VIDEO - Royal Blackwood : The most important product in luthiery?

Beau Hannam Ukuleles

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Ebony forests are in danger, and that Royal Blackwood makes for an excellent ebony substitute, it is probably the most important product for luthiery that I can think of.

Purple heart tree is twice as big as a Gaboon ebony tree.
Also, purpleheart is roughly twice as stable (ie it shrinks/expands in all directions half as much) as Gaboon ebony. (see picture a few posts below)

To give some perspective, most solo Luthiers like me make 10-15 instruments a year. We don't pose an impact on ebony forests. However, Gibson make approx 170,000 a guitars year, Fender 208,000 (in 2007), Taylor 130,000, Martin 107,000 (based on serial numbers 2018-2019) PRS about 15,000 a year. According to The Music Trades website's industry census of the United States guitar market, there are about 2.5 million guitars sold each year in the US.

It is only when these large factories move towards ebony substitutes will the inevitable loss of ebony forests be diminished.
 
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I am sorry but I cannot disgree with you more strongly Beau. Forest management alongside innovation and re-education is the way forward. 'Black' wood is not the default fingerboard material - Rickenbakker prove that everydaeen gracing luthier supply house shelves over the last 40 years.y! Imitating the 'real thing' will not suppress demand, it will simply drive it into the BR buffaloes dropping ground. Ebony will still be in demand, still be requested and still be used by builders large and small.

Another thing - torrified wood is untested - and correct me if I am wrong but purpleheart has quite an open pore texture doesn't it, unlike its cousin greenheart which would make an excellent substitute for ebony...

I applaud your review. I cannot however for the life of me see any benefit in pimping out this imposter in the hope it will save the ebony forests - I think that horse is way out of the barn and on the open range by now. I suspect this has more to do with diluting Taylor's monopoly held on the supply of musical grade ebony into the US than some moral and noble cause to save the industry from bankrupting its wood supply chain. I am not an optimist where this is concerned since it is 4th or 5th in a line of 'substitutes' that has found its way onto luthiers' supply house shelves for the last 40 years to be the next 'ebony replacement'. In the words of Bob Gleeson when he first saw my work all those years ago, "We'll see how long (it) lasts". We will.
 
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Hey Beau,

Just wanted to let you know that I really enjoyed learning about the properties of these materials. I love my instruments, but leave the wood shop to others, yet I watched the video with interest. Now I want to see the next chapter: how will the royal blackwood respond under your hands?

Looking forward to seeing what happens next with royal blackwood in your shop.

Bluesy.
 
Hey Beau,

Just wanted to let you know that I really enjoyed learning about the properties of these materials. I love my instruments, but leave the wood shop to others, yet I watched the video with interest. Now I want to see the next chapter: how will the royal blackwood respond under your hands?

Looking forward to seeing what happens next with royal blackwood in your shop.

Bluesy.

Thanks, I forgot to mention in the video that the two pieces I got were also very stiff.
I also recently heard it cnc's well, akin to being between ebony and rosewood- this isn't important to me (i don't use a cnc, but its very important for factories.
 
Pete,
Nothing I said contradicts the logic of what you said, so there shouldn't be any disagreement as none exists.

Firstly, of course forest management is the first line of defense for forests. However as it also the first line of money making. Cleared land then becomes used for crops to feed the world.
So I have absolutely no faith in any forest management to save any forest.

2- For thousands of years (think the Egyptian Pharaohs) black ebony has been used for its beauty, rarity, and for stringed instrument makers, hardness for fingerboards. Thes desire for hard and black is the default fingerboard material and won't be diminished over time, if we can take anything from history. Rickenbacker is like any other guitar company who use also use rosewood for fingerboards. However if by some miracle the world defaulted to only ever using rosewood for fingerboards, we are back at the same place- endangered rosewood.
Therefore a sustainable substitute is needed.

3- Yes torrefied wood is largely untested in luthiery. So we should test it with a vision for the future.

4- I don't care if the species used is purple heart, greenheart, poplar or pine- the sustainable species matters little to me.
What matters is a viable substitute.

5- It matters not if this is the 1st or 5th interpretation (attempt) for a viable ebony substitute. I know of (in order [i think] of invention- Dyed Poplar (etc), Richlite, Rocklite, Royal Blackwood)- each one moves closer to the real thing than the one before it. There will surely be more adaptations of faux ebony and we can and should think they will continue to get better with technology.
Don't disqualify the attempts at perfection.

6- I don't see this as a power play against Taylor but more simply as a sign of the times.
The world is imploding due to population and certain trajectories need correcting, as Thanos pointed out.

I am sorry but I cannot disgree with you more strongly Beau. Forest management alongside innovation and re-education is the way forward. 'Black' wood is not the default fingerboard material - Rickenbakker prove that everydaeen gracing luthier supply house shelves over the last 40 years.y! Imitating the 'real thing' will not suppress demand, it will simply drive it into the BR buffaloes dropping ground. Ebony will still be in demand, still be requested and still be used by builders large and small.

Another thing - torrified wood is untested - and correct me if I am wrong but purpleheart has quite an open pore texture doesn't it, unlike its cousin greenheart which would make an excellent substitute for ebony...

I applaud your review. I cannot however for the life of me see any benefit in pimping out this imposter in the hope it will save the ebony forests - I think that horse is way out of the barn and on the open range by now. I suspect this has more to do with diluting Taylor's monopoly held on the supply of musical grade ebony into the US than some moral and noble cause to save the industry from bankrupting its wood supply chain. I am not an optimist where this is concerned since it is 4th or 5th in a line of 'substitutes' that has found its way onto luthiers' supply house shelves for the last 40 years to be the next 'ebony replacement'. In the words of Bob Gleeson when he first saw my work all those years ago, "We'll see how long (it) lasts". We will.
 
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Out of the 6 commission inquiries I've had this year to date, five of the customers specifically asked for "sustainable" or "alternative" wood choices, including ebony fretboard alternatives. Yes, this is a tiny sample size, but I don't think this is so much a matter of suppliers or builders trying to force a concept on customers as much as it is suppliers trying to catch up to what people are already asking for. Heck, many mainstream brands are already offering man made ebony alternatives (i.e. Gibson using Richlite). Big manufacturers have pivoted away from traditional tonewoods plenty of times in the past, there's a good track record of that happening.

Pete, what sort of testing would you want to happen with torrified wood before it was acceptable? Fender, Warmoth, Jackson, Charvel and others have been making necks and fretboards from torrified wood for years. It doesn't seem to have penetated the ukulele market yet but it's acceptable and even desirable from a marketing perspective among guitar builders.

I haven't tried this new material yet, but I do like purpleheart for fretboards and have used it many times. I'm looking forward to trying this some time soon.

As a child, I grew up playing a piano that had been handed down through 4 generations of my family before me. It has real ivory keys on it. I'm sure there was a point in time when some people felt that real ivory keys would always be in demand on pianos and synthetic substitutes (like the acrylic that's on pretty much every piano in the local music shop) would never catch on.
 
I never use endangered woods as a matter of principle, and personally prefer more colourful woods for fingerboards, especially Pear, Apple, London Plane, Olive, etc., however for those who do like darker woods for fingerboards, I'd recommend Ovangkol, Bog Oak, Laburnum, etc..
 
It has real ivory keys on it. I'm sure there was a point in time when some people felt that real ivory keys would always be in demand on pianos and synthetic substitutes (like the acrylic that's on pretty much every piano in the local music shop) would never catch on.

This is such a good point. Nobody that buys a piano nowadays expects ivory keys. I suspect this will be the case with ebony in the future. But I think it needs to be emphasized that it isn't necessarily the manufacturer of guitars and perhaps ukuleles that push rare, unsustainable woods, it is the customer that demands it. If a customer is going to pay big, big bucks for an instrument they will demand that it has expensive "real" woods. In other words, it is market driven, not manufacturer driven.
 
This is such a good point. Nobody that buys a piano nowadays expects ivory keys. I suspect this will be the case with ebony in the future. But I think it needs to be emphasized that it isn't necessarily the manufacturer of guitars and perhaps ukuleles that push rare, unsustainable woods, it is the customer that demands it. If a customer is going to pay big, big bucks for an instrument they will demand that it has expensive "real" woods. In other words, it is market driven, not manufacturer driven.

I think you're right, and to an extent there will always be people who want the "real" exotic stuff. I guess that's why you can go buy a BR guitar back and side set for two or three grand right now. But I also think that there's at least a potential for the customers to be the ones driving the change. I'm sure that other optimists in other generations before me have said things like this, but I feel like the up and coming customers of today have generally been well trained to understand concepts like sustainability, and to see it as desirable. As I'm writing this, my teenage daughter is sitting across from me chatting with her friends about an organic plant based face wash product, and how it's made in a way that has less ecological impact. Her and her friends aren't hippy dippy tree huggers, they're just normal kids! If I told them I was building a guitar with wood from a tree that's on a protected species list and is nearly extinct, they'd hate my guts no matter how good it sounded. That's just kids today.

So, I think the tide will turn, whether it's with this product or some future product. When I started building I never would have thought about using an artificial product for a fretboard, and I was certainly never asked to by a customer. Now, I have many choices in products, and customers are asking for them quite often, whether I want to use them or not!
 
Thanks Beau for introducing it, I for sure would like to try it. It got me thinking- I'm lucky enough to have worked with luthiers big and small for the past few decades, and I've noticed a pattern. The smaller, custom builders making a few instruments a year for the most part are truly concerned with the sustainability of their materials. They actually care about how their wood is harvested and where it comes from. I believe this is at least in part passed on by the customer. The larger makers, for the most part, never ask (at least they don't ask me) about sustainability or providence. They care about price, speed, and quantity. I suspect that a viable ebony alternative will be more accepted in the custom instrument world, where it will unfortunately do the least good.
 
I never use endangered woods as a matter of principle, and personally prefer more colourful woods for fingerboards, especially Pear, Apple, London Plane, Olive, etc., however for those who do like darker woods for fingerboards, I'd recommend Ovangkol, Bog Oak, Laburnum, etc..

I use bog oak as a substitute for ebony and have done so for a number of years. I haven't used an exotic wood for some 5 or 6 years. Most of my instruments (back/sides) are of maple, walnut, figured cherry or cypress.
Bog oak is expensive, up there with the very best ebony boards but nicer to work. It's open grain structure may put some people off but I fill the pores.
I've also used Laburnum but sometimes it's not always available in the required width//sizes. I suppose there's no reason why it can't be joined down the centre, perhaps bookmatched.
 
I recently made a fingerboard from some terrified maple I got from an LMI open house sale a couple years ago. It made a very beautiful deep brown fretboard that is almost the color of finger grime so I think it should look good for some time.
 
Ive baked all sorts of light coloured woods in the oven (DIY Torrification) just wrap it in ali foil and put it in at 200 + degrees C for a couple of hours, they all come out darker than they went in..my pallet ukes have pallet spruce fretboards that look like rosewood...the best thing about it is that it dos not shrink so no sharp fret ends.

PICT0010-9_zpscd3344f6 by Ken Timms, on Flickr
 
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I use bog oak as a substitute for ebony and have done so for a number of years. I haven't used an exotic wood for some 5 or 6 years. Most of my instruments (back/sides) are of maple, walnut, figured cherry or cypress.
Bog oak is expensive, up there with the very best ebony boards but nicer to work. It's open grain structure may put some people off but I fill the pores.
I've also used Laburnum but sometimes it's not always available in the required width//sizes. I suppose there's no reason why it can't be joined down the centre, perhaps bookmatched.

Hi I have used bog oak on the last two 000.s I made. What do you use to pore fill? Bob
 
It's the pore til thing with bog oak that gives me the hebbie jeebies... Mgurure while not 'black' is a blackwood substitute and is a fine textured brown wood that shows off abalone nicely.
 
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