Does the wood choice of a fretboard really impact a guitar’s tone? Ask big-name players like Joe Bonamassa and Joe Satriani and they’ll give you passionate reasons for why they lean on either side of the long-raging debate.
Ask Jimmie Vaughan and he’ll tell you it doesn’t make one iota of difference either way. And he’ll point to his late brother for proof.
Today, as manufacturer’s look for alternatives to dwindling supplies, fingerboards can be made out of a huge variety of woods. Pau ferro, laurel and wenge have since come to the fore, alongside Richlite, an ebony-like material made from paper and found on builds from Aristides and GOC.
Regardless of the growing options, fingerboard woods can fall quite naturally into light and dark categories. For many, a rosewood fretboard offers comfort and warmth, while a maple neck supposedly offers greater note clarity.
Joe Satriani veers away from maple, believing it isn’t a consistent wood, and opts for rosewood in his Ibanez signature guitars.
“Say you bring eight guitars on tour, getting all the maple-neck guitars,” he said last year. “It is just a piece of wood. It grows out of the ground and Mother Nature decides what’s it gonna sound like.
“I owned a ’54 Strat, and I loved it. It had a maple neck, and I thought it was the greatest guitar, but I did not have a job then where I had to play melodies and solos nonstop for two and a half hours. And so, this job of being a solo artist has changed my needs as a guitar player.”
Joe Bonamassa, meanwhile, is firmly in the maple camp. Writing in his Guitar World column in 2023, he said “one can argue that a rosewood ’board results in more of a Stevie Ray Vaughan-type sound,” but added, “I always refer to maple-neck Strats as the ‘Buddy Holly’ guitar, and great players such as Eric Johnson, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix are also well known for playing maple-neck Strats.
“To my ears, the notes jump off it in a different way, as compared to a rosewood ’board.”
Although Bonamassa believes rosewood ‘boards are responsible for SRV-type tones, the Vaughan family seemingly aren’t as quick to make that connection.
Discussing all things gear and tonewoods with Guitar World in a new interviewJimmie Vaughan spotlighted his prized 1963 Fender Stratocaster. It had a maple neck with a rosewood fretboard, but he swapped it out for a maple neck and didn’t notice a difference between the two.
“The body is from a ’63 Strat, but the neck is one (Austin blues guitarist) Bill (Campbell,) gave to me, so I guess it’s kind of a ‘parts’ guitar,” he says of its Frankenstein nature. “It was really put together by Charley’s Guitar Shop in Dallas and René Martinez, who was a fantastic guitar tech.”
And it turns out his reasons for swapping the neck out weren’t tonal.
“I’d wanted a white Strat for years; it felt like it was unobtainable when I was a kid,” he sighs. “I remember seeing Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps in an old movie, and they all had white Strats with the maple neck. I just thought it looked better than the dark rosewood, so I replaced it.
“I know there are people who think it makes a big difference to the sound, but I really don’t think it does,” he adds. “I know Stevie always sounded the same whether it was a rosewood or maple neck.”
The debate extends beyond the realms of the Strat too, with Jason Isbell, the current owner of Ed King’s legendary “Red Eye” Les Paul, believing rosewood is “more forgiving,” when it comes to Telecasters and that they “soften things up a little.”
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