The Atlas

The Wood Key

Tonewood Atlas is a live index of what the boutique acoustic world has on its shelves right now, gathered from independent dealers and normalised into one vocabulary. This page is the key to how we read wood — every classification choice, shown.

2,978 listings · 186 dealer codes · 88 species · 21 families, live today

The Wood Key

Tamarind

Tamarindus indica · hardwood · in the Other Hardwood family

Tamarindus indica, of long-obscured wild origin — Kew gives the native range as Madagascar and the Comoros — and now planted across the tropics; the boards sold to luthiers are almost always the wide pale-yellow sapwood, commonly spalted into fine dark zone lines, rather than the narrow deep reddish-brown heartwood that forms only in old trees.

Where it sits

backs and sides

1 on the soundbox · 1 builder

How dealers write it

Spalted Tamarind

How it files

28 codes27 species1 family

Who’s building with it

Ryan Guitars

Not CITES-listedchecked, not merely absent · as of 2026-08-09

Read from Commission Regulation (EU) 2026/1383, cross-checked against the USDA APHIS CITES Timber Species Manualthe document. We do not give legal advice and have not checked any individual instrument’s paperwork: this species carries this status on this date. Ask the dealer about documentation.