will any solidwood acoustic sweeten with age or just spruce?

[capnkid]

Will a guitar with say a cedar top, or dao top sweeten with age.

and if the top is spruce how do the back and sides differ in tone/projection between rosewood back and sides and sickamore back and sides?

[ewegogetemtiger]

cedar sounds mature earlier (very quickly compared to woods like spruce) -- that's why many luthiers like to show off their new wares at shows featuring cedar tops.

spruce takes, in many cases, years to mature ... so your spruce-top guitar will sound different the older it gets.

[Light]

Well, there are guys who will tell you that Cedar starts off sounding old, and I have to say that it does not age as dramatically as spruce.

But yes, any solid wood guitar will CHANGE with age. There are guys who will tell you that cedar gets played out after about 10 years. I don't buy that. My dad made my mom a guitar as a birth present when she was pregnant with me, which makes that guitar 31 years old, and it still sounds great. But that guitar has not been played much. Maybe if they get a lot of playing, they loose something - but I doubt it.

I'll tell you why I prefer spruce, though. Spruce has a more ballenced sound, with a much stronger fundimental than cedar, and it has a MUCH better dynamic range, particularly sitka. It really is odd how much you hear non-builder talk about this and that alternative top woods, but the vast majority of builders (who are in a much better possition to actually know the difference between the woods) have a strong preference for sitka spruce. The quality is still great (and should be great for a long time to come), and the sound is much better, at least to my ears.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi

[ewegogetemtiger]

Like cedar, I've found mahogany to sound great right out of the factory and (at least to me) gains more mid-range complexity with age...but I could be totally wrong on that. Those old mahognay Martins from the Depression era sound amazing!

[tdukex]

I like cedar topped guits for fingerstyle. I agree with Light that spruce has a wider dynamic range, and the sound will also stay more focused when played hard whereas on cedar tops, from my experience (have owned three), the sound will start to break up (distort) when played too hard. On the other hand, cedar tops to me are more responsive to subtle dynamics when played fingerstyle and they seem to have a more complex, harmonic tone. I like that.

And don't think that just because cedar doesn't have the dynamic range that spruce has that it can't be loud. My OM rings out like a bell. The cedar topped dreadnaught I owned before projected better than the engleman spruce topped dread I owned before that.

These are just my opinions. In the end, I don't buy guits because of the brand name or the top. I buy guits that I love the sound of and love to play.