Re: Does wood matter?
IME/IMO: Yes, the wood affects the tone of an electric guitar...but not in a way that can be quantified, controlled, reproduced, predicted, etc. In other words, there isn't much point worrying a lot about it, because you can't do much of anything about it anyhow. The only thing you can do to 100% certain get a "good sounding piece of wood" is to only buy guitars that actually sound good to your own ears. At that point, there is no need for guesswork. It doesn't matter what causes it to sound good; be thankful that it simply sounds good, and leave it at that.
That said, in the general woodworking sense, it is always preferable to build with the most stable wood feasible. As wood products age and encounter different environments throughout their lives, you want the wood to stay as much as possible the way that you carved it and assembled it. Good old, stable wood used to be all over the place, but it's hard to find these days (thus extremely pricey when you do find it). Those beautiful old, stable trees were harvested to death decades ago, and were used for pretty much everything – even the "low grade" lumber of the day. The lumber back then was also more likely to have been dried and milled properly after being cut. Most commercial lumber today is from new growth farmed trees, usually prematurely harvested. And to make this even worse, the drying/acclimating process is artificially rushed. To put it succinctly, it's crap to work with compared to old, stable wood. It's not as dense, it's not as strong, it doesn't carve as cleanly, and it moves all over the place before, during, and after working with it. Ask anyone who has been doing construction and/or other forms of woodworking over the past 40+ years and they will tell you the same.
In other words, you absolutely do want to put the time and effort into proper wood selection and handling when building a guitar, regardless of whether or not you can actually use the wood to control the tone.
