Tops - Tonewoods

Premium Guitar Top Wood - Acoustic Soundboards & Carved Tops 

What Is Guitar Top Wood?

The guitar top, also called the soundboard, is kind of the single most acoustically influential component on an acoustic guitar. It is the primary vibrating surface that turns string energy into projected sound, and in turn it really shapes the instrument’s volume, responsiveness, tonal clarity, and dynamic range. Whether you’re building a traditional dreadnought, a fingerstyle parlor guitar , or even an archtop carved-top instrument, picking the right tonewood for the soundboard is the most consequential material choice in your whole build, and it kind of ends up being the one you feel the most later on.

Why Soundboard Wood Quality Determines Instrument Character

Unlike body or neck tonewoods, the guitar top must balance stiffness with low mass, a property luthiers call the stiffness-to-weight ratio. A high stiffness/weight ratio gives more projection and sensitivity. It explains the continued dominance of the classical spruces used on acoustic guitars while providing options like cedar and koa for finger-style playing.

Guitar Top Tonewood Species at Exotic Wood Zone

At Exotic Wood Zone, shipping from St. Louis, Missouri, we stock a carefully tested and graded selection of premium acoustic soundboard tonewoods:

• Sitka Spruce - the international benchmark top wood for acoustic guitars; strong yet light with the ability to generate an extraordinary dynamic range from pianissimo to fortissimo through strumming

• Engelmann Spruce - softer and more sensitive than Sitka at quieter playing volumes; preferred by makers of fingerstyle guitars for its instant tonal response

• Adirondack Spruce - This type of wood is also known as the original Appalachian red spruce. Not only does it provide wear-resistant quality, but it also produces a wide range of sounds that make it superior to Engelmann and Sitka when flatpicking at high volumes.

• Western Red Cedar - This type of wood gives a warm sound with dark hues versus spruce which have more of a bright sound but will still work well for fingerstyle players and is ideal for classical guitars as well as 11-string guitars with nylon strings.

• Hawaiian Koa - Koa is an unmistakable wood that exhibits both beauty and a tone that balances and warms up as the instrument matures.

All soundboard tops are bookmatched, kiln-dried for moisture stability, and graded for tap tone, runout, and figure before listing.

Complete Your Build with Matching Tonewoods

A great soundboard deserves equally well-matched components. Exotic Wood Zone also stocks the full range of acoustic guitar tonewoods to complete your instrument:

• Acoustic Guitar Back and Side Sets - matched pairs for body resonance and visual consistency

• Acoustic Guitar Neck Wood - This is high quality, straight grain wood to guarantee playability.

• Acoustic Guitar Fingerboard Wood - hard, dense fretboard blanks for tone and durability

• Acoustic Guitar Binding Wood Braces, Rosettes, Headplates and Bridge blanks - pretty much everything needed to take your build from a blank state to finished instrument yeah.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What wood is best used for the top of an acoustic guitar?

Sitka Spruce is the best wood due to its excellent strength-to-weight ratio and wide dynamic range. Cedar is ideal for finger style play for warmth immediately; Adirondack spruce is suitable for heavy flatpick playing.

• What does bookmatched mean for guitar tops? 

Bookmatched is a cutting process in which one piece of wood is cut in half and opened up like a book. This creates symmetry of grains and consistency of stiffness in the wood and makes for an aesthetically pleasing soundboard.

Explore our complete guitar top tonewood collection at Exotic Wood Zone and build a soundboard that truly sings.