Brazilian Rosewood — Density, Movement, Workability & Cost

Every acoustic guitar back and side made from any rosewood gets measured against this one first — Brazilian rosewood (Dalbergia nigra) set the standard the entire category is judged by, and it did so from a position that's now essentially unrepeatable: the species has been effectively closed to commercial international trade since 1992, and the strictest CITES listing available, Appendix I, has never loosened since.

The tone that built the standard, now available only as legacy stock

At 52 lb/ft³ and 2,790 lbf on the Janka scale, Brazilian rosewood taps with a ringing sustain builders and players consistently describe as genuinely different from other rosewoods — not just a marketing claim, but a repeatedly reported acoustic character. It works cleanly for its density and bends over a hot pipe well, with spider-web black lines running through a chocolate-brown ground as its classic figure.

Movement, at the thin dimensions a guitar back actually uses

Radial shrinkage of 2.9% against a tangential figure of 4.6% gives a 1.6 ratio, comfortably stable. A thin 1/8"-thick guitar back panel, 18" wide and glued from bookmatched halves, moving from a 9% moisture content to a dry 6% loses about 0.083" (2.1mm) across its width; the wood movement calculator runs other widths too. That same back panel, 22" long, weighs only about 1.5 lb — the wood weight calculator covers other instrument-panel sizes.

Gluing and finishing legacy stock with the same care as any rosewood

Being oily, Brazilian rosewood benefits from an acetone wipe and immediate assembly when gluing, the standard rosewood approach. It polishes to a natural gloss, and traditional French polish suits it particularly well — most surviving vintage instruments built from this species carry exactly that finish, a genuine historical continuity rather than a stylistic default.

Durability, cost, and why nobody puts this wood outdoors

The heartwood is very durable, though the point is entirely academic: nobody exposes a wood this scarce and this expensive to weather. At roughly $250 per board foot it's among the most expensive species this site tracks. Acoustic guitar backs and sides, fine furniture, veneer, turnery, and knife handles round out its historical markets — "historical" doing real work in that sentence, since new commercial supply essentially doesn't exist.

Appendix I, and what that actually means in practice

Brazilian rosewood has carried the strictest CITES listing, Appendix I, since 1992 — the only species at that level in this site's entire dataset — and CoP20 left it exactly where it was. Commercial international trade is closed outright, not merely permitted with paperwork the way Appendix II species are. The sole legal route is documented pre-Convention material, and even a finished guitar built from pre-1992 stock needs certificates to travel internationally, a genuinely different compliance burden than any other wood on this site.

What people actually ask about Brazilian rosewood

What happens to the resale value of a documented pre-Convention Brazilian rosewood guitar over time, given supply can only shrink? Values have trended upward for genuinely documented instruments precisely because the legal supply is fixed and can never be replenished, which is part of why forged or missing paperwork is such a serious problem in this specific market — the certificate itself has become nearly as economically important as the instrument.

Why do builders and players insist Brazilian rosewood sounds different from Indian or other rosewoods? It's a consistently and independently reported difference in tonal character — brighter overtones and a particular ringing sustain — documented across many builders and players over decades, though the exact acoustic mechanism remains a subject of genuine debate among luthiers.

Is any "Brazilian rosewood" sold today likely to be fraudulently mislabeled? Given the scarcity and price, mislabeling is a real, documented risk in the market — buyers of high-value pieces should insist on provenance documentation and, where the stakes justify it, professional species verification rather than relying on a seller's description alone.

Shrinkage above traces to Table 4-4 of the USDA Forest Products Laboratory's Wood Handbook (FPL-GTR-190, 2010); density and Janka hardness are The Wood Database's 12%-moisture-content figures. CITES status is read from the appendices valid 5 March 2026, post-CoP20 — unchanged since the original 1992 Appendix I listing, the longest continuously enforced restriction of any timber species this site tracks.