I'm just trying to show HOW MUCH wood affects tone, and therefore why species IS very important. If it were cork sniffing i assure you my main strat would be ash because i absolutly LOVE the look of ash. but i've had 3 ash strats and they all had a sound i couldn't live with as my #1. I used to like basswood but i got tired of that sound and now prefer alder. It's not cork sniffing at all. in fact, it's a big part of the tone puzzle and more important than most anything else. People here obsess over things far more subtle like blocks and saddles and such, yet since the do obsess over it it's obvious they make enough difference to matter. in fact, you can call wood cork sniffing of you want but the fac t is some very subtle things can and do make the difference between being happy with your tone and not.

You're saying that considering different species to get the tone you want is bunk. tell that to the guys who build guitars for a living. tell that to suhr or anderson or any of them. see what they say. they dedicated thier lives to this and certainly have worlds more experience than any of us do, and they will roll thier eyes at the notion that choosing the species of wood for it's tonal properties is cork sniffing. how you could possibly dispute that is beyond me. maybe your ears aren't as sensitive, i dunno. i don't know if you've been playing 10 years or 40, and that makes a huge difference in what you hear. I only know I hear it and they guys who build hear it, and to me or them it is far from cork sniffing. So for you maybe it is cork sniffing. i assure you that to my ears it's further from that than any other tone altering aspect of a strat including pickups.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

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The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

Thomas Jefferson

+1 to that: Personlly, it sounds like you are all in -- what is referred to as -- violent agreement.

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Laughing out loud with fear and hope, I have a desperate plan ...

Well, on the subject of multiple vs 1 piece bodies, i won't even begin to give an opinion on that because theres really no way to be sure w/o extensive experimentation. I have zero idea what differece that makes.
As for "the masses", well yes thats true. but we here at these forums are here discussing these things because we are not the masses. We are the few percent who are anal about things like this which is why we're here discussing it. the masses don't know and could care less. They are probably the smart ones ! In any case, i and many others hear a *general* difference between species that is very obvious and we prefer certain species over the other. To what degree it matters to us i'm sure varies with the degree of difference each hears. To me it's easily enough to matter a lot and it helps me decide how to build the strat i prefer. In fact, at this point i can pretty much describe almost every detail about a strat that leads to a sound i prefer, and subtle as some are even to me they have to be just right or i feel something missing in the feel and tone.

But the one thing thats important to remember is that people that come to forums like this are for the most part people that are curious and anal about things like this. The difference that divides us is while we all are like that, not all of us hear these things as easily. i've been at it since around 1970 and i can assure you that for many years i couldn't have told you the difference between almost any of the things we discuss here. Even 15 or 20 years later i wasn't sure about a lot of it. Now however i unfortunatly can hear way more than i wish i did !