Picture looking down on a tree trunk, where you can clearly see the growth ring circles. Now, slice down through the trunk, cutting it into quarters. Then, make thin pie slices out of each quarter. Take two adjacent ones and true up the wider sides of the pie slices. Glue them together and you have a "quarter-sawn" bass back or top. Cutting the tree trunk in any other fashion will result in a combination of slab, quartered, and rift-sawn stock. Bass bar stock is cut in a similar manner to top and back wood, then trued up to be rectangular, rather than pie-slice shaped. Is there somebody out ther, more computer savvy than me, who can diagram this?
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