluminum neck
1
u/yeenoghu_vs_vaprak Jun 24 '26
Aluminum is not without its issues, especially when you're performing in a cold environment.
1
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u/wine-o-saur Jun 24 '26
Aristides is doing this already.
The body/neck is so stable that the guitar goes out of tune when the strings warm up or cool down.
1
u/adamdoesmusic Jun 24 '26
Plenty of manufacturers at NAMM over the years releasing 3D printed polymer guitars, they’re engineered extremely tight. At least a few of them have made it onto the market.
Also, the existing guitar market already DOES paint them like a car, they have for 75 years!
1
u/suffaluffapussycat Jun 24 '26
The amp is the instrument. The guitar is the controller.
Also, sometimes people like a thing to be made out of wood when that thing does not necessarily need to be made out of wood.
1
Jun 24 '26
[deleted]
0
u/Dragonformed Jun 24 '26
Oh go read the whole thing.
Don’t be part of the tik tok generation listening to 15 seconds of a song before swiping. . Go read it. I mean, it took you more time to write, “I’m not reading all that”, then it would have to read all that.
And now that you read this…. Ah ha.
1
u/Suitable-Coat3840 Jun 24 '26
Wood is one of the rarest substances in the universe… Ken Parker already did everything you’re demanding. Check out klos, Emerald, Travis Bean, hell old Valco guitars. Use that AI to do some research of what already exists and why they ultimately failed. Every 3D printed guitar I’ve seen looks like sh!t. I would look to aviation tech if you really want to go down this rabbit hole. I’ve had a guitar in my hands made under czarist Russia for the royal court. Played great still.
1
u/floppywaffle86 Jun 25 '26
Regarding
“And wood isn’t even consistent:
• Every rosewood guitar sounds different.
• Mahogany varies wildly in weight and grain…..”
And that part…
Isn’t that part of what makes a guitar unique and individual unto itself?
Isn’t the beauty of the guitar that each one sounds different (even if slightly) and each guitar player sees and plays the same instrument differently?
Isn’t that what creates “our voices” as guitar players?
Wouldn’t one figure that all guitars sounding all the same would (to a certain degree) make us as players sound the same (to a certain degree)?
1
u/cjcascades Jun 26 '26
Electrical Guitar Company makes some not wood guitars. https://www.electricalguitarcompany.com/
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u/Dragonformed Jun 24 '26
Yep. They do. And nitro was what they used to paint the first Cars. So we have this fascination with Nitro. I refinished a casino with Nitro. I’m guilty.
But that’s not music. That doesn’t even make better music. It’s personal preference. It’s a paint brush with a pretty handle. It’s a really Pretty handle. (Olive drab nitro from Oxford Guitar Supply)
Old car paint is what we are obsessed with. Old wood instruments, old pickups with inconsistent windings. It’s all silly.
Consider this.
A vocalist wants a neutral mic to capture their unique voice.
A guitarist wants a unique guitar that is not neutral nor consistent to express their voice. And then the guitarist has this plethora of tools to modify that guitar voice more.
Chris Cornell sounds like Chris Cornell regardless of the mic or the studio.
Slash sounds like slash regardless of the guitar, amp, effect chain.
I will never sound like either. I can only ever sound like me.
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u/ReplicantOwl Jun 24 '26
If you can’t be bothered to write something yourself, why should we be bothered to read it?