Why wood matters... ?

[Sascha Franck]

IMO, we try way to hard to declare some sort of binary truth about it and I don't think it works that way.

It pretty much defenitely doesn't work that way. I have seen, heard and played guitars made of very unlikely material combinations sounding pretty traditional (such as a Trussard steel Tele with a mahogany neck that just sounded like an excellent Tele) and other guitars that refused to sound like they possibly should do (such as my G&L Legacy that doesn't deliver any traditional Strat tones, regardless of the pickups used).
In addition, I sort of often found some acoustic properties to translate well into the amplified realm - just to almost instantly find another example of where things simply didn't translate well at all, sometimes even more like the opposite.

I already said so in my first post in this thread: I absolutely believe that wood matters, but more often than we may like it, the ways in which it matters are pretty unpredictable.

Apart from all that, yes, there seem to be some tried and trusted wood and construction combinations delivering more or less reliable results.

 

[JasonE]

I am in the wood matters camp. I too have experienced the very noticeable difference in tone when swapping the neck on a bolt on guitar. I clearly heard the difference between maple and rosewood fretboards. I have also seen guitars that had a tone in them that stayed there even with pickup swaps. It was part of the base tone of the guitar and could be heard acoustically. That tone was always present regardless of the pickups that were installed in the guitar. If you are someone that plays with a ton of gain, delay and reverb on your tone you may not hear this as much. That stuff really covers a lot of things up.

 

[Eagle]

One thing I should say is wood matters in the sense that is must work acoustically and be strong enough to perform the function but the exact type of wood used doesn’t matter if it passes this test. The bottom line is an electric guitar must perform well as an acoustic instrument in everything but volume . This is why guitars can be made out of other materials too. They need to pass this test regardless of what they are made of. Everything matters. The term “ tone wood “ referring to specific types of wood is pure marketing bs.

 

[laxu]

One of my guitars, a Flaxwood Rautia, is made of spruce fiber and resin. It feels like ebony and it sounds like a good electric guitar. It's a PRS-ish hollowbody where even the back plate and nut is made of the same material.

There's a whole lot of marketing about traditional "tone" woods but there are plenty of alternative materials - manmade or just different woods. We also should not ignore that things like metals of the bridge etc also contribute, as does how all those parts are connected together.

 

[Eagle]

One of my guitars, a Flaxwood Rautia, is made of spruce fiber and resin. It feels like ebony and it sounds like a good electric guitar. It's a PRS-ish hollowbody where even the back plate and nut is made of the same material.

There's a whole lot of marketing about traditional "tone" woods but there are plenty of alternative materials - manmade or just different woods. We also should not ignore that things like metals of the bridge etc also contribute, as does how all those parts are connected together.

Everything matters.

 

[Jarick]

IMO the neck is the most important part of the guitar and the wood definitely matters here, along with the frets, scale length, etc.

I don't know about body wood because I've never done real testing here. It's hard to isolate just the body wood. If a Gibson sounds fatter than a Fender with the same pickups, is it the body wood, or the neck wood, or the scale length, or neck joint?

All I know is I have had the same pickup in many different guitars and they all sounded pretty different to me, so it's not just the pickup only.