A couple of comments...
1) Your drummer's drum *is* plywood. So is your Alembic. A big sheet of plywood is a big laminated sheet of thin plies of fir or mahogany or baltic birch. It's created that way for basically the same reason that your Alembic's neck is laminated - by orienting the grain of the wood in opposition between different pieces you get a stronger, stiffer result. Now, the details of the construction are quite different - plywood is usually oriented at 90 angles between plies, but the bookmatch-type laminations in an Alembic neck are intended to equalize any warping tendancies by mirroring them across the glue lines.
If you want a high performance neck, this is a good way to do it. Although you can find a single big piece of maple which would have equal stiffness, you'll reject a lot more wood to find that good piece.
You see exotic select, one-piece necks on a few guitars these days - rosewood neck PRS guitars, the Klein Electric (also rosewood, and these are truly a single piece including fingerboard). And of course, there's a lot of maple Fender necks out there, too. Given the existing Alembic pricing, it's somewhat terrifying to imagine the upcharge for a non-laminated neck! Or what could have higher wastage than a snare drum carved from a single, gigantic block of wood (of course, if Alembic were doing this, they'd probably pull a continuous back plates trick and build a whole concentric set of drums from a single block!).
The flip side of a Klein neck is a Kubicki Ex-Factor neck which is built-up out of 1/8 plies of maple, visible on the back of the neck. Another extreme laminated instrument are the Ned Steinberger NSDesign US/EU upright basses which are built of curved alternating layers of wood and graphite like the cross-section of an onion.
Every different material in the neck has some effect on the tone, but I think that glue is probably not a big factor vs. the wood choice in necks. Now, if you're building an acoustic guitar with that light shaved top, I think the choice of glue and joints may have a very significant damping effect.
2)Graphite - From a mathematical standpoint, I think george_wright's comment is correct about graphite. Modulus necks (and this includes the graphite Alembics which were fabricated by Modulus) are built up of layers of pre-preg graphite material - graphite fabric impregnated with epoxy resin.
As I mentioned above, I doubt that glue in a neck is a big factor in the sound (assuming a proper glue is used). By volume, glue is probably only 1-2% of the mass of the neck. In a graphite neck, I believe the resin is probably 30+% of the mass of the neck. Now that's cured into a solid so it's not like the fibers are floating around.
David Fung
