Carpathian Spruce Soundboard for Small Guitar
Remarkable sounding (and looking!) spruce from the mountains of Romania. Carpathian Spruce, a European Spruce (Picea abies) grown in the mountains of Romania, is prized by many builders due to its "best of both worlds" properties.
Carpathian Spruce has excellent stiffness often seen in Adirondack Red Spruce, while maintaining the lower density and lightness often seen in many of the traditional Euro Spruce varieties (German, Swiss, Italian). This gives it an excellent stiffness to weight ratio.
However, unlike Adirondack Red Spruce whose aesthetics can vary wildly—with blotchy color, wavy grain, and other cosmetic flaws—most Carpathian spruce has a white, milky uniform color and more consistent grain pattern.
Among the varieties of Euro Spruce commercially available, Carpathian Spruce tends to have wider grain patterns similar to what you'd expect in Adirondack Spruce.
Overall this is an excellent tonewood for any flat-picked or fingerstyle steel string acoustic guitar.
- Each half is approximately 8" x 23" (203mm x 584mm)
- Sanded sets are thickness-sanded to 0.125" - 0.130" thick
(3.18mm - 3.30mm) - Unsanded sets are approximately 3/16" (5mm) thick, ready for thickness-sanding to your own specs.
Use our grading system to choose your soundboard:
Color: Higher grade soundboards have more consistent color (color affects the instrument's appearance only, not its tone).
Grain straightness: Higher soundboard grades have straighter, tighter, and more uniform grain. While closely spaced grain has been traditionally favored, luthiers have found that wider grain can produce very good tone.
Quartersawn grain: The higher the grade, the more closely quartersawn the wood. Perfectly quartered wood is more dimensionally stable and moves proportionally with changing temperature and humidity environments. This helps to ensure structural integrity and resists cracking better than other types of cuts.
Grain run-out: Our soundboards are sawn from split billets to reduce the amount of grain "run-out," caused by a twist in the tree. By splitting the log, the twist is followed when sawing. Higher grade soundboards have less run-out.
Origin and drying: Our soundboards (unless otherwise noted) are from western North America, and have been kiln-dried and stored in a climate controlled environment.