Ricardo -> RE: Rough tuning a guitar (May 4 2015 16:07:42)
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ORIGINAL: mqbernardo Hello, sorry about perpetuating this off-topic discussion but just wanted to add something on the pau ferro / caviuna thing estebanana was talking about. There is indeed a lot of confusion amongst tree names, part of it is related to spurious branding, some to light-headed trading, part of it a lost-in-translçation thing. But things were complicated in the first place as when the first Europeans arrived, there were already different names for the same trees and different trees for the same names within different indian populations. Then these names entered to two different colonizing languages (castellano and portuguese) and sprung off, all well before good old uncle Linnaeus came in to help. So pau ferro is just portuguese for iron wood. Usually it´s a name given to Machaerium scleroxylon (Santos / Bolivian rosewood). But in bolivia they call it Morado (spanish for purple) and in paraguay it´s guasu. As for Brazil, they preferably use the name "pau ferro" for Caesalpinia ferrea and tend to call M. scleroxylon caviuna/cabiuna. Caviuna comes from the tupi language group and roughly means "dark wood" or "dark bark" or "dark group of trees". -una is the tupi/guarany suffix for black/dark and in fact some indians called the 1st negro slaves they saw cabiuna (dark bark). But caviuna is also an unbrella word for any dark wood / dark tree - so brazilian rosewood is also called caviuna. So, to distinguish them (specially on the zones where Brazilian RW is indigenous) sometimes M. Scleroxylon is called red-caviuna, or jacaranda-caviuna, or pau-ferro-do-cerrado and Brazilain rosewood is called caviuna-negra (black caviuna). Confusingly, jacaranda is also the name for brazilian rosewood (and other trees) - it´s also form tupi origin and roughly transaltes to "thing with a hard center". Machaerium villosum is also called pau-ferro in some regions of brazil. Manikara (massaranduba) is also sometimes called pau-ferro but i guess it´s trade name is "bullet wood", although i´ve seen it being sold as Brazilwood, which is also a name for pernambuco... It gets tiresome... Sorry to have gotten carried away, as some might have guessed this is a pet-peeve of mine. cheers, Miguel. Great post. It falls in line with what my bolivian indian friends have told me in the past. I once saw a "caviuna" guitar that to me was clearly brazil rosewood...caviuna was hand written on the label...I was thinking it was a desperate attempt to make the guitar seem legit cuz the wood on back and sides was surely illegal for it's year. Pau fero guitars (bolivian RW) never really did it for me...soundwise. E. Indian is the best IMO for negras. Going back to bridges earlier, just would like to add I have Jernoimo Peña negra and the bridge and face plate must be ebony. It's pitch black like the fingerboard. The sound is very strong and bright.
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