I've been enjoying my new '10 American Deluxe Ash strat since i bought it in october, but just now I pulled out my squier and realized that the squier is so much more resonant unplugged than my super expensive Deluxe.

I also noticed the squier is considerably lighter than the deluxe.

I've been researching and swamp ash is supposed to be very resonant while northern ash is used for baseball bats. so is fender using northern ash as their "premium ash" or what?

kinda disappointed..

Hi fenderchiq: Forum user Nikininja and I spent a fascinating evening with Trevor Wilkinson a few months ago. Amongst the many things we discussed was swamp ash. He told us something I for one didn't know: swamp ash is neither a type of tree nor an indication of geographical source. It merely means wood from the lowest part of the trunk which might have been exposed to more moisture from the surrounding soil. You can get swamp ash and regular ash from different sections of the self-same tree trunk. Obviously, only a small section of the trunk will have the swamp ash characteristics, so it is comparatively rare and therefore treated as a premium product.

From my own experience of felling ash trees on my land, you can get wood of completely different densities and characters from trees growing yards apart on the exact same soil and no doubt both offspring of the same parent tree. So the character of your Am Dlx body will have more to do with the individual billet of timber from which it is cut than anything else. That's the way of it with a natural material.

Just for shucks (cos we like pictures on the Forum) here's some of my ash as it came off the tree:



And after several years seasoning, here's one of the better billets being turned into a guitar body blank:



More on that - later...

Cheers - C

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Ceri that was very informative, and being that I`m thinking about a Dlx Ash Strat in the coming year I`ll keep this in mind. I wondered about the differences between the two types of wood also and this cleared it up. Great post thanks.

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I guess you really had to work your ash off to get to that point, huh?

Badda bing badda boom

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Bill

Drum roll; cymbal splash.

Cheers - C

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Gotta love a Dlx Ash Strat!

Good luck with it - pick a nice one!

Cheers - C

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Premier Guitar recently had a great article with Trev Wilkinson. Check it out!

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Being able to play and enjoy music is a gift that's often taken for granted.

Don't leave home without it!

Got it. So unless the luthier was involved with the process from the very beginning (including literally the cutting of the tree) it's highly unlikely that a regular production
American deluxe stratocaster would be made from the desirable portion of the tree.

The best pieces are reserved for the custom shop and not put into a production piece.

Would you say this is an accurate assessment?

Hi again fenderchiq: no, not exactly. Swamp ash is readily available, it just costs more because there's less of it and people think it's desirable. Lots of guitars are made from swamp ash, but they are always labelled as such because they will cost a bit more and need to account for that. If a guitar is made of swamp ash you can be sure the maker will let you know loud and clear.

So to the best of my knowledge Am Dlx Strats are "regular" ash rather than swamp. And nuttin' whatsoever wrong with it: for each person who claims swamp ash is better there is another who says the opposite. You pays your money, you takes your choice.

All I'm saying is that whatever weight and tone qualities your Deluxe does or doesn't have is down to the individual tree that bit of wood came from. It's not because of what it's called.

Cheers - C

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I found this to be confusing and contrary to what I'd always believed so I did some searching. Many of the dictionary links are identical to each other which is kind of odd in a Wiki sort of way but the guitar related links appear to specify a difference in species for swamp ash.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/swamp+ash

http://www.lakland.com/faq.htm

http://www.definitions.ws/134638/swamp-ash

http://www.ehow.com/list_6730938_characteristics-warmoth-guitar-wood.html

http://www.warmoth.com/Bass/Options/WoodDescriptions.aspx

http://www.increasemyvocabulary.com/definition/of/swamp-ash/

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Just think of how awesome a guitar player you could have been by now if you had only spent the last 10 years practicing instead of obsessing over pickups and roasted maple necks.

I too have found out that my squier jagmaster is much louder than my 09 am dlx ash too acoustically.

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2009 american deluxe ash stratocaster

2009 epiphone es-335 dot.
2009 65 drri amp
2009 fender vibro champ-xD amp.
2009 takamine g-4400 acoustic/electric guitar

1980 fender harvard reverb 1 amp

Hi BMW: it's always tricky talking about trees because the same word can mean completely different things in different places - or even the same place. All we can do to be certain is use the Latin names... but try going into a guitar shop and asking for a Fraxinus bodied Strat and see how far we get!

One of my tree books names about 20 species of ash and says there are more than 60 in total. Typing Fraxinus into Google produces long lists.

I notice one of your links talks about Fraxinus Americanus, another Fraxinus Caroliniana, both as "swamp ash". But then F. Caroliniana is also known as Florida ash, water ash and pop ash - popular names are imprecise.

But I think what Trev Wilkinson was getting at was that the quality of relative lightness that gets ash refered to as "swamp ash" by timber suppliers comes from its exposure to waterlogged soil and only occurs in the lowest section of the trunk. The rest of the tree does not have the same character, so would not be sold as such. So regardless what species the tree is or where geographically it came from it is only a tree that grew under certain local conditions and only a section of that tree which gives the timber that ends up being called "swamp ash" in a guitar maker's catalog.

And the wider point I was trying to suggest to fenderchiq is the one many of us here know from long experience: that regardless what a guitar is nominally made from it is the individual lump of wood that gives one instrument a nice sound, another apparently identical model less so. It's a guitar by guitar thing.

Cheers - C

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The problem is the USA Deluxe Ash Strat is not available as an HSS model with the bridge humbucker/raw switch options. Only Factory Special Runs are loaded with those features.

Fender did Deluxe HSS Ash Strats between 1998 and 2003.