I'm nutty about rosewood. It's just durned handsome, and has wonderful texture. The depth of the grain seems to draw me into its ancient treeness. I prefer it over ebony for fingerboards (and definitely over maple: it seems downright apostasy that PRS puts maple boards on some guitars). But I really think that's more about feel and look than tone.
With both maple and ebony, I'm always feeling (and thinking) that they may as well be aluminum or hard plastic. I have fingerboards of aluminum, "ebonol" bowling-ball plastic, and Hagstrom's Resinator composite, and my fingers throw them all in the same category with ebony and maple: it's just a hard surface. We feel like we're playing on formica. (Not that I'd have anything against a formica fingerboard.)
So it's all OK - but I like the texture of rosewood and other more open grains under the fingers. I know, I shouldn't even be
touching the fingerboard while playing, and if I didn't have the technique of a Neanderthal (or a robot without pressure sensitive claws), I wouldn't feel it at all. So maybe it's just my eyes lying to my fingers. But rosewood is my strong preference. (Will I die muttering
Rosewood...rosewood?)
I've gotten equally nutty about other rosewood guitar parts. Bridge bases, of course. (I
have learned, though it took me 50 years, that the classic rosewood acoustic guitar body is not my tonal favorite; there I go for mahogany.)
But I just
had to have last year's Gretsch all-rosewood (top, back, sides) Tennessee
Rose (what else), and rosewood turns out to be a magnificent body wood for that enclosed thin hollow construction. Is it tonally much different from the usual maple or maple-over-hog combo? I don't know - but it's fantastically and notably even and consistent through all registers when wiggling under the TV Jones Filter'Trons in the guitar, making it uncannily and unexpectedly one of the best
live guitars I have. It's just so well-behaved and responsive under all conditions, with a clear woody voice that can be tweaked in myriad directions with the supplied knobs (not always the case on a Gretsch), and which is remarkably dynamically sensitive. (Sorta like a PRS in that regard.)
Plus it's stupidly gorgeous.
(Gretsch catalog pics can be underwhelming, but see it here.). Rosewood top, back, sides, fingerboard, and headstock overlay. Pretty thorough - but
DAMMIT, why did Gretsch then lose their noive and put a MAPLE neck on the thing? It could have been all rosewood, all day and all night, forever and ever...
OK, what were we talking about?
Ah. Whether it's worth tonally worrying about what
species of rosewood is used for a fingerboard. Like the other fellers, I don't think so. But as I've never had otherwise identical guitars with varying rosewood boards, I can't say for sure. I do know that I would choose a guitar on the basis of other factors rather than get hung up on the national identity of the rosewood board.
But a whole rosewood
neck? Yep, that's worth paying up for. Again, since my one rosewood-necked guitar is unique in my harem and I don't have an otherwise identical model with a maple or hog neck to compare it to...I guess I can't be
sure it's tonally significant. But I sure like feeling the rosewood in the palm of my hand as well as under the fingers. (Which makes it nice that it's a fat neck.)
Also, for what it's worth, it occurs to me that a thoroughly
committed neck - where both shaft and fingerboard are of the same species - has been a good thing every time I've experienced it. There's nothing like an all-maple Tele neck, my all-aluminum Strat neck is killer (on a hollow aluminum body), the rosewood-over-rosewood works well, and I ordered up a wenge-over-wenge neck for a Tele baritone project last year.
That combination (with P90s in a soft catalpa body) sounds like nothing else I've ever owned.
So if you can get an
all-rosewood semi-hollow or hollowbody PRS, do that. Or if you can find a guitar of the model you want with a rosewood
neck...that's worth pursuing. Otherwise get whatever rosewood board comes on the guitar that most lights your fire.