Bear claw tops

[Georgelange]

What is the opinion of this forum regarding bear claw Sitka or Adirondack tops? Is there a discernible difference in sound between a non bearclawed top and one with bear claw? I think there is

[elambo]

Good question. I can only offer my experience. After many years of paying close attention to the correlation between top wood grains and sound I've decided that I can't find a repeatable correlation. For a while I thought that wide-grain tops had a warmer tone, then found plenty of exceptions to that rule. Same for tight-grain tops in the opposite way -- plenty of warm and bright guitars in either camp. I had a bearclaw top that I knew very well, and when I played others in music stores I couldn't find predictable similarities in those either.

I'm curious to hear other people's experiences.

[f5joe]

I've never noticed any perceptible difference to my ears. For me, it's a visual thing.

[Acoustic Music Works]

To the OP: what do you hear as the difference?

As far as Collings guitars go, I think Bruce is a little less "mystic" about a lot of this stuff than some other luthiers. For example, Dana Bourgeois has said that bearclaw in Adirondack is extremely rare, and so you know that when he finds a top that he finds sonically appealing and it has bearclaw, he's going to voice it perfectly for the guitar that it's going onto, based on its individual attributes. Dana is more of a "wood whisperer" whereas Bruce has gobs of real-world experience, about 30K worth right now! You get the feeling that they're using slightly different parameters to achieve slightly different tonal goals.

To answer the question from a dealer perspective, we're very rarely in the position to compare apples to apples on bearclaw tops. You almost never get the same guitar, with the same specs, in the same scale length, with the same b/s wood, from the same year, in the shop at the same time with both bearclaw and non. So it's perfectly agreeable that a difference might be heard between a bearclaw and a non-bearclaw guitar, but one definitely wouldn't consistently ring better or worse (for us) and it wouldn't be scientific in the least, purely subjective.

[godfreydaniel]

I’ve never sought out a guitar because it had bear claw (I usually prefer the look of a top without it). That being said, by choosing guitars by how they sound, I’ve ended up with three guitars that have bear claw.