Re: Tele body wood.............
If you were building a light, resonant, twangy,looks good with a clear/burst finish Tele. What wood would you choose?
Warmoth has a tone scale on their website for seeing how guitars sound based on wood. I suggest you look there. Sure, swamp ash is brighter than alder, but not very much brighter. Still, yeah, I'd say swamp ash on a tele, but honestly it's the overall result that you get, so you could in theory get a rosewood or mahogany body tele, just put the right pickups in it. My ESP (agathis) with the Hot Rodded combo through a Delta Blues amp has a tanginess, but not tele twang.
Disclaimer: I'm not a tele player, and haven't really played many. I've heard many recordings, and my pickups in my guitar, when split, might sound close, but they're not going to sound like a Tele anyways. I know the difference, I'm just pointing out that you can make other woods twang if you use the right pickups.
From what I've heard, it was pickups, the body manufacturing, and neck wood, that made a Tele sound the way it did, also possibly the original brass string saddles. Also, single coil pickups tend to have a "quack" to them. Just my 2 cents...