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I've been thinking of trying some walnut for my next guitar but I like the Martin D28 sound. My only experience with walnut was a Taylor 110e that I sold. I didn't really like the sound. I wonder if I used walnut and built it like a D28, would it be close or the same as a D28 in sound. I like the idea of using local timbers if possible.

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!

Not likely.

I'd give walnut a try and find out what you get. I had a nice Claro Walnut/Lutz Spruce guitar that I really liked. Didn't sound like a D28, but it sounded really good, and it was quite a looker to boot. Local timbers are always nice to use when you can.

Dave

This video of a Custom D-28 with walnut back and sides might give you some idea of what you could expect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8q1Nq6fQTJw

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

Walnut will be more similar to mahogany. Try osage orange for a domestic rosewood alternative. And place the wood in an east/west facing window for a couple weeks after thinning (but before bending/bracing/etc.) if you want to darken it up. It is translucent, so it will darken all the way through.

That said, I would recommend building one with black walnut too. It's so easy to work with it feels like cheating. Relatively soft, minimal dulling of tools, no interlocked grain, not stringy or oily, bends effortlessly, and the pores are pretty small and easy to fill.

Osage, on the other hand, is very hard and stringy. And like softwoods, the light and dark growth lines have different hardness, which makes life difficult if you need to do any knife/chisel work or routing inlay pockets into it.

Sounds real fine, but with it having an an adi top, it's difficult to pick out the sound of the walnut!

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

It doesn't sound bad but it kind of reminds me of the Taylor. I guess I'm partial to booming bass. I'll try it anyway.

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!

Not exactly a D28 but have you ever played a mid 60s Epiphone Frontier Hutch?

Asking because it's a maple back and sided dreadnought, but if you play it it responds a lot like a D28 with equal to more bass provided it's in proper playing order. The design is far different than a D28 (bracing width, brace angle etc...) but the results do speak for themselves in terms of the sound and response. There's also some J45s from the 40s that have maple back and sides or even plywood that sound to my ears equal with a D28 or even more lively/responsive in certain areas. Granted they do sound slightly different but no two guitars are the same.

My point being that you might want to consider changing some design elements to work with the wood that you have to make up for the perceived differences in sound. Maybe widen the x angle, thin the braces down a bit, try a different bridge design etc...

Most wood species vary a lot, so blanket comparisons can be fraught. The two properties that probably do the most to determine the effect the B&S woods have on the sound are probably the density and damping, with density being more important IMO. Walnut tends to be somewhat less dense on average than the Indian rosewood that Martin uses on -28s, with most walnut being more like mahogany in that respect. Still,I have seen especially dense walnut from time to time. The claro that I've seen has tended to be on the low density and soft side of the range; you might have more luck with black walnut.

Osage is a good wood, more in the Brazilian rosewood class than Indian. Black locust tends to be more comparable to IRW than Osage, with similar density an hardness to IRW, but with damping more in the BRW class. This makes it an 'improved' IRW substitute. It darkens down a lot if you fume it with ammonia, with household ammonia being quite sufficient. Osage darkens with ammonia fuming as well, although not as much.

You might enjoy this. Walnut was one of the tone woods

https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.5084735

And as far as getting the D28 sound (whatever that means) I recall a few years ago at the Steel String Listening session at the GAL conference there was a dreadnaught sized guitar made out of an unusual wood - I want to say Myrtle but could be very wrong. Most of the guitars presented that day were basically OM or something similar, when the dread was played everyone said "yup, thats a dread". It really didn't matter what the tone wood was, its sounded like a dreadnaught

Focus on the top, that's where it's at imho. I've built many walnut guitars, non were Dreds though that I can remember, except for a 12-string which was a dred-ish size guitar and it was a cannon of a 12-string.

I have some black locust drying for the back and sides for an archtop. It’s difficult to find billets wide enough, quarter sawn with tight growth rings, but if you can find it, it’s really cheap. It’s mainly used for fence posts around here. I’m also using it for the stem and transom on the boat I’m working on.