Re: The real influence of wood in tone
Do strings affect the "tone"? Yes. Does the bridge material affect the "tone"? Yes. Does a bolt-on wood Strat type design vs. a welded, body-less, hollow titanium washboard design affect the "tone"? Of course. I'm saying that the order of importance of these elements is what is misconceived by most players.
Sure. However, there is no fixed order of importance because every guitar is different. The shapes, proportions, materials and coupling between the elements are design/model specific, while things like internal structure, mass and stiffness distribution are unique to each piece of wood. Every neck has a set of impulse responses, which are evaluated by listening to tap tones. Depending on where and how strong it's struck, a neck might produce a different tone. If that's the case, the neck will respond with a specific voice, a combination of resonant modes, depending on what notes you fret and how hard you pick.
Synthetic materials usually lack this kind of responsiveness, but their ability to produce a clean, pure, sustaining tone might be employed to focus the energy elsewhere, for example into the body. The basic idea has been around for a while, we've seen necks made of aluminum, and carbon fiber, but also wooden necks with synthetic fretboards, or stiffening rods inside or a composite shell outside.
The question whether the body or the neck is more important for tone does not have a simple answer, because a Telecaster is so very different to a Status, as is a King V to a Les Paul, as is a "bodyless" Steinberger to an Explorer or an ML. Furthermore, no body is ever going to work without a neck (and a bridge). But notes played in the highest registers can be practically devoid of neck resonance. Now that might seem as if I'm contradicting myself but that is just because plucking a few inches of a 0.010" string is a totally different set of conditions than slamming an open E chord. Nonetheless, a good guitar is expected to respond well to both and everything in between.
The strings and the neck+body system are so alike coupled pendulums. The hardware provides coupling points so by choosing the materials, you can filter the string tone and consequently the wave driving the wood resonance. But even though Graphtech saddles can tame some treble, they won't make up for a true lack of low end punch. The first rule of old school sound engineering is "crap in = crap out", which means you can't just equalize a bad take into a good one.
Bolting on hardware also means adding a bit of mass here and there. There's the fatfinger, the badass bridges, the 2tek, the big blocks, the jetfretz but there's also hipshot lightweight tuners and pigtail aluminum wraparound, titanium bridge parts. In present times you've got so many ways to add or subtract some weight to either end of the string, isn't that wonderful? Everyone who owns a big tube amp knows moving mass is difficult. We can assume things aren't any different to sound waves. What that means, is that a heavy bridge will tend to vibrate less and reflect sound waves within the string, so the body will be driven more through the neck and less through the bridge. Will a big block help a dead, thuddy sounding body? No, it won't. Will that and an L-500XL help? No, they won't. They will just make it thud a bit louder and clearer.
I think you might be overestimating how highly most players rank wood among factors determining a guitar's tone. Let's say it's the largest single factor. Does it outweigh everything else combined? I'd be interested to see how people rate on agreeing or disagreeing with that.
That's a good point. A guitar is a rather complex system, that should be evaluated as a whole, because every part is connected to others in some way. There is no single piece of a jigsaw that lets you see the whole picture.
Now "to contradict myself slightly", let me tell you that to me, wood is the most important. Because that is what inspires me to play, because its effects come through in my tone and because if it's dead, it's dead and only fit for a campfire. It is the primary source of tone because it resonates sympathetically with the strings, dampens these oscillations within self and feeds them back to the wires, giving the guitar a spectral and dynamic foundation before amplification.
We're talking about VERY subtle differences in tone, with that premiss accepted EMG's do not make all guitars sound the same, the tonal properties of the wood will always reflect on EMG's tone as in any other pickup, only in a more fine way.
EMG preamps introduce quite a bit of coloration which might mask the wood's resonance noticeably. Comparing them in a couple of Corts and Epiphones through a pod or a practice amp doesn't really help tell the whole story. I wouldn't bother to use anything else if they could make an el cheapo Ibby sound like Reb Beach's... but they don't.
