One piece bodyblank for guitar

Allmost all bodyblanks for guitar and bass we are offering on this website are two-piece body blank as one piece bodyblanks are harder to come by. More on that later.

For a two piece body blank, a slab of wood is resawn and then two pieces of wood are planed and glued together. With tonewoods like alder, if done correctly, the body blank will have a center seam that is hardly visible. With woods like swamp-ash with its's beautiful grain structure, a seam will be visible in a two-piece swamp-ash bodyblank.

I have personally come across 5-piece body blanks on factory made Asian guitars where multiple pieces of unknow woods are glued together and then covered in thick layers of a polyurethane finish in a solid color. The same happened in the seventies with cheap Japanes copies of well known American guitar models.

One piece bodyblanks for guitar or bass are just that: body blanks made from one piece of wood, no glue involved. In order to be able to produce a one piece body blank a tree must have been wide enough to be able to produce slabs of wood wide enough to resaw and thickness plane into 1-piece body blanks.

You can imagine that the number of trees wide enough to produce 1-piece bodyblanks is limited. Therefore these 1-piece body blanks are scarce and when they are available they will be more expensive than a 2-piece version of the same wood species.

One piece bodyblanks versus two piece bodyblanks

Is there a difference you ask? And if so what is it?

If you do a search on google on 1-piece bodyblanks vs. 2-piece bodyblanks you will enter the world of guitar forums (enter at your own risk) where everything related to guitars is discussed at length. Regarding the topic of 1-piece vs. 2-piece bodies I have come across opinions on the aesthetics, economic value and sonic qualities of a 1-piece body. (And even the sound of the different types of glue used in 2-piece bodies).

Personally I do not know if an one-piece guitar body made out of a 1-piece body blank sounds better or different than a guitar body made out of a two-piece body blank of the same wood.

If you happen to stumble on a one-piece body from a beautiful piece of figured tonewood (like to curly alder in the picture above this text) and it suits the aesthetics of the instruments you are building I would definitely consider it.

But in the end it is just a matter of personal taste.

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