M IS FOR MAPLE

Aceraceae family.

Now this is probably the string instrument player's wonderwood, equalled for performance criteria by a few others that are less readily available. My few years hacking about in a small corner of the instrument industry led me to feel that in terms of sustain and top-end evenness, texture is as significant as density, and I would cite black walnut in support of this idea — fine textured, and weighing between hard and soft maple, looking totally different in terms of grain and colour, but behaving very similarly to fine textured maple in a neck in terms of tonality and sustain. But there is more fat to chew there later in this series.

Of course a fiddle-back or mottle looks gorgeous under a breath of stain, and bird's-eye or curly can make you feel as up-market as a good tux, but I'm still waiting for someone to make the case that relates rays and parenchyma distribution to sound dissipation/distribution in a solid body guitar as convincingly as the traditional case for medullary rays in spruce.

A few years ago, Sky's Kevin Peek perfected the Stylophone sound on a maple neck/maple body Gibson L5S through a distortion unit. With lashings of square-wave and a seemingly infinite sustain, the sound dominated the ads for a while. The guitar cost £1200 odd. Meanwhile, in the Climax Blues band, Pete Haycock was doing a similarly sostenuto thing with a £250 Jap Westbury, maple/maple again, with an extra bit of control cavity dug out of it by your humble scribe for a passive master volume pot.

Both guitars had the same type of bridge and tailpiece, the same 24¾ in scale length, comparable humbuckers (Gibson Super Humbuckers against DiMarzio - a matter of tonal taste rather than function), and the same type of neck/body join. While Kevin's control cavity was probably a bit neater than my spoon-bit gouge and scrape tunnel, the physical dimensions were very similar. So what, you ask? Maple, dear thing, hang the price, feel the texture, bang it in a Big Muff and it'll do it all night.

Japanese maple, acer mono or acer palmatum.

Looks like rock maple, but is a bit lighter at around 670 kilos per cubic metre. The Jap acer at Weston Birt Arboretum are the autumn tourist hit — the leaves go a stunning red. It's a creamy wood, with a red tint in the heartwood, usually straight grained, sometimes wavy, and with fine growth lines wandering about on lengthways cut shaped surfaces.

Acer saccharum is North American. We see it in spec sheets as rock, hard, or, in one instance, hard rock maple. Its other name, sugar maple, is probably bad for a guitar's image; I've never seen it used. Acer nigrum, black maple, is also called hard or rock maple. We're looking at fine textured densities around 740 kilos per cubic metre here, and for acer saccharinum, soft maple, 550 kilos per cubic metre and a less fine texture, with Pacific maple (Acer macrophyllum) slightly heavier.

Hard maple is difficult to work, and I have the feeling that the stuff I cut into in Pete's guitar was too easy to be saccharum or nigrum, and there certainly wasn't a grand's worth of difference in the sustain, nor in the texture.

TRADA say that soft maple is 20 to 30 per cent weaker in bending and compression along the grain, and is less resistant to splitting than hard maple. That doesn't matter much on a 2in thick solid body, but matters on a thin neck. TRADA also point out that uses for hard and soft are pretty much the same except for the most exacting situations.

Light strung electrics are hardly exacting in the way they mean it, though a double bass neck is clearly a rather different matter.

We don't see maple much on acoustic back and sides now, it drifted over into a few flat-tops from the cello style jazz guitars; notably the great fat old J200, and more recently in one of the Kasha designed Mark series models.

Your next instalment on maple will come under 8. Figure that out.