“werewood”—FAcT or FAnTASY? BY ERVIN SOMOGYI
Luthiers will generally agree that the acoustic guitar’s soundboard is the
soul of the instrument. And they will
choose a soundboard’s wood with care by
considering such factors as species, grain
count, color, age, provenance, grain evenness and orientation, weight, and stiffness.
Popular choices for topwoods have traditionally included Sitka spruce, Engelmann
spruce, Western red cedar, Italian alpine
spruce, fir, redwood, pine, German spruce,
red spruce, Adirondack spruce, sinker
redwood, sinker spruce, and—with steel-string guitars—even koa and mahogany.
With all the choices available, there is an
endless debate about which topwood is
“best” and how to properly use it.
I’ve been making guitars for a long
time, so I too participate in this debate.
My approach to the selection of the topwood relies on a favorable stiffness-to-weight ratio—not so much on the grain’s
evenness, count, color, etc. To me, the
wood’s weight is critical and half the formula. I’ve sorted through many thousands
of topwood sets in the last 40-plus years,
and the range of their densities has never
failed to impress itself on me.
The same has also been true of the
many piles of spruce and cedar planks I’ve
sorted through to made selections from. I’ve
handled planks so heavy that they seemed
fresh-felled and still full of water. And
they’d be next to planks that were so light,
you could sneeze and they’d practically blow
off the pile. But these are woods of comparable size that had been kiln-dried together,
so the moisture content would have been
the same. I assumed this disparity was all
normal and natural, until I learned about a
European tradition of forestry based on the
practice of cutting down woods at specific
phases of the moon. This practice of wood
felling is built on many centuries of empirical experience and observation, and it yields
woods of consistently different density,
durability, and working properties.
Wood that is felled in accordance with
lunar cycles is referred to as “full-moon
wood,” though somehow, I’m always tempted to think of it as werewood. Whatever one
wants to call it, the fact is that our modern
traditions of cutting lumber—which are not
at all based on cutting woods selectively,
in limited quantities, or for specific uses—
have paid no attention to this practice. Our
When you encounter an old acoustic guitar
that sounds magical—like this 1941 Gibson
ES- 150—it’s tempting to speculate why. Is
it due to vintage construction techniques?
Decades of string vibration? Or could
werewood actually play a role? Photo by
Andy Ellis
enterprises will cut day and night until the
acreage has been clear-cut and the wood
taken away by industrial containers, before
moving on to the next acreage.
The back story on full-moon wood is
quite interesting. Since before the start
of the 1st millennium AD, foresters have
noticed that the woods they cut yielded
different working properties and durability
as a direct function of where in the lunar
cycle the woods were felled. Woods of any
one species cut during the new moon, the
full moon, or the waning moon, have con-
sistently and predictably produced different
results. Therefore, a number of especially
advantageous uses for timber—including
guitar tops—have been correlated with spe-
cific felling dates. These woods for sound-
boards are available to luthiers and can be
found through a simple search by using the
keywords “full moon wood.”
Some readers might be thinking that all
this lore is sheer poppycock. Nonetheless,
there are three points to consider that are
hard to ignore. First, as already mentioned,
the body of empirically collected wood-fell-
ing wisdom is very old. It applies to a range
of practical wood uses as diverse as house
construction, roof shingles, wooden chim-
neys (well, they had them in the old days),
barrels for storing liquids, boxes for storing
foodstuffs, firewood, plows, transportation
of felled woods via river floatation, and of
course, soundboards for musical instru-
ments. In each case, woods felled at the
appropriate phase of the lunar cycle may
last longer, wear better, are more stable, are
harder/stiffer or softer/more pliable, or are
more fire-resistant or burn more easily—as
their intended use requires. This informa-
tion is articulately set out in a searchable
article titled Lunar;Rhythms;in;Forestry
Traditions;–;Lunar-Correlated;Phenomena;in
Tree;Biology;and;Wood;Properties, written by
Swiss forestry expert Ernst Zürcher.
ervin SoMoGYi
A professional luthier since the early 1970s,
Ervin Somogyi is one of the world’s most
respected acoustic-guitar builders and
rosette designers. To learn more about
Somogyi, his instruments, or his rosette and
inlay artwork, visit esomogyi.com.
