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Might be going out on a limb here (wood pun intended) but has anyone built a guitar with a pine top?

Just curious. Not ideal I'm sure but if you had nothing else I'm sure someone could make it work.

Yes. In fact several. Granted the pine I used was 80-100 years old and well seasoned but it's made some really really good sounding guitars. The only problem I have with using pine for tops is that I don't have enough of it.

I've been milling wood from my place, ponderosa pine, white oak and manzanita to make a truly "local" guitar. The pine has been difficult to get good clean top plates of jumbo size because of pitch pockets (the log was 30"D x 36"L, from the base of the tree) but I did get some parlor size. Boy, did it gum up the bandsaw blade and wheels. Took 2 hours to clean it up. I'll try again from a log further up the tree. I also have a couple of bug kill sugar pines yet to cut down, 36"D. Might work better.

By the way, the progress of the Camp Fire was stopped in our direction 2 days ago (about 2 miles away) so we're going home tomorrow.

What great news that the fire has stopped approaching!!! Seeing the smoke here in San Francisco, I get an idea of the scope of the fire.

The local guitar you describe sounds really interesting. When you build it, please post pictures and/or sound files.

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Tim Allen
"Never hurry, never rest."

i/VE used piranha pine from s . america to make some very decent sounding tenor ukes. The tops were only 2.5in w. As an aside another lesser known wood is rocky mtn white fir, which I am also using for small instruments. It has wider summer growth bands and narrow winter growth rings. The wood is very white , soft and dents easily. But it is stiff and has a nice tap tone

My first archtop had a southern yellow pine top with maple sides and back.
Didn't want my first attempt at following Benedetto's book to involve expensive wood. Pine started life as a construction 2X6 from the local big box store where I stumbled upon a near perfect quarter sawn board. Top was fashioned from 6 or 7 slabs glued together.
It's still my daily go-to guitar

The guitar John made from his barn pine sounds awesome! There is a video of it in one of the challenge threads you should check it out. Edit: I found the thread with this guitar but the videos don’t seem to be there anymore. It’s too bad, that guitar is what got me interested in parlor guitars. Maybe John will post it here.

I just finished a pine top parlor. Unlike many, mine was not old wood. I found a long 1x12 that was twisted and split in the scrap bin at the BORG. There was just enough straight wood for a top and braces and I could tell by how the board had split tha there would’t be much runnout so I gave it a try. I remember Alan Carruth saying that softwoods all tend to track the same line with respects to density and stiffness so I figured it would work okay if I thinned it until it “felt about right.”

It was pretty resinous so I stickered it and took it through several baking cycles in my oven. That seemed to bring much of the resin to the surface and harden it up. It sanded easily in the drum sander after that. There is a sound sample on this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=10101&t=51183&hilit=Pine+parlor

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Bryan Bear PMoMC

Take care of your feet, and your feet will take care of you.

Several of my students have used white pine that came from a beam that was pulled from an old mill building. It's low in density and makes a light weight top that responds well. It does have a soft surface, like WRC.

"Not ideal I'm sure but if you had nothing else I'm sure someone could make it work."

As many people have mentioned you can make a fine guitar using a pine top. If you don't want to pay the postage for an "A" grade spruce top (which can also make a nice guitar) you can pick through the SPF (spruce, pine, fir) lumber at your local building supply and come up with a decent piece of spruce to resaw (and then let dry) for a soundboard.
Alaska Specialty Woods sells paint grade Sitka tops for $8 and regular Sitka tops for $14, so unless you have a nice piece of pine you want to use or you are inclined to experiment (I recently did a sassafras top) it hardly seems worth the trouble.

And that 'paint grade' Sitka top might just have the voice of the angels. Tops are sold in increasing prices driven by cosmetics, not acoustics; price has little to do with how good an instrument turns out to be. I've used tops from Alaska Specialty woods, and they are just wonderful for me.

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Peter Havriluk

Now that's great news! Thanks for sharing the update!

Thanks for the input everyone. I was asking because I'm putting together wood for my first build and I just happened to have some pine laying around that I had considered using. With all the positivity towards it I might give it a shot. I'll look up the Alaska specialty woods tops you mentioned. Thanks for the input

Cedar is used in a lot of classical guitars....I haven’t built a guitar with it yet but there are some huge ones near my house in NC.....can’t wait to see what it sounds like


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That is Western red cedar, which doesn't grow in NC. I have used Eastern red cedar for backs and sides, but IMHO it is a bit dense and limber for soundboards.
I used a four-piece Ponderosa pine top on one of my early guitars (late-1970's). Back then, a lot of 1X12 shelving board was old growth tight-grained Ponderosa. It worked fine. I also used it for bracewood after that.
In the 1980's, I mostly used Engelmann spruce cut from construction lumber. I did cut some Western white fir, but never used it for tops....only bracing. It is very similar to Engelmann, but has no resin canals and sometimes has a disagreeable scent. The S-P-F designation on construction lumber groups Engelmann spruce, pine (Ponderosa and lodgepole, mainly) and white fir under the same class.
In general, the softer, lighter weight pines are less stiff than spruce along the grain but a bit stiffer across the grain. Hard, dense pines like Southern yellow pine are more akin to a hardwood when used for a top.

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John

I've measured the properties of a lot of different sorts of woods. I look at the density, the damping and the Young' modulus along and across the grain. Young's modulus pretty well predicts how stiff a piece will be at a given thickness. What's really interesting is that all of the softwoods I've measured follow the same rule relating the Young's modulus along the grain to density. If you know the density you can predict the Young's modulus within about 10% most of the time. This makes some sense, given that all softwoods have a very similar structure: hardwoods are more variable. There are not many visual marks for this. Grain count doesn't seem to matter: it might have a small effect, but doesn't stand out. The proportion of soft early wood to harder late wood does make a difference; late wood adds mass faster than it adds stiffness, so hard late wood lines make a top that is heavy at a given stiffness. Run out reduces long-grain Young's modulus, as do things like 'bear claw' and curl, which are just local changes in run out.

Cross grain stiffness mostly relates to how well quartered the wood is. Again, grain count doesn't seem to matter enough to cancel out even small changes in ring angle.

The white pine I've seen, some old and some new, has generally been low in density, with long-grain stiffness that tracks the density about as well as spruce on the average. I was just checking out a piece this morning that turned out to be a bit higher in density that I wanted for the project in mind, and somewhat lower in long-grain stiffness than it 'should' have been based on the density.

Robert Benedetto built one of his famous archtop guitars out of knotty pine and crate grade maple to demonstrate that the construction was more important than the wood choice. He plays this guitar in his instructional video. It is also featured in his "how to" book.

I think y ou can only use a pine top if your last name is Perkins

Thank you for the input gentlemen

I/ve also used Pine on a few tenor uke tops . I left it at abt 2.2 mm a little thicker than spruce at 1.9 to 2mm

Pine isn't just for tops you know.