Ok, Fire protection now all in place.... Can people tell the difference?
I have had Ebony, Brazilian on my previous PRS guitars, I now have Rosewood on my SC58. Perhaps my ears are damaged but I really struggle to hear the difference. I have Richlite on my J45 and even this to me does not make a sound difference. Yes, I do love the look of Ebony and perhaps I think that it sounds better because it looks better. I have seen so many posts on forums about people asking if they have a Braz board on their guitar, so perhaps I am not alone in not knowing the differnece.
I definitely hear a difference between fretboard woods.
As a synthesist, sound designer and pro studio rat, I tend to describe sounds in terms of ADSR envelopes, harmonic overtones, etc. The caveat is that most of the differences are obscured by amp or pedal gain, so unless you’re at least occasionally a clean player, you may not hear them.
In any case, the woods tend to have different ADSR envelopes; that is, their rates of attack, decay, sustain and release vary when a note is plucked.
The ear picks up on this, it’s one of the things that makes, say, a horn sound different from a piano. Both instruments generate sine waves that sound different at the same pitch, because their ADSR and harmonic overtones are different.
If you listen carefully to the envelope of the note through a clean amp, you’ll hear differences in ADSR between the woods used in guitars.
As an example, a Maple fretboard tends to have a fast attack, and faster decay, accentuating the pick and releasing quickly for the next note. This is partially why the ear perceives it as bright, and also why it’s well-suited to chicken pickin’. Notes pop off the fretboard. To a degree, ebony also has a fast attack, and is perceived as a brighter sounding material.
Rosewood tends to have a slower, more searing attack and decay, though I find BRW a little faster than IRW, and the notes ‘ring’ a little more. Madagascar RW is somewhere in the middle, nicely balanced IMHO.
Listen to the differences between identically constructed Maple-bodied acoustic guitars and rosewood, or mahogany. You hear differences, but of course because of the amount of wood used, they’re more obvious. Nonetheless, those differences in tone don’t vanish when these woods are used elsewhere on the guitar in smaller amounts. They’re simply less obvious.
It’s not a matter of thinking that one person can hear what another can’t. It’s more a matter of knowing what to listen for. Try listening to several guitars with various fretboard woods, listen for how they accentuate pick attack, and how a note decays and releases, and you may hear these differences. Eventually, if you play a bunch of them, concentrating on ADSR, you’ll notice the similarities and differences between these woods very easily.