"Well, the vibrating strings are attached to the bridge, nut/fretboard, and tuning machines, which in turn are attached to the body, neck, and headstock, which in turn vibrate the bridge, nut/fretboard, and tuning machines, which in turn vibrate the strings some more (not to mention the actual sound waves vibrating the guitar at the antinodes). Not only does this allow the wood to effect sustain (by feedback and sympathetic vibration), it effects the tone by selectively damping some frequency ranges and amplifying others." Switch your pickups and hardware between a basswood body and a similarly milled ash body, same neck, same setup, same amp, same settings, and I defy you to detect any difference. All that vibrating and damping happens, sure, but the effect is minimal in solid-body guitars compared to what the electronics are doing--the only way you'd hear a difference in tone is if you played the guitar acoustically, no amplification. If you could hear a difference through your amp, you probably have x-ray vision, too, and are faster than a speeding bullet. "but I can tell you that the same electronics in an inexpensive guitar with lighter wood and another with good heavy wood have their respective quality. I have compared for myself." Try the reverse; switch your good pickups for cheap ones and tell me if your expensive, heavy guitar sounds the same. Try this, too: take a set of great pickups, from a late 50's Strat, say, and stick them in a cheezy knock-off. Does that guitar sound more like the Strat the pickups came from, or more like the cheez-caster did with its original pickups? Strats have bolt-on necks, which is a very fluxy joint; if you have a trem, it's specifically designed NOT to be rigidly fixed to the body, AND your pickups are floating in the middle of a square foot of multi-ply plastic--which is the only direct medium for the translation of vibration from the body to the pickups. I'm tellin' ya, body weight is way down on the list of significant factors in the way a solid body guitar sounds. "Electric guitars are really complex electro-mechanical systems in the way they produce sound." Nah. Another myth. Basically, we're talking a slab of wood, a few feet of wire, magnets, strings, metal and plastic hardware. You'd get a much more dramatic difference in tone by wiring your pickups out of phase than you would adding or subtracting two or three pounds of body weight. Acoustic guitars are complex, violins are hellishly complex (somewhere in the back of my storage unit I've got a 200 page book of acoustic studies of Stradivarii--try that for summer reading); electric guitars are relatively simple. That's their beauty, if you ask me.